A Parkour documentary that shows the struggles of traceurs while searching for meaning in their trainings. It is about the journey a couple of practitioners take to Lisses, the city where Parkour started, to discover what this discipline is and to follow the footsteps of the Yamakasi.

The maker is TK17, a traceur who broke both his legs and is still training today, is a great inspiration to many Parkour purists. This parkour documentary is one of his first projects and it is now up on Youtube for everyone to see.

Enjoy it all!

A citizen reported the pair around 8:40 p.m. Nov. 27 after they were spotted on the roof of the restaurant, located at 169 Glyndon Street SE.

Officers in Virginia, U.S. responded and found one adult on the ground and a juvenile still on the roof of the Vienna-based restaurant, the Virginian.

The juvenile could not get down, so Fairfax County Fire and Rescue responded with a ladder to assist the juvenile in safely getting down from the roof. The juvenile’s mother responded to retrieve him. Police are still assessing any damage to the building.

It begs to wonder, what were they doing on top of a building if they had no idea how to get down. There should be a test that prevents anyone failing it from taking up Parkour. Seriously!

More on the news here: ViennaPatch

What is muscle memory?

Is the inherent ability of the body to turn movement into reflex. You can witness this in a situation where your body just reacts. When you drop a fork and instantly reach out to grab it, or when something is flying over and you automatically duck. That is muscle memory.

As a person develops from a toddler to a fully grown person, they go through a learning process that is called “basic motor skills”. After that, the process refines itself and imprints the most used activities in your brain so you don’t have to consciously activate them.

At first, the imprint is vague and can be discarded if it’s not practiced often. It has been estimated that the brain requires 1500 repetitions to permanently ingrain a certain movement in your muscle memory.

What does that mean? It means that, at this point, there will be a clear, distinct imprint in your nervous system. So clear, in fact that when you go to perform a task, your body will only refer to the spine, not the brain. 

This will help your Parkour training in more than on way, due to the ability to move, adapt, react faster and with more accuracy though the environment. Even when significant atrophy (muscle shrinking) has taken place during a layoff, previously hypertrophied muscle returns to its previous size more quickly than usual.

How to train muscle memory

Step 1. Condition your body

In order to train muscle memory you need to build up your body and muscles. This means that you need to do a lot of conditioning. This strength training will help you get an overall status of what you can do and cannot do, and consolidates your body for the actual training.

If you want to begin practicing flips, for example, you will need to start conditioning your legs a lot. If you want a tutorial on how to do that, you can check my lower body conditioning exercises. If you are planning on improving your climbing and vaulting skills, you will also need to focus a lot on your upper body conditioning.

It appears, that despite practice, attitude can interfere with muscle memory. Nerves can lead to clenched muscles that can’t quite perform, as they would probably do if you weren’t thinking about it. A sense of being unable to perform as you would wish may also affect muscle memory. The processes are still complex, and the “confidence factor” needs to be taken into account in training your muscle memory.

Step 2. Focus on the quality of the quantity

The key to building good muscle memories is to focus on the quality of the quantity. We’ve often heard, that 10,000 hours is the magic number to make someone an expert. It’s likely that this is the case when you practice well, but if you carelessly build procedural memory over and over again you can just end up being really good at repeating your mistakes. When you practice, take it slow at first. When going back to learn a movement, don’t rush to learn the entire thing. Break the movement up into parts and concentrate on learning one part really well. Practice that section slowly until you’ve got it down, then speed it up little by little until you can execute it at full speed.

Step 3. Know when to quit

Knowing when to quit is one of the most important steps. Typically when this is done, a moves cleanliness will deteriorate throughout a session as you become fatigued. So, as I said before, even if you remember the good, clean ones, the bad ones will also remain in your muscle memory. This means we’re back to square one. How do we fix this? Restrict your movements to less repetitions. The optimal number would be less than 30 movements per session. That way you will only imprint perfect movements in your reflexes.

