Top Five Most Difficult Types of Reality Show Challenges

1. Endurance
The purest form of this challenge, a Survivor classic, involves placing all the competitors on top of small platforms and telling them that the last one remaining wins. Keeping your balance atop the platform isn't all that difficult as long as you can stay mentally focused, often for hours at a time. When Jeff Probst bribes you with food or certain competitors try to strike a deal with you or attractive female competitors take their clothes off, staying focused becomes a lot more difficult. Big Brother is often good for a couple of these challenges each year. Variations often involve a physical component, such as holding yourself off the ground on a bar or keeping your hands in a certain position or maintaining your balance on the water. A challenge on Dog Eat Dog involved players standing on small platforms atop the pool with a freezing cold indoor rainstorm taking place. The Mole had an interesting twist on this type of challenge, where one player had to spend the night on a bed with the song "Tiny Bubbles" blaring over and over again. If he touched the floor, he lost.

2. Eating
The eating challenges are what put Fear Factor on the map. They started rather tame, in the scheme of things (live cockroaches, sheep eyes, buffalo testicles -- all delicacies in certain parts of the world), but as part of the constant quest to become more and more extreme, the 100th episode featured an entire rat being thrown into a blender. Survivor often has one these challenges each season. Foods consumed included live maggots, cow blood, and balut (fertilized duck eggs). One season even required the survivors' loved ones to eat the foods. Big Brother has been known to throw the houseguests a dinner party consisting of some pretty nasty food. The Amazing Race has thrown up roadblocks that include chowing down on large portions of caviar, organ meats, fried grasshoppers, and an ostrich egg. Even The Joe Schmo Show spoofed the concept by serving the the participants fake disgusting food that was really made out of gelatin. (Matt, the Schmo, was obviously unaware of the joke, and threw a fit when told he would have to eat dog feces.)

3. Needle In A Haystack
The great equalizer in reality show challenges give every person or team, regardless of their physical ability, an equal chance of success, since this challenge is based solely on luck and patience. It is a staple of The Amazing Race, which has required teams to bite into hundreds of chocolates or open up hundreds of nesting dolls or unravel hundreds of haybales in order to find a clue that has been hidden in precious few locations. It can be incredibly frustrating to struggle for hours while team after team comes through and, with a stroke of luck, locates their clue in a matter of minutes. Treasure Hunters often has empty containers mixed in with containers holding artifacts and Survivor occasionally throws empty treasure chests into challenges. The Mole had a rather literal challenge of this type, where players had to comb through a haystack in search of a miniature baseball bat.

4. Digging
It's a variant on the Needle In A Haystack that requires physical endurance in addition to patience. On The Amazing Race, hippie B.J. spent hours trying to dig for a buried bundle of lamb chops in the oppressive Omani sun, while last week's final clue on Treasure Hunters told teams to dig in a certain area for their artifact but provided no further guidance as to where and how deep to dig. The humidity of the Deep South didn't help matters. Survivor often has challenges where the competitors have to dig on the beach, though the area is usually confined and hints in the form of coordinates are regularly provided.

5. Holding Your Breath
Survivor, Dog Eat Dog, and Fear Factor have all featured challenges requiring competitors basically to do their best David Blaine impression and stay underwater as long as they can. The scary part about these challenges is that if you mess up on taking a deep breath or clearing a snorkel pipe when the challenge starts, you can be eliminated in a matter of seconds (just ask Janu). There's just something very unnerving about being underwater, since you know that humans weren't designed to survive down there. While The Amazing Race doesn't usually include breath-holding competitions per se, there have been roadblocks involving underwater swimming in frigid conditions in Moscow and South Korea.