![]() Presented by Ben Shephard, Chris Kamara and Rochelle Humes, the show focuses on around 250 contestants (160 in series 4–5) tackling a difficult assault course featuring a variety of obstacles, the most notable being the Warped Wall. The show is based upon the format of the Japanese game show Sasuke, created by Ushio Higuchi, which is aired in the United Kingdom and other countries as Ninja Warrior. It's much harder to train your upper body.Ninja Warrior UK (also known as Ninja Warrior UK: Race for Glory) is a British physical obstacle assault course game show, created for ITV. After our first grueling session, Geoff gave me a homework assignment: train myself to hang for sixty seconds. Keep in mind that I can’t do a single pull-up, so sixty seconds represented a legitimately difficult end goal. In fact, you will never understand how long sixty seconds can feel until you’re in a gym, hanging from a pull-up bar, watching your fingers gradually weaken and slip as you look over at the timer and realize that only ten seconds have passed. Everyone at the gym was moving and active. Meanwhile, here I was, hanging like a toddler clinging to his mommy’s leg. I could feel the meat of my palms tearing away. I wondered if everyone else could smell them and then trace the scent directly to me, a man hanging from gym equipment because he seemingly doesn’t understand how gym equipment works.Īnd yet, I improved. Soon, I was hanging for twenty seconds, and then thirty. My grip felt stronger and more virile, so much so that I made a point of shaking hands with people just so I could dazzle them with my hand strength.Īt one point, I even made it to fifty seconds. You deformed your body for the sake of it! I felt like I could punch through concrete. My task was to climb across a series of footholds over to a little alligator. The footholds were pretty and colorful, all to disguise the fact that they were merciless. They sloped and crimped and jugged, and were generally designed to make your hands and feet miserable. By the time I was halfway across the wall, I tapped out. “When I was on Stage 3 (of ANW),” Geoff told me, “I completely pumped out on the bars, and it hurt so much, but I forced myself to hold on. I could barely do it, it was skin-of-my-teeth, you know? But it happened. And you're going to feel that on the course, hopefully." That's what I like about climbing: you get used to it, you push yourself through that. We moved to the grown-up area, with climbing walls that went forty feet high and had designated route maps that ranged in difficulty all the way from Beginner to Crazy Free-Climbing Stoner. ![]() Geoff and Jessica hooked me into a snug harness that put a death grip on my cock and balls, and then attached me to a belaying rope. Okay, so you’ve worked out religiously and built up your forearms and become a real-life Peter Parker. Maybe that’s enough to get you on the show. Maybe you’re quick and strong enough to be like Chad Hohn, one of a cadre of ANW veteran contestants I meet in Atlanta… a man who has scouted out the course the day before using a pair of binoculars and his smartphone, so he can get a sneak peek at what obstacles are in store for him (even though producers discourage sneak peeks at the course prior to taping, no one stopped him). I watch Chad run through every obstacle without falling, leaving only a small amount of fat on the clock. He may as well have been sitting down for Sunday Brunch, he makes it look so easy.īut even if you’ve got the athletic goods, that still may not be enough. It won’t shock you to learn that, since this is now an NBC venture, most Ninja Warrior episodes are modeled on the network’s Olympics coverage. Geoff Britten, who works by day as a TV cameraman and has covered the Olympics, says, “They literally just copy it. Like, ‘Let's take some people, tell their stories, and America will love them.’ And it works.”Īnd here’s social worker Jen Liam, another repeat ninja who brought her wife and daughter to the taping. It never hurts to bring your family along for both moral support and possible crowd shots. ![]() Since ANW is only filmed at night, aspiring ninjas are here from sunset all the way until dawn for their chance to humiliate themselves on national television. And their families come along with them, lining up for hours outside the stadium, many of them dressed in attention-grabbing t-shirts repping their loved ones: COOK, TEAM SKIP, #SEESHAWNRUN, etc. Like virtually all of the other contestants, Jen trained by building her own replica obstacles at home, gradually colonizing the joint with salmon ladders and climbing walls and log rolls ( 7. ![]() As a result, she can no longer fit her truck in her garage. ![]() “It started off with a pull-up bar,” she says. It's like, Oh, I've got to have that toy." “And then it went to a few holds, and then it went to some ropes, and then it went to a partner net. ![]()
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