Featured Fitness Content: Volume 73

Here is this week’s fitness content round-up. But first, if you’d like to view last week’s, you can find it here.

There’s a lot going on at Ruthless at the moment, plus on a personal note, my training is getting into high-gear for my speed ascent of King’s Peak in Utah. So I’ll get right into this week’s content…

Featured Content

Observations on Training by an Old Guy By Phil Ringman via Starting Strength

7 Intermediate Bench Hacks By Nate Harvey via EliteFTS

Tip: The Best Back Stretch You’ve Never Tried By TJ Kuster via T-Nation

Acute Exercise Has Beneficial Effects On The Immune System During Prostate Cancer Via Science Magazine

The Real Reason Why Weighted Baseballs Increase Pitching Velocity, and Injury Rates By Mike Reinold

Quote of the Week

I don’t think my affinity for World War 2 history could be overstated. That being said, the war in the pacific has been growing on my attention and Douglas MacArthur, plus the extent of his influence in that theater.

This is a larger-than-life, remarkable general well-worth looking into, but this is well outside the fitness-forward scope of Ruthless.

Leaving what could otherwise be within your sphere of influence/control to ‘luck’ will ultimately lead to bad luck. Control what you can, ignore what you can’t–and just like that, stoicism finds its way into our Quote of the Week yet again.

If you’re ever interested in a high resolution copy of any of our Quote of the Week graphics, you can reach out on our contact page for a free high-res copy.

Photo of the Week

So technically I don’t know if this constitutes a ‘photo of the week’ as this might be the first time I’ve added one to the Featured Fitness Content Series, but here’s a pic from a recent upper-body dominant workout with Ruthless. If you’re interested in learning about the nuances and the reasons behind this set-up, I would recommend going to our Instagram page to read the description, but I have a feeling a longer article will soon follow.

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No more than 50% of our day-to-day athletes are given the bench press as a primary (A1) exercise. . This isn’t necessarily an indicator of shoulder dysfunction, but can be something as innocuous as disproportionate limb length between the upper and lower arm. . Additionally, many of our athletes focus on sports such as baseball or swimming where there is an in-built reward within the game for those athletes with longer arms. . In the gym, however, long limb length is rarely rewarded. . For our remaining athletes who aren’t contraindicated for the bench, we regularly use band tension as a primary or supplemental form of resistance. . Band tension, when applied properly, reduces the total load applied when the shoulder is in the most precarious position. . Band tension has the additional benefit an ‘overspeed’ effect whereby the bar wants to accelerate to the ground faster than the rate of gravity. . Since most of the muscle damage incurred in weight training (and the greatest training stimuli) is in the eccentric (lowering) portion of the lift, this means that more training stimuli can be produced, not only in terms of load, but in terms of myofibril damage. . . . . #weighttraining #strengthandconditioning #drylandtraining #exercisescience #benchpress #injuryprevention #RuthlesslyFit

A post shared by Ruthless Performance (@ruthlessperform) on Jul 30, 2020 at 9:41am PDT