Conceived by Yoshiaki Sato in the 60s, the method began after a religious event in which Sato participated and stay long sitting, noticed numbness in the legs and sensitive calf and tingling and massaged. At that moment he listed the feeling with what he felt at the end of your training sessions with weights, highlighting the calf (SATO et al., 2005).

      In the 70s the researcher suffered a broken and used occlusion immobilizing the affected limb for two weeks. In muscle maintenance, even accelerated rehabilitation occurring totally within two months (SATO et al., 2005). In the 90s, Sato patented method with Kaatsu name, which is not conventional in Brazil, where for a long time was not imported to other countries.

     The Kaatsu compressor consists of ribbons can have their pressures and adjusted act of restricting blood flow to the selected member (Burgomaster et al., 2003). As no common method in Brazil in research are normally used sphygmomanometers and calculate the percentage of desired occlusion.

     The method appears as an alternative to control muscle atrophy in people with bedridden or with limited mobility, thus may increase the chances of recovery. The main function of the method is to maintain or lean mass and muscle strength gain with the use of smaller loads and repetitions.

      To give you an idea, in the conventional method of weight training usually charges between 65 and 80% of 1RM are used for muscle hypertrophy and above those levels to gain muscle strength. Already with vascular occlusion method is possible to achieve similar results with loads of 20 to 50% only (KARABULUT et al., 2009).

       As we have seen, the method is very interesting and will be discussed in greater detail in future posts, but we must draw attention to the use only of Kaatsu or sphygmomanometer and monitoring of professional specialized in vascular occlusion, therefore, the practice can be extremely damaging in If excess.

 image reference: youtube