Weights. Treadmills. Spin classes. Let’s face it, workout innovations just haven’t kept pace with advances in TV, iPad, and snack-food technology. (Did you know there are onion-ring-and-ketchup-flavored Doritos now?) That said, a few forward-looking gyms offer activities that might actually compete with our Twitter/Netflix/PizzaRanch fixations. Activities like bouncing up to 10 feet in the air while playing dodgeball. Crunch Fitnesses of the world, take note.

House of Air,San Francisco
The professional-size trampolines in this former airplane hangar are set so you...

The black boxes were sitting on the ocean floor in what would have been plain sight, if there were any light at a depth of 12,800 feet. They were guarded by silent corpses, the passengers and crew of an Airbus A330 that plummeted to the bottom of the Atlantic in June 2009. For nearly two years, the boxes—not black, actually, but bright orange—had lain amid some of the most rugged undersea terrain in the world, 11,500-foot mountains rising from the ocean floor, covered with landslides and steep scarps. Un...