Biohack Your Muscles

Now, you can’t necessarily shortcut your way to health, there are ways to maximize your exercise time that go above and beyond traditional workouts. One of the recent most popular types of fitness “biohacking” is the ability to get maximum effects with a minimal effective dose of effort or to achieve more than one fitness result at the same time with as much efficiency as possible.

3 Ways to Start Biohacking Your Muscles

1. Restriction Training

This technique is also called occlusion training. The concept is really simple: you take an elastic band or piece of plastic tubing, wrap it around the muscle you want to work like a tourniquet, and then do your workout. For example, if it’s arm day and you’re doing a bicep curl, you would wrap the band or tubing around your arm first, then do the movement.

A study concluded that low-intensity occlusion training has unique benefits in growth hormone release, muscle hypertrophy, and strength training for those with joint pain, or anyone who is unable to sustain high weight loads, like athletes who are unloading and postoperative patients.

2. Restricted Breathing For Better Oxygen Utilization

You may have seen one of these devices before, maybe even on Facebook, actors training for a role in some action pack movie: an oxygen-restriction mask. Sometimes called an altitude training mask. The purpose of oxygen-restricted training is to make it harder to draw air into your lungs, thus restricting the amount of oxygen you can take in on a given breath.

The benefits of restricted breathing are undeniable. Deprived of oxygen, your body makes more hemoglobin to shuttle oxygen to your muscles and produces more hormone and immune system adaptations.

3. Sauna For Cardiovascular Improvements

According to a study, participants who had two or three sauna sessions a week had a 22% reduced chance of suffering sudden cardiac death. Men who had four to seven sauna sessions of at least 20 minutes each, had the greatest benefits. Compared with those who had just one sauna session a week, they had a 63% lower risk of sudden cardiac death.

It has been reported that the benefit to cardiovascular health was likely due to the decrease in blood pressure and an increase in blood vessel diameter that both infrared exposure and heat exposure can provide.

These are three great ways to start biohacking your body. Many of these tools will help you see faster results than you’d see while training with no extra help. And there are plenty other techniques out there that will help you reach all kinds of goals.

* The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of LifeVantage or any other agency, organization, employer or company

** LifeVantage’s Marketing team may from time to time publish blog articles reporting information and research from third-party sources. The views and opinions expressed by these third-party sources as reported in LifeVantage blog articles are those of the authors and experts quoted therein and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of LifeVantage.