If you just did 20 perfect landings or movements, and you’re all excited at your new skill, you need to remember that you body becomes fatigued and after a few more repetitions, you won’t probably react the same. Diversify your training and always quit before you feel tired. At the point you’re fatigued, your physical abilities will have already dropped 30%.

The concept behind training you muscle memory is quite simple. All you need to do, is remember there are some rules that you need to follow, and focus.

Let’s retiterate:

Step 1 – condition to get self-confidence
Step 2 – Focus on the quality, not on the quantity
Step 3 – Know when to quit

If you follow these three simple steps, the next time you go out training your Parkour, you should be able to build a physical basis on which you will learn, move, act and react faster than before.

Think fast!

But what happens when you keep doing it for a few months, for a year? Well, you get bored. This is when you training starts to become a necessity, not a choice. You should never train. When you look at your training grounds as a defined, static thing; only a wall and a rail, that is when you lose your perception of how Parkour training should be… fun and fulfilling.

This happened to me after about two years of training and it felt like I could no longer find anything that gets my interest in the city I lived in. So I started searching for new places to raise my spirits and motivate myself. That’s when it hit me… I had no idea where I could go train anywhere else.

The fun of exploring

That was the moment I just got a backpack, a bottle of water and went around town trying things out wherever I could see something interesting. I never took my backpack off and I only stopped if the places were very interesting.

It’ s great method to break the monotony of the same places and to find out how you behave in new places. I was only exploring the city trying to find routes that nobody else saw. This a very effective way of training your perception of the environment and it helps you develop orientation skills.

When is a good time to start exploring?

If you never tried it before, go for it now. The place you live in might have a lot more to offer than you expected. No matter what your skill level is or why you’re training, exploring the urban environment can both develop your desire to train even more and break the habit of going in the same places every time.

Forget about that place where you have all the walls you need. Try your skills out in the city, where creativity makes the difference!

Drinking a large amount at once will result in negative effects if you do a lot of exercise immediately afterwards. Not drinking enough water will also result in negative effects (dehydration).

How to drink properly when training

You can either drink water often, in small amounts, or drink more but take a break from exercise for a short time afterwards. If neither of these are an option in a particular situation you just have to decide which problem you would prefer, damaging your internal systems by exercising after drinking a lot, or cooking your brain through dehydration. Neither are particularly great options, but I prefer to err on the side of drinking more water rather than less since a lack of water will probably kill you faster.

I’ve read somewhere (don’t remember where exactly) that it’s best to regularly sip some water from the bottle when you are not even thirsty rather than drink a lot when you are thirsty then not drink anymore. When you are thirsty, you have already lost at least 2 % of your body’s water.

Even mild dehydration can drain your energy and make you tired. Research has found that even a 2% drop in the water content of the body results in fatigue and tiredness whilst a decrease of 10% (severe dehydration) or more can be fatal if not treated immediately.

Common causes of dehydration in traceurs

Excessive sweating
Inadequate fluid intake
Exercising in dry, hot weather
Drinking only when thirsty
Failure to replace fluid losses during and after exercise

Learning to keep hydrated in Parkour

Practice hydrating before and during exercise to prevent dehydration. Do not consume salt tablets as these will promote dehydration. Instead, use sports drinks or lightly salt your food to meet your sodium requirements after excessive sweating.

Drink no more than 1 cup of water every twenty minutes. You can also weight yourself before and after you exercise to get a sense of how much fluid you typically lose. One pound is equivalent to approximately 24 ounces of fluid.

Effectiveness of sports drinks

Sports drinks are good for maintaining performance during an exercise activity as the body undergoes active stress and begins losing nutrients and H2O. How long of an activity? A lot of factors can come into play (altitude, temperature, etc.) but two main factors to consider are duration and intensity. A 60 min technique training vs a full-day training are drastically different levels of exercise. The 60 min training can get by on water while a whole day would benefit to replenish the lost nutrients the body requires to perform.

To determine for yourself, a good rule of thumb is anything  60 mins or less of continuous moderate exercise, water should be suffice. Going beyond an hour when start a good sweat, reaching for that flavored H2O with the added goodness might not be a bad idea if your intention is maintain the current level of performance.

