The pooling of metabolites like lactate during Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) exercise may activate anabolic signaling pathways.

“what we think is is that they're augmenting muscle activation so they're causing the muscle to have to work a lot harder than it normally would because you're pulling this lactate around it and you know you might fatigue some of these cross bridges so we have to recruit more and more and more and more fibers so that's where we think the benefit of metabolites is is that they're basically inducing fatigue which then leads to further muscle activation and muscle activation for a sufficient duration of time is is the name of the game at least in my opinion for making a muscle grow”

“my assumption which i don't know if it's right or wrong is that at least one of the reasons that bfr can produce so much hypertrophy at such low load is as is in response to the metabolic challenge that's posed and so one of the things i was doing quite a bit was testing lactate levels with and without bfr”

“one is that the pooling of these metabolites in and of themselves is turning on some of these anabolic signaling Pathways meaning just the fact that you're pulling lactate around the fibers that that's able to activate growth”