Going into championship season athletes are struggling to make last-minute changes to their training, to their mindset, and diet. What are the best changes an athlete should make at this point in the season? The short answer is none. Any changes made in haste are best not made at all. Some blatantly obvious changes may …
Last week, we posted an article explaining that not only are endurance training and strength training acceptable to overlap during the in-season, but that when used concurrently, strength training can actually reduce the chance that an endurance athlete will fall victim to overtraining. Here is one such example of a program that we developed for …
Internal Program Review: In-Season Strength Training for an Advanced High School Swimmer Read More »
If you haven’t check out the 50th edition of Featured Fitness Content, I recommend that you do that here. Otherwise, here are some great recent reads in health and wellness. This is edition is a bit outside of the norm for this series as it includes some research, some news on the business side of …
Featured Fitness Content: Volume 51 (Late January) Read More »
Regardless of your preferred cycling style, be it mountain biking, distance, or sprint if you’re spending a lot of time pedaling, it is very easy for the ratio of quadriceps to hamstring input in each pedal to get further and further out of whack. In a perfect world, you would have a near even input …
Performance Enhancement Strategies for Cyclists: Fixing the Quadriceps-Hamstring Ratio Read More »
Let’s imagine that you’re deadlifting. If you’re training with us at Ruthless Performance, you’ll likely do 1-2 sets of 10 reps with an empty barbell before adding weight; for intermediate-level athletes we’ll do 1-2 sets of normal barbell deadlifts. For more advanced trainees it may be a set of Jefferson Deadlifts followed by a set …
Strength & Conditioning Fundamentals: Hidden Volume Read More »
In the holiday lull of the lengthy winter swim season, some of our better athletes are chipping away at their weaknesses, building to their strengths, and generally outworking the competition. While some excuse away their laziness over the holidays as a ‘break’, others view it as a chance to double-down on swimming, but very strategic …
Mid-December through Mid-January has been filled with great fitness content from top influencers from trusted industry professionals. Because of this, we’re going to be re-launching our Featured Fitness Content series that we’ve been providing our readership since the early days of Ruthless Performance when the business still went by The Fitness Resource. If you’re a …
Featured Fitness Content: Volume 50 (Mid-December through Mid-January) Read More »
Tip #3 – Use Unilateral Exercises to Develop the Lower Extremities If you are limited by access to equipment or adequate time to develop athlete proficiency at the primary barbell lifts, unilateral exercises are a very strategic selection. While bilateral exercises such as the traditional barbell back squat or deadlift may be rate-limited in their …
Two of the biggest complaints long-time hunters have about their physical abilities in the field are nagging, continuous knee pain and chronic low-back pain. There’s a multitude of causes for these including: poor glute activation–which tends to cause an overreliance on the lower back as a means of stabilizing the trunk, packs that are too …
Physical Preparation Strategies for Big Game Hunters: Optimizing the Ankle Read More »
Tip #2: Train Lower Leg Flexion for More Resilient Breaststrokers Lower leg flexion, notably leg curls like the machine hamstring curl, swiss ball hamstring curl, valslide hamstring curl, and a handful of other variants regularly take the backseat in targeted hamstring training to hip hinging variations like the Romanian Deadlift (RDL), Trap Bar Deadlift, …