Lastly, it is always a good idea to hydrate throughout the day. If you wait til your body tells you to drink water (or until your pee is yellow), you are dehydrated and lost the battle of maintaining constant hydration. And if you plan on exercising, by sure to begin drinking water about 2hrs before your planned activity, that way you enter your activity already hydrated and you don’t have to make your body work harder in an area it doesn’t need to.

Create your own drinking routine

Creating a fluid intake plan is helpful to ensure proper hydration. Make sure to practice this routine during workouts and not the day of the event. Do not try new sport drinks or juices the day of the event as you may find that they do not agree with you.

Why train in perfect form?

Mainly, because it teaches you the automation of doing things right. What may feel easy and comfortable for you today, might – on the long term – make you develop some bad training habits. And while your body will be able to sustain and correct the impact to a certain degree, this will not come without a price. You can develop a lot of bad postures and movement restrictions over time.

So, let’s see a short list of some of the most common training mistakes that traceurs make when they train.

The top bad training habits

Landing precisions with the tips of you feet outwards – This will make the outer leg muscles develop better, while your inner thigh muscles will remain largely untrained. It will be extremely hard to counterbalance this deficit later. So, you should always try and land with your tips straight.

Landing precisions with the feet wide apart – While this may help you better balance yourself in certain situations, this is bad form because you put a lot of strain on your knees and do not dissipate the impact throughout all the leg muscles. Always land with your legs together; perfect form would be to land with the balls of your feet touching each other.

Hunching your back when performing vaults – I have actually seen a lot of people do this and I must say, I do not understand why. Whenever you are performing a vault, or any other Parkour move, your back needs to be straight and in a relatively upper position. This also helps you keep your space orientation and balance.

Making small steps when approaching the obstacle – You run fast, reach the ideal speed, and then you start tiptoeing and decreasing your speed as you reach the obstacle. This will make you lose momentum and lose your focus. A good technique is to always start running slowly and increase your speed as you reach the wall, so when you engage the obstacle you have the optimal speed.

Putting the hands on the obstacle, and then performing the vault – When doing a Lazy, a Kong or even a Pop-vault, I have seen a lot of newbie practitioners puting their hands on the obstacle then popping off. While this may be good for learning the movement, in the first day, this is not what you want to do in your everyday trainings. Because you lose speed and power. When you touch the obstacle your feet need to be off the ground and ready to overpass the obstacle. So you run, you jump and then place your hands on the obstacle for control.

Absorbing the impact with your heels then rolling – I have seen a few practitioners that jump, land absobing all the shock in their heels and then rolling just for the artistic impression. Rolling should be done to take the strain off your legs. When you land keep your body slightly forward and try to fall into a ball, and roll. There is no point in rolling if you heels hit the ground… the shock will already be absorbed by your knees.

Landing on the heels – This is closely related to the previous mistake and it’s about the way traceurs land. You should never land on your heels… EVER. Every movement is landed on the tips, and this should be trained from the first day. All the shock that goes into the heels is transferred directly to the ankles and knees without being attenuated.

If you can avoid these basic mistakes you are well on your way in becoming a healthy and good traceur. Remember that form is something that needs to be taught; it is not natural. So try to work on it as soon as possible to ensure you will have the correct form when performing your Parkour movements and general training.

Train safe!

There are a lot of training methods in Parkour during the day, however, many of the movements you do in daytime need to be adapted when you cannot see very well. So, let’s see a few of the best techniques to improve your night training methods:

Train on small ledges

One of my favorite ways to train during the night is by doing short courses or precisions on small ledges. This gives me the opportunity to control the movements and perfect the way I land. If you want to go the extra mile, you can also add variations to this type of training and do the course with your back, or precision in reverse. This will definitely teach you how to jump and land perfectly in your regular trainings.

Don’t focus on sight

One of the most important things to remember is that you need to work on your body coordination by utilizing your other senses. You, most probably, will