One of actress Tracee Ellis Ross‘ latest workout videos got extra views thanks to an unidentified cameraman who seemingly stole the show.
The reason why he was the main focus of the Instagram post was because fans were complimenting his work!
He captured all the beautiful curves of the curvaceous Ross.
In the video captioned, “Pushing through…with those dang cuffs on my thighs,” Ross is seen doing a sled push exercise while using her blood restriction cuffs.
A sled push is a full-body exercise that requires an individual to push weight on a prowler sled for a specific duration.
This exercise targets various parts of the body, including quads, glutes, hip flexors, calves, chest and shoulders.
In addition to the recording, Ross also provided information on her cuffs.
The 48-year-old told her followers that the cuffs were meant to help her receive the same physical “results” with a lighter weight load compared to a heavier one.
As many began to view her post, a handful of people applauded the cameraman for recording Ross’ “best workout video.”
“Whoever filming gets the Oscar!” said one commenter.
“Cameraman deserves a raise,” posted another admiring fan.
“If this ain’t the best workout video I’ve ever seen” another comment read.
Ross, who recently turned 49, wasn't always this comfortable with her body. As a matter of fact......growing up, she had a lot of insecurities pertaining to her butt and it made her very uncomfortable.
In an interview with Health Magazine, the "black-ish" star confessed the long process of how she became comfortable with her figure in her 30s. “I love my butt in a way I didn’t growing up. I really didn’t like it growing up. It was so much bigger than everyone else’s, and I wanted jeans to look the way they did on everyone else, and mine didn’t. I’ve been at odds with my body for many years, wanting it to be something other than it was.”
She added, “Then, in my 30s, I started to get comfortable with the largeness of my personality. The same thing with my butt. I tried getting really, really skinny, and I learned that no matter” how thin she got, she said, “I was still gonna have a butt.”
Besides using exercise to shape her body, the kind of exercise Ross is doing also helps with a number of health conditions, like rheumatoid arthritis, certain cancers, and fibroids, which has been hitting the Black community hard over the last decade.
Regular exercise has been known to help prevent the growth of fibroids by reducing hormones and the fibroid activity they often trigger. In fact, according to the Fibroids Institute, studies have found that exercise of three or more hours per week reduces your risk of fibroids by about 30-40%!
The bands Ross uses are called Blood Flow Restriction bands or BFR. After your workout session, a person can use BFR bands to get the best result for your upper-body workout to improve your arms and drastically improve the lower body for the legs and glutes. BFR bands are effective in increasing your training volume and frequency.
With traditional strength training, you need a heavy load (at least 60 to 70 percent of your one-rep max) in order to make your muscles stronger and bigger. With BFR bands, you're able to achieve the same effect with a much lighter load.
When you lift heavy weights, it creates a localized hypoxic environment in your muscles due to the demand, which just means there's less oxygen than usual. Hypertrophy training uses load (weight) and reps together to reach fatigue and oxygen depletion faster.
When that happens, there's a buildup of lactate, which is what causes that "burning" feeling when you're doing a tough workout.
Using a tourniquet mimics this hypoxic environment by reducing the blood flow, but without having to actually use heavy weights.
Aside from increased strength (even outside of your BFR sessions) and muscle growth, there are some pretty amazing benefits of blood flow restriction training.
New BFR research is being done on people who have recently had operations or who need rehabilitation for one reason or another. A few studies have identified benefits for orthopedic patients, with more currently underway, says Eric Bowman, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Franklin, TN.. "This has the potential to be a major advancement in the way we rehabilitate patients with knee pain, ACL injuries, tendinitis, post-operative knee surgery, and more." BFR is also used in elderly patients who need to get stronger, but can't lift heavy weights.