Ninja Warrior and Strength Training
Let’s talk about strength training. Getting swole right? No. Getting cut? Still no. Oh, it’s gotta mean bulking season right? Ugh no! Let’s take a step back, when I talk about “strength training”, I mean increasing the maximum resistances your muscles can handle in a particular exercise. The amount that you can pull, push, squat, the length of time that you can hang from a ledge with extra weight, etc. Most people think about increasing the size of your muscles when they hear strength training, but that’s not completely correct. It’s fair to be worried about muscle growth in ninja, after-all you want to be carrying around the least amount of extra weight when swinging around. But “getting swole” for lack of a better term, has more to do with your diet and types of exercises you do while training than simply strength training.
And better yet, when you do strength train (I’ll define this soon), two things to happen right off the bat. First, you’ll actually improve your endurance with less weight/resistance and secondly, you’ll improve your power in that exercise. Power is simply defined as strength over time so the two ways to improve your power are to increase the resistance in order to improve the strength or lessen the resistance and increase the speed at which you are moving the resistance, activating the fast twitch muscles and decreasing the time it takes you to move through the movement.
But before we go any further, let’s clarify some definitions that often get used incorrectly. There’s really 4 different types of training that you should be doing. There’s strength training, power training, strength-endurance and pure endurance. Each of these serve a vastly different purpose but ultimately contribute to your overall fitness. Strength, as mentioned earlier, is the maximum amount of resistance that your muscles can handle in a particular exercise. An example of this would be your 1-rep max in weighted pull-ups. Power is essentially the explosiveness of your muscles. These exercises will improve the speed at which you can move through a movement, activating your fast twitch muscles. Salmon ladder is the epitome of power exercises, any sort of plyometrics workout or clapping push-ups are also great power workouts. Strength-endurance, loosely defined, is completing several hard (strength) movements with minimal rest for longer periods of time. The purpose of these workouts is to get your body better at recovering quickly in between sets. You do this by training your muscles to work through strength exercises (albeit, less resistance than pure strength), while flooding the muscles with lactic acid. This will train your body to clear out the lactic acid faster, leading to quicker recovery and more energy in other workouts. An example of a strength-endurance workout is 5 pull-ups EMOM (Every Minute on the Minute) for 15–20 minutes. Last but not least is endurance training. The biggest difference between endurance and all other training, is that endurance is purely aerobic which means that the resistance (and relative feel of effort) is lower but continuous for long periods of time. The greatest example of pure endurance is long runs for marathoners, the pace is relatively easy, but over the course of 20 miles it starts to feel particularly difficult. Another example of this is traversing an easy route on a climbing wall for 20–30 minutes.
Now, back to ninja! If we’re trying to train for a particular sport, in this case Ninja Warrior, we need to follow the Principle of Specificity which states that training “should be relevant and appropriate to the sport for which the individual is training in order to produce the desired effect.” Looking at “relevant and appropriate”, we not only want to look at the techniques that we practice but the muscle groups that we train as well. There’s a lot of traditional weight lifting exercises that simply doesn’t make sense for ninja. Bench press is the holy grail, but in ninja warrior, when are you going to be lying on your back, pressing upwards? Now, I’m not saying push exercises are useless, they are incredibly important to train in order to keep your body balanced and uninjured. But improving your max bench press is definitely not going to help you get through that pegboard. Weighted (or unweighted, depending on your level) pull-ups, however, have so many applications to ninja warrior and almost every upper-body obstacle involves some sort of pulling.
So we now know what strength training is and we understand the Principle of Specificity, what’s next? Put me in coach, I’m ready to get after it!! Well, when we train strength we generally want to keep the resistance high and the reps low, putting maximum stress on our Central Nervous System. When we do this, we need to take long periods of rest in between sets in order for our bodies to fully recover. This will produce the highest quality repetitions and to keep quality high across each set, you’ll want to take about 3–5 minutes rest. I know this sounds like a lot of rest, but remember, we’re loading up with high resistance and want each rep to be the highest quality possible. As far as number of reps per set goes, the magic range that I stick to is 1–6 reps before hitting muscular failure. Hitting muscular failure within those bounds is the important part, you unfortunately can’t just stop at 5 reps and call it strength training, you have to push your body to its limits within those bounds. If you’re able to do more than 6 repetitions on your first set then you should increase the resistance.
And now that we’ve defined strength training, what are the ninja related movements we’ll want to strengthen? Breaking down every obstacle we can come up with a list of movements that ninjas must possess. In my mind, it looks a little like this:
- Explosive pull-ups (salmon ladder, spin hopper, clacker, crank it up)
- Offset pull-ups (devil steps, crank it up, doorknob graspers)
- One-arm lock-off (Pegboard, iron maiden)
- Lache (Subcategory: trapeze lache)
- Slow balance (Less so in ANW recently but slackline is a great example)
- Agility (Almost every lower body obstacle in ANW)
- Explosive leg power (Warped wall, mega wall, swing surfer)
Grip strength
- Crimp (cliffhanger, I-Beam)
- Vertical (nunchucks, cane lane)
- Pinch (vertical limit, floating doors)
- Crush (floating monkey bars, iron maiden)
- Sloper (cannonball alley)
Most obstacles you’ll come across are actually a mix of two or more of these skills as well. Cane lane for example, which involves holding onto the long part of a cane and jumping the hooked portion over barriers along a rail, is a combination of vertical grip strength with explosive pull-ups. The new obstacle in Baltimore this year, dangerous curves, is a mix of pinch strength, offset pull-ups and laches.
With these movements identified, we can train them both in isolation and in combination to maximize the strength gains we are getting and increasing the relevancy to our sport. For strength training, we’re not going to look at movements that mostly require technique which would include laches, slow balance and agility. Technique movements can be trained more frequently than strength as they take time and continuous repetition to engrain in your brain and don’t put nearly as much stress on the Central Nervous System. Your CNS takes roughly 48–72 hours to fully recover so strength training days require much more rest time in between.
So to put this all together, increasing max strength is going to increase power and endurance (with less resistance). So if you are comfortable on obstacles and have been training for a while, it’s time to turn those obstacles into strength drills! Adding extra resistance while drilling obstacles is the best way to start with this. If you’re able to increase your max resistance while training on obstacle, you will become much more explosive and efficient when you need to tackle that movement in competition. For a quick example, take the devil steps. Say you have a setup that requires six moves up, six moves down. One way to train this is to throw yourself at the obstacle, trying to do as many reps back and forth as possible. On the flip side, you can also add more and more weight to a weight vest until you’re barely able to complete all 12 moves. Repeat this workout once or twice a week for a month or two and you will have increased the weighted needed to hit that “barely making it” muscle fatigue. Remove all that weight and you will fly through the obstacle, even if it’s thrown in the middle of a course.
Hopefully this helps give you a better understanding of what exactly strength training is and how it can relate to ninja warrior. Next week we’re going to take a deep dive into how exactly you can strength train for ninja. What exercises you can do, how to setup a workout based around strength and how to incorporate strength drills into your obstacle training. If you have any questions or comments about ninja strength, be sure to leave them in the comments below!
