Live out your lady and the tramp fantasy

Hello outcasts! Some goodies for you today (Like every week, duh)

4 weeks ago, we started a plank challenge. Simply a challenge who could improve their plank time the most during 4 weeks. Well, results are in today!

Lastly, if we don’t talk before then (Come say hi on LinkedIn btw), I wish you an amazing Christmas! Remember, it’s ok to go crazy during the holidays. It’s your daily year-around habits that matter. Not the once-a-year habits. Now go devour that entire glazed ham. I know I will.

Today on gym outcasts:

👊 Power thought
You have the potential

🍴 Recipe
Lady and the Tramp IRL

💡 Fact
The best and worst chest exercise

🏋‍♂️ Exercise
Pull-ups in rings vs pull-ups on a bar

🏆 Plank challenge WINNER
WHO improved the most?

👊 Power Thought

Realize how much better you could be. You hold the potential to be so much happier, feel so much better, be so much more confident. Why waste it?

🍴 Recipe - Italian Meatballs

Surprisingly quick and delicious. Even Italians would approve of this one.

I made the meatballs suuuuper big here as you can see in the image, next time, I’m going smaller as I think that would be better.

💡THE best chest exercise!

The king of the hill assumes it's throne. Bench press is the winner. It showed the best muscle activation out of all tested exercises, especially in the mid-part of the motion.

Body weight pushups showed to be one of the WORST out of the tested exercises for chest muscle gains. That doesn't mean it does not work tho. It just works less than most other exercises.

Dumbbell flys had WAY WORSE muscle activation than Cable flys, likely because in a cable you have the same resistance throughout the motion since you’re being pulled to each side, while with dumbbell the resistance changes. Because ya know, gravity.

🏋‍♂️ Pull-ups with rings vs with a bar

Since a bar is fixed and rings are moving, you get a more natural position with the rings.

If you have elbow joint problems or wrist issues, switching to pull ups in rings might do the trick.

I like pull ups in rings more, for the simple reason that I can push my muscles just a bit more. This comes from two things.

• Easier to grip the rings for longer time than a bar.

• You can move your arms to get that last rep that you could not have gotten on a bar.

I often do 2 sets of both when I’m doing pull-ups.

PSSSST, if you can’t do pull-ups yet and want a similar exercise, check the exercise below out! You can do the same thing with a bar in a smith machine. The higher you place it, the easier it gets. So move it down as you get stronger!

🏆 Plank challenge finishing times

We had 7 competitors finishing the challenge! I gotta say, I’m really impressed with all the improvements around the board. People really stepped up!

BUT. There was one man who went HARD.

Massive congrats to Josh Black, who put in an immense effort to improve MORE than DOUBLE his max time in just 4 weeks. Incredible effort!

Josh, I’ll reach out to you about the prize. A Gym Outcasts Plank Champion hat 🏆

PS. Don’t miss the next challenge, coming soon