Brain Handles

Recently I've become addicted to Ninja Warrior (a.k.a. Sasuke).

Like many people in this country, I need to get in shape, but I find the gym incredibly boring. The exercises are repetitive and don't really feel like they link up with any useful skill. But if I could find a gym that offered a 6 month prep course for Ninja Warrior, concentrating not only on exercises to build up the proper muscle groups, but lots of time on practice obstacles, that would keep me much more interested.

Basically, when you were a kid, you didn't like running laps, but if you were racing someone, chasing someone, or running for a game, you loved running. You didn't like doing pull-ups just for the sake of doing pull-ups, but if you were climbing a jungle gym or monkey bars, it was totally fun. As adults, we've taken all the play out of our fitness and made it work. Who wants to work at being fit when you can play at it and get good results with a lot more fun?

That's why I'd be so much more likely to sign up for and complete a Ninja Warrior fitness course as opposed to letting my gym membership lie dormant. For all the seriousness of it, it's a game. It's a challenge. It's fun. And the achievements of clearing obstacles and finishing a stage of a course are so much more concrete than increasing the number of reps or the amount of weight in an exercise.

Realizing that this might not gain a whole lot of traction in the U.S., where Ninja Warrior is still a very obscure basic cable program and the term "boot camp" has become incredibly overused/diluted, I wondered if there might be another pop-culture reference which had challenges/obstacles like Ninja Warrior but much broader mindshare.

Enter Pirates of the Caribbean. It's an incredibly successful movie franchise, well-known nationwide and worldwide, and could present many similar challenges: climbing ropes and rope nets, scaling a mast, balancing across booms and spars, and a variety of other challenges.

They could actually do a Pirates of the Caribbean themed physical competition game show to enhance people's motivation to do a pirate workout. If they did it like Ninja Warrior, I could totally see them franchising a series of "Pirate Gyms" where you could train to be an ultimate pirate, swinging on ropes, climbing nets, sliding down sails... basically creating circuit training courses based on a pirate ship that not only get you fit, but are so much like playing that you forget you're working out.

But I don't need a Pirates of the Caribbean gym or a Ninja Warrior gym. I just want to play again like I did when I was a kid. I want to make all the health benefits of exercise a side-effect of having fun. We need "run, jump, and climb" gyms for adults. It would probably be more successful financially if you theme it with a popular franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean, but the real issue is a paradigm shift in adult fitness... gym as playground, playground as gym. Grids of machines are gone, grids of spinning cycles are gone, grids of exercise mats are gone. If people with the money and expertise to pull that off can wrap their minds around that, it could get very interesting.