Ninja Warrior Season 27 Stage 2 Course Breakdown

Continuing my breaking down of each one of the stages, we are on to stage 2!

1. Sliding pull up bar: Crush Grip Closed hand - general pull strength, core strength for stabilizing.
2. Double Salmon Ladder + Unstable Bridge:
1. There are 7 touches with the Double Salmon Ladder, this motion requires a excellent base of vertical pull strength, on top of that it will require explosive vertical pull strength, something that very few athletes actually train for. For pulls ups this will require whats called a "kip up" its that little hip jerk and knee up motion you see. The strength training component of strength would be call an explosive pull up, with when you "kip up" off a pull up bar, clap your hands together and then grab it on the way down. In the middle of all that you have to rotate yourself around, strong shoulder girdle strength.
2. With the Unstable Bridge, it looks like a lot of the same principles will help as with the double salmon ladder EXCEPT, the grip is different, this looks like a Pitch Grip Closed hand grip.
3. Oh and the endurance of your vertical pull needs to be well over 30seconds.

      3. Balance log + climb up the rope: Balance, vertical pull, crush grip closed hand (big surprise)
      4. Run, jump and grab chain. Vertical leap, crush grip closed hand, perhaps add chain pulling to a workout
      5. Wall Lift, 3 walls, 66 pounds, 88 pounds and 110 pounds. Lift with your legs not your back. Two exercises come to mind with this one, the dead lift and the olympic clean.

All done in 90 seconds.

Strength Summary for stage 2:

• Crush Grip, Closed hand, this type of strength DOMINATED the first stage, not surprised to see it all over the second stage.
• Vertical Pull and Explosive Vertical Pull, now we have a monkey wrench. While your base strength needs to be a solid vertical pull, you need to have that explosive force to life you up to the next bar. Think of it as squatting and box jumping. Your squat can aid how high of a box jump you have, but you could be able to squat a lot of weight and not be able to jump very high, why? because your body is not balanced and you've never trained for explosive movements, its a whole another set of tricks your playing with now.
• Pitch Grip, Closed Hand, this is the first time we get to use our pitch grip, and even if you have a good crush grip, doesn't mean you have a good pitch grip.
• The other guys:
• Vertical Leap, pretty standard.
• Balance, check.
• Hip dominate leg strength, a balanced workout program that increases your vertical leap is also going to increase you hip strength, so you SHOULD be covered. Its pretty much a deadlift or a clean like I mentioned above though.
• Ropes and chains: There is a method of training, which uses whats called "battling ropes" or the other one which is called "chain reaction". You use these two items for a series of strength exercises, I find it does really good things for the endurance and makes a great alternative other than doing treadmill cardio when training for ninja warrior. The byproduct of using these tools is that it will get your hands familial with holding a rope or chain.

As far as the battling rope and kip up/explosive pull ups go, maybe I'll make a video on how to use those items with ninja warrior and post them online. Probably not until February though. In the mean time in addition to breaking down stage 3 and 4 I'll be setting some specific and measurable goals for myself. Training to get stronger is great and all but if your getting stronger in all the wrong areas and don't realize some simple weaknesses, well.....