Featured Fitness Content: Volume 128 (Special Edition)

The Featured Fitness Content series that I regularly release here at Ruthless is my opportunity to share some of the best information that I’ve found from scouring the web. Having released 128 editions of this, I’ve found some great resources, some of which are traditional bio/medical journals, while others are blog posts from brilliant up-and-coming trainers, nutritionists, athletes, or anyone else who might have something that they can teach us all in our quest for advancing health, fitness, and human performance.

So why is this a Special Edition? If you’ve been following along for any length of time, you’ve probably found some resources which helped inform your understanding of the science of human performance. In today’s installment, I’ll be featuring commentary that is usually reserved only for the Ruthless Performance Newsletter. In the newsletter, I release our Featured Fitness Content a day early and with greater insight into each article and how it has impacted my personal understanding of health and sport science.

Featured Content Breakdown

6 Lower-Body Exercises Every Golfer (and Nongolfer) Should Do by Jen Murphy via WSJ

I’m a paid subscriber to the Wall Street Journal. Of the legacy media, I find it to be the least biased (minus the not-so-urgent breaking news updates). Any time I read the title for a ‘listicle’ about exercises that you should be doing I tend to cringe. However, being that its my job to keep abreast with how the general population is viewing and thinking about health and fitness trends, I’ll occasionally read further.

To their credit, the exercises in this piece for the WSJ were actually pretty good exercises. Golfer or not, these are in fact, a good place to start with exercise selection.

Grapefruit Paloma via LMNT

When I was still a drinker I was a fan of the paloma… Some grapefruit to extend the half-life of caffeine in the body, a liquor that tends to have less severe hangover symptoms than others (provided that you can avoid the bottom shelf), and an overall low sugar, highly refreshing adult beverage… What’s not to like?

Since hangovers are, in part, caused by dehydration, utilizing an electrolyte supplement in the cocktail should lead to a shorter, less severe, hangover.

Maybe just don’t drink. But what’s the fun in that?

How and Why to Take Care of Yourself: Diet, Exercise, and Purpose | Dr. Peter Attia | EP 360 hosted by Jordan Peterson

Dr. Peter Attia is a very valuable resource for scientifically-minded individuals with an interest in their own health and wellness. In fact, when my cousin graduated from medical school in April, I gifted him a copy of Dr. Attia’s new book. Since he released his new book, he’s been on a bit of a media tour. I found this particular interview to be notable because of the difference in backgrounds between Dr. Peterson and Dr. Attia, leading to some questions and insights that you might not find elsewhere.

Louie Simmons’ Reverse Hyper Machine via Westside Barbell

I think a Westside Barbell article makes its way into almost every installment of the Featured Fitness Content series as of late.

In having a Reverse Hyper, invented and popularized by the late Louie Simmons, Ruthless Performance is a bit of a standout as a gym locally. I tend to rank gyms by either their inclusion of a Reverse Hyper or a lack thereof. This article actually has a picture of a very special Reverse Hyper at Westside which was actually the very first reverse hyper that I used.

The “White Whale” as it is dubbed at Westside has 400 lbs welded to it, meaning that the first time I ever used a Reverse Hyper was with 400 lbs. With that weight, I felt as though my brain was going to bust from my blood pressure like an overfilled water balloon but has made each subsequent experience on a reverse hyper feel as smooth as butter.

Psychedelics May Be Part of U.S. Medicine Sooner Than You Think by Jamie Ducharme via TIME

My on-going interest with psychedelics in the medical system can in many ways be attributed to how potentially disruptive it will be to the overall lackluster conventional approaches to treating depression, PTSD, and on… Recent research into this field has shown that in just a few hours-long sessions, patients are having better outcomes than endless years on traditional pharmaceuticals.

The Time Billionaires by Sahil Bloom via The Free Press

The TLDR here is that:

A.) You should be utilizing Bari Weiss’s The Free Press as a source for quality reporting.

B.) “Time Billionaires” essentially refers to an unrecognized class of billionaires… Those with billions of seconds left in their lives as opposed to those with billions of dollars. Time can create dollars but dollars can’t create time. It’s a powerful lesson, particularly as a coach and someone who has stumbled into working with developing teens and young adults (the time billionaires) as they navigate some of the most formative and biggest transitional periods of their entire lives.

The Vitamin D Deficiency Epidemic by TC Luoma via T-Nation

If you go upstream of many classically defined maladies such as anemia, fatigue, osteoporosis, and general bacterial or viral infections, you may find that a Vitamin D deficiency is at play. Rather than fighting these things independently problems arise, we may be better off focusing on general wellness so that these diseases have a harder time taking root to begin with.

Featured Content