Wales legend Sam Warburton is an ambassador for Hytro Blood Flow Restriction and believes it’s the closest thing to a ‘cheat mode’ in fitness.
Fitness company Hytro have a goal of leveraging the power of Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) to maximise athletic potential and enhance performance and have wearable simple BFR solutions for men and women through shorts and training tees that are aimed at unlocking the potential of BFR training.
Warburton, 34, outlines why the products on offer are so convenient to him in his busy family and professional life.
He said: “Because I’m a time poor dad that’s working, I find the benefits now more than ever. I’ve used Hytro before at the professional level. Blood flow restriction is a fantastic tool for athletes to use at the end of sessions in a five minute blast. You don’t have to lift the heavy mechanical loads that you may otherwise have to use, so it’s less stress on the body and less input but you actually get great response from a physiological perspective.
“There’s recovery aspects where people can perform sitting down passive recovery which is great when playing and with training demands getting so great now, any marginal gain you can seek is a huge one.
“Having to commit three to four 45-minute sessions a week, if I’m struggling for time I can stick on my Hytro gear, do a lot less work and get very similar benefits. There are no cheats to long gain, long-term fitness but actually this is the closes thing to a cheat mode in a game that you can get. The product they’ve produced from a performance perspective and efficiency when it comes to training is a very useful tool.”
Following his retirement in 2018, Warburton launched his own personal training company SW7 Academy and after winning 79 international caps and captaining the British and Irish Lions on tours of Australia and New Zealand in 2013 and 2017, he said it was important for him to go into something he’s passionate about post-retirement.
He said: “When I finished playing I didn’t want to rush into anything; I tried a bit of coaching, jumped into the fitness world, broadcasting, public speaking, charity work so there’s lots of things going on that I wanted to give a go. I gradually narrowed them down into what I love. I saw this quote on the wall and it said Steve Jobs underneath it and it read: ‘Make sure you do something you’re passionate about because the passion will pull you, you won’t need to be pushed.’ I thought that was so true, if there’s things you don’t want to do it’s hard to motivate yourself to do that but when it’s something you love doing it’s easy. When it does get to a sticky patch or it does get quite hard, the passion will pull you through that sticky period.”
However, as much as Warburton enjoys his role as a personal trainer he shares his frustration with the industry and how it’s been exploited on social media.
He added: “You can do a six-week personal training course and call yourself a PT on Instagram and start preaching things and that frustrates me. It’s not a very regulated industry, so that’s why through experience of working with a load of coaches and learnt a lot from them I know the service people are getting is as good as you can get. I like saying to people this is what you’ve got to do to get from A to B and then seeing their results.”
Sam Warburton is a Performance Advisor at Hytro, the first Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) wearable designed specifically to improve sports performance. Find out more about BFR training at hytro.com
