The master processor has no control at all over the relays. If you'll look in ifi_aliases.h, you'll see that the relays are all aliased off pins on the user processor. So the relays get updated literally the instant* you set them to something in your code. So if relay1_fwd is 1 before your loop, and you set it to 0, and then set it back to 1 again, you'll actually be getting a veeeery short pulse from 0 to 1 on the output pin. This is almost certainly negligible and won't affect anything, but it will be there. Plus you're wasting valuable processor cycles clearing variables.
Why, back in my day our user processor was a monkey with a calculator and.....
*actually an instant plus a few nanoseconds of propagation delay.