Jeff Probst explains why ‘Survivor 48’ Get a Grip challenge is harder than ever

There’s a reason why Survivor endurance challenges don’t last as long anymore.

In the past, players spent hours and hours battling it out in true tests of endurance and grit, like in fan-favorite Get a Grip, the last-person-standing challenge spent holding onto a giant pole with deep footholds. But as this week’s episode of Survivor 48 showed, that’s no longer possible. While the iconic challenge returned, it was made more difficult than ever with extremely shallow footholds that barely helped the competing players stay up. As a result, the challenge was over in no time.

“This isn’t an absolute rule, but for the most part, when it comes to endurance challenges, we try to keep them consistent from season to season,” Jeff Probst said on last week’s episode of his On Fire with Jeff Probst podcast. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But then Probst announced in the very next episode of Survivor 48 that they’ve made the Get a Grip challenge more difficult every time it’s used in the game. So what gives?

The host explained his contradicting statements in this week’s episode of the podcast.

“I said it’s not an absolute rule,” he pointed out with a laugh. “So that’s this case. Get a Grip is actually a really good example to look at how a challenge was originally birthed, and then how it evolved over the years.”

Probst revealed that Get a Grip was created by executive producer John Kirhoffer after he watched “local laborers, and they were just hanging off these trees getting coconuts.”

“He was mesmerized by it because he thought it looked terrifying, but they were doing it so easily,” Probst said. “And so he went to the challenge team and the art department and said, ‘I think we could do a challenge here,’ and it became Get a Grip.”

First introduced in season 9, Survivor: Vanuatu, it quickly became a staple as players battled exhaustion (and sometimes the elements due to rain making the poles slippery) to outlast each other, sometimes for hours, hanging on for their lives. Fan-favorite Ozzy Lusth won it twice (and even came close to a third win before Tai Trang ultimately beat him), while other iconic players including Tyson Apostol, Denise Stapley, and Jeremy Collins have all triumphed in previous seasons.

“We start doing the challenge and over the years it did lead to some epic moments where people are hanging on for hours,” Probst says. “So then you start to examine the challenge a little more analytically, and what we started realizing very quickly was the way it is currently designed with the footholds, there will always be players who will be able to stay up there for hours. So then you have to ask yourself, ‘Is that what you want? What is it that we want from this challenge? What’s the most dramatic, what’s the most entertaining version of this challenge?'”

Because Survivor is constantly evolving, they found a way to make Get a Grip harder and, as a result, not last as long. “Over time we started making it a little more difficult — not giant changes, they’re incremental, making the footholds just a little less deep,” Probst says. “And now it has evolved into a challenge that will first test your fear of heights, because when you don’t have much of a foothold, now if you have any fear of heights, it’s immediately there because it’s much harder to hold onto. And so now you’re aware of how high up you are and that starts making you feel less secure because you know you’re going to fall at some point.”

And it’s not just more difficult — it’s also more painful for the players. Fun, right? “Because of the smaller foothold, it’s much more painful,” Probst says. “So now you’re trying to work to get your toes or the side of your foot to offer any kind of stability that doesn’t create even more pain.”

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So future Survivor hopefuls, start training your feet to withstand that kind of pain now, because Get a Grip isn’t going back to the way it was. In fact, it might actually get even harder!

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say, the current version of Get A Grip is probably pretty close to where it will stay for the rest of time,” Probst declares. “Until, of course, you play this clip in a future podcast and there are no footholds at all anymore.”

For more from Probst on the episode, check out the latest installment of On Fire.