First Workout(s)

Sunday 7/10 was the official start of my Ninja Warrior training. It wasn't pretty.

This was the first workout of the first four-week part of my endurance/fat loss phase. I tried to build a workout that would hit all the major muscle groups in ways that at least remotely related to the obstacles I might face. And as any book on weight training will tell you, we develop endurance and burn fat by doing sets of 12-15 reps with about a minute rest.

But what exercises to do? First, I looked at the actual obstacles from the entire 26-season run of Sasuke. Fortunately, Wikipedia had a great entry on the obstacles, so I cut-and-pasted their list and description into a database for further analysis. That sounds really nerdy because it is, but a database (I use Bento) is really just a spreadsheet with a customizeable interface and more tools for sorting and filtering the data. Putting the obstacles into a database made it easier to review each and identify the skills and strengths each requires.

What did I find? Pretty much what you'd expect if you watch one episode. You need the grip strength of a chimpanzee, the bounding ability of a kangaroo, the vertical jump of Blake Griffith, and the core strength of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Next step was to find exercises in these areas that I could do in my garage gym. For that I relied on The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises. There's plenty of free resources on the Internet listing exercises for every muscle group, and I did draw from one of my favorites, unique-bodyweight-exercise.com. But Men's Health does a good job of compiling every possible variety of exercise, sorting them by particular muscle groups ("glutes and hamstrings" vs. "Quads and Butt"?) and offering a variety of workouts for different objectives that make pretty clear how you could build your own program. Plus, their programs run 8-12 weeks, so I got a sense of long-term development.

So here's my program for the next four weeks. I'll life Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, alternating between the A and B workouts:


WARMUP

5-minute run. Nothing better for fat loss, so I run as much as I can. Barely a jog, but it's a great way to wake up for a workout.

5 minutes of jumping jacks and stretching. I picked stretches that would target Ninja Warrior and my weaknesses in flexibility:
--Jumping Jacks
--Low side-to-side lunge
--Over/under shoulder stretch
--Bent-over Reach to Sky
--Groiners
Got all these crazy exercises from Men's Health. But basically I'm trying to get flexible for the Spider Jump/Spider Climb, where you have to push yourself up and through a channel between two walls with nothing below you but the dreaded swamps of Mount Midoriyama.

Then came the A workout. I did the sets in alternating pairs, to cut down on the rest between sets:

1A: Box jumps, 3 sets of 15 reps
1B: Swiss-Ball Hip Raise & Curl, 3 sets of 15 reps

2A: Elevated Wall Pushups
2B: Swiss Ball Towel Inverted Rows

3A: Inverted Shoulder Press
3B: Elevated Wall Plank

"Elevated Wall" means that my feet were pressing against a wall about a foot or so above the floor while I did the pushups or planks. I threw that challenge in to hit my core; it's a baby step on the way to the old Ninja Warrior obstacle Body Prop.

So how did it go? The first pair were a cake walk. I ditched my planned minute rest between sets, they were so easy. The other four, however, were another story. The rows are in theory a great exercise, with the towels forcing me to work my grip and the Swiss Ball challenging my core while the rows themselves hit the upper back. But I was just not strong enough to keep it all steady, and while I completed the first two sets and got 10 on the last, I looked foolish enough doing them that I should've been on Tosh.0. Next time I'll probably just put my feet up on a bench. And ending the workout with planks was sheer torture.

This morning, just to catch up, I followed with my "easy day" run, two miles around the neighborhood. Felt much faster than the 9-minutes a mile my app said I ran. I chalk the slow time up to having completed the Sunday workout in the evening. I really need 24 hours between workouts. FYI, my GPS-running app is RunKeeper on my iPhone, and I highly recommend it.