Tools and Tech to Improve Your Ninja Skills
As Ninja Warrior starts to grow in popularity, outside of the TV show, I’d like to interject some science and research to help push the sport towards legitimization. There are already many people pushing their training past the point of what a hobby would demand, but there are some elements that can still be tweaked to hone in the best possible methods of training for Ninja Warrior. This is where Fitness Monitoring comes into play.
Broadly speaking, Fitness Monitoring refers to any conscious effort put into tracking or monitoring specific elements of fitness training. There are a plethora of means and methods of monitoring, and various variables to take note of. I’ll first introduce some here, and then get a little deeper into the weeds further down.
For general health, the most common monitoring to be done is heart rate monitoring; whether in a hospital or a gym, knowing your heart rate is quite important for keeping you safe. Luckily, there are plenty of methods to track heart rate; I’m sure most people will recognize the utility of a smartwatch for this purpose. It has become almost commonplace for the average person walking around to have an incredibly accurate heart rate monitor on their wrist most times of the day. If you don’t have one, don’t worry, there are many more methods and tools to come, that was just an example.
Now let’s talk a bit about Ninja Warrior. While there are channels by which to reach a professional status in the sport, I believe the average person would still consider it a hobby, albeit a rather intense one. I think that it is for this reason, that there isn’t too much in the way of scientific research covering Ninja Warrior, and thus a fundamental lack of understanding of it. The previous statement is meant to be in comparison to other well-established sports, which all have swathes of studies ranging anywhere from the mentality of athletes to biomechanics to functional training for the sport. It is my opinion that Ninja Warrior as a sport has an untapped potential for study.
Metrics of Monitoring
On to the main points. Here’s some practical information on monitoring; to start with, what are the important metrics that can be tracked and analyzed to improve performance in Ninja Warrior training?
Objective Measurements
Heart Rate
Training Zones
Calorie Intake
Calories Burned
Metabolism
VO2max
Body Composition
RER
Sleep
Subjective Measurements
Strengths and weaknesses
Goals
Psychological State
Now, this may all seem like a lot, but you only need to use as much as you feel is necessary for your own training, and luckily, most of these metrics are fairly easily gathered and analyzed. There are a few tools that would be necessary to track these, some of them free, some of them cheap, and if you really felt like it, there are definitely some expensive devices that can tell you roughly everything about your body.
Why don’t we start with the free stuff first.
Write Everything Down
The easiest change any athlete can make to their training is keeping logs or diaries. Goal setting, training logs, mindset logs, food diaries, sleep, etc. Anything subjective that you can think of having an impact on your training that can be written down, should be. It doesn’t have to start out completely full of all of your daily activities, but just beginning the process will build up the habit of being conscientious of your training.
Personally I have two logs; what I plan to do, and what I do. In the former, I like to set short term and long term goals, both for myself and my athletes, detailed training plans for the upcoming week, and some rough ideas of where I think we should be in terms of skill development and conditioning.
For the second log, I keep track of what is done in workouts and other training sessions, what I eat and when, how I feel during each workout (tired, energized, lethargic, etc.), and the progress I made on specific skills I was working on. The same applies for logs I keep for athletes.
To cap this section off, write everything down that you feel has a vital impact on your training. It's a bit of a pain, but it helps; and it's free.
Standard Fitness Tracking Tools
Now we can start getting into some of the numbers. Taking objective variables during training has become commonplace in every domain of sport and fitness. The most blatant example of this is running. Every runner, from amateur to olympic, has a smartwatch; Garmin, FitBit, Apple, whatever. These devices have taken formerly medical-use monitoring technology, inaccessible to the public, and crammed it into little wristbands; it’s fantastic. Depending on how much money you spend, you’ll get a range of variables monitored, but most commonly, they can collect Heart Rate, Steps, and GPS. Most of the other metrics that show up on the watch are extrapolated from these basic ones.
I cannot stress enough how helpful it is to be able to constantly know your heart rate at any given time during training, so long as you know what to do with that information. By itself, heart rate can tell you how much stress a certain activity is putting on your body; but in combination with other variables, there is so much more you can learn about yourself. I will get into that a little bit later on; but for now, just know that no matter how cheap, if you can get ahold of a reliable heart rate monitor, there are some huge improvements you can make to your training.
The Fancy Exercise Science Technology
There are a few metrics that you can get to improve your fitness that, yes, can be expensive, but only need to be gathered once a year maybe.
