It’s an older video, but I have to ask:  is there anything this guy can’t do?  I spent an hour—which I will never get back—watching YouTube clips of this show (called "Ninja Warrior") yesterday.  The athleticism on display is staggering. 

The obstacle course—any obstacle course, not just this mind-bogglingly difficult one--is a test of strength-to-weight ratio, which in my mind is a pretty great measure of overall fitness. 

How strong are you relative to your bodyweight?  The answer to that question determines how easily and effectively you can move your body through space, a crucial factor not just in the performance of many sports but in everyday life as well. 

But you don’t need a ninja’s obstacle course to improve your strength-to-weight ratio:  push-ups, sprints, or indeed, running in any form; jumps and leaps of all kinds; pull-ups, bodyweight squats, jumping rope, single-leg squats, back extensions, lunges, planks and reverse crunches are all body-weight exercises that can improve your ability to move through space easily and effectively. 

Body weight exercises are also useful because they indirectly measure body fat as well.  The leaner you are—meaning, the less extra baggage you carry around in the form of pudge--the better you’ll perform at any such movement.

We’ve all seen, on one hand, 300-pound power lifters who can barely climb a flight of stairs and, on the other, long-distance athletes who couldn’t do a pushup if you paid them.  Both athletes may have achieved an elite level in one very narrow aspect of fitness:  absolute strength and endurance, respectively. 

You’d want the power lifter to be on hand if you found yourself trapped beneath a Volkswagen, and the marathon runner if you were stuck on a mountain and needed someone to get help in a hurry.* Like a backhoe and a moped, their bodies are perfect for certain very specific types of activity and dreadful for almost all others.

Body-weight exercises improve your ability to do something every one of us do every day:  move your body through space.  And everyone from the most housebound couch potato to Venus Williams could stand to get better at that.

No less a sage than Alwyn Cosgrove has said that you shouldn’t even touch a weight in the gym until you’ve mastered body-weight training.   Since I’ve never been able to do a single-leg squat worth a plug nickel, I have, according to Cosgrove, wasted about 20 years of my life in the squat rack.

Many trainers—including this one—would argue that the bench press and the lat pull-down, two weight room chestnuts, are less effective than their body-weight analogs, the humble push-up and pull-up, both of which work a greater amount of muscle tissue and more closely resemble movements we perform in everyday life.  Once a client can do multiple sets of 15 or more of either movement (a feat in itself, especially for pull-ups), I find it far more useful to add weight to the movements themselves than to change them out for less effective, if more popular exercises. 

Many exercisers abandon these movements after they’ve trained for a few weeks in favor of more ‘advanced’ exercises that are in point of fact far less challenging. 

Don’t be one of those guys.

*And, er, didn’t have a cell or a satellite phone.  And thought running down the mountain would be a good idea.  Or just didn’t like that runner guy who was in your climbing party.  Okay, so the everyday uses of a long-distance runner are limited.  I admit it, okay?  He’s so stringy he’s not even much good as nourishment.

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Football may be dangerous, but these days it's the cheerleaders who seem to be taking one for the team.

This has nothing to do with fitness, but if this doesn't give you a warm fuzzy feeling, Whitney Houston soundtrack and all, well, you just have a heart of stone.