Body Composition - The stuff you’re made of
Body composition is the compilation of measurements of body weight, muscle and fat percentages, bone weight, water weight, etc. Dialing back a bit, you have your body weight, that’s pretty easy to measure; but zooming in can tell you which parts account for a certain percentage of that body weight. Mostly what you will gain from a body composition test are “Skeletal Muscle Mass”, “Body Fat %”, “Extracellular Water/Total Body Water”, and distribution of mass.
In my opinion, the first three can be used as indicators of health and, let’s be honest, bragging rights. For training purposes, I find the last metric to be of most use. Knowing your distribution of muscle mass can highlight some favoritism you show to certain limbs, or which side of your body you favor. Being aware of this, you can make some adjustments to your training.
Metabolism, Vo2max, Anaerobic Threshold, RER, BMR
One of the most important, and interesting tests you as an athlete can and should get done is a Metabolism test. There are a couple of variations, but to boil it down, these tests let you know what your body is burning for fuel, at what rates, and during different situations.
Some quick preliminary notes before I get into the definitions and test; your body metabolizes mostly fats and carbohydrates for energy, depending on the type of exercise you are doing, you’ll want to use them at different ratios. Everyone has a set Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), but this can be changed through lifestyle and training.
RER - Respiratory Exchange Ratio
This is the ratio of Carbon Dioxide(CO2) exhalation to Oxygen(O2) intake. More specifically, the CO2 created through the metabolism of fats and carbohydrates. The ratio scales from 0.7 (burning all fats) to 1.0 (burning all carbohydrates). This ratio will be captured and calculated often during a VO2max running test.
Anaerobic Threshold
The threshold reached during exercise when the body changes over from aerobic metabolism to anaerobic exercise. Your body will change from using oxygen to aid in metabolism, to not using oxygen to help. Essentially, when the intensity becomes too much for the body and you hit “the wall”.
VO2max
The maximum amount of oxygen consumed during increasingly difficult endurance exercise. This measurement is generally a useful predictor of aerobic capabilities in athletes, although its practicality becomes a moot point at the most elite levels of endurance competition, where all athletes have similarly impressive VO2max levels.
BMR - Basal Metabolic Rate
The amount of calories you burn during a day before accounting for movement or exercise. Every process in your body, from muscle recovery to thinking, requires calories to function; put them all together and you get your BMR. There are tests to calculate this number as well; similar to the VO2max test, but you don’t move at all.
The average for adult women is 1400 kcal per day; for men is 1800 kcal per day.
These are averages and BMR is non-static within every person, take this with a grain of salt.
Now we can really dig into some interesting notes. So while you are taking any of these tests, or basically any fitness/health test, your heart rate data will be collected. Why is this important? Because heart rate data is easy to capture, and easy to understand.
An example.
You have just completed your VO2max running test. You will receive a chart, or spreadsheet with all of the collected data, hopefully rationalized into some readable format. What you will be given is your VO2max number [60 mL/(kg·min)], your RER data points at varying levels of exercise intensity, and your Heart Rate data at any given time during the test.
All of this information can come in the form of a graph, so you would be able to see how your body is reacting at the increasing levels of intensity of running. So, something you could pull out of this is: what you are burning for fuel at a certain speed of running along with your heart rate data. This would allow you to, on your own time, estimate your RER data during your own training based on your heart rate.
The usefulness of this as a method of training is absolutely fantastic. Let’s say you want to specifically train your endurance and increase your ability to burn fat as a fuel source during training. You can now look back on your data collected from the VO2max test, find the intensity level and heart rate that correlate to an RER closer to 0.7, and train at that level. You will then be, most likely, training your body’s ability to burn fat as a fuel for exercise.
Final Thoughts
That was a lot of information, boiled down into, honestly too simple and small of an article. Any one of these topics could be expanded into its own article, video, discussion, etc., and that very well might be on the horizon. Also, if I gave away all my information, I’d have a pretty hard time offering up my services as a trainer and coach.
For the time being, just take into account that there are many extra levels of detail you could be adding into your training, based on what your goals are. Writing down goals, and taking notes is a great start for athletes and fitness enthusiasts of all levels, however; I definitely recommend it.
R. Andrew Paxton, B.S., M.S. Kinesiology
Head Coach & Trainer, Coeur Ninja
e: robertpaxton11@gmail.com
p: (615) 424-3239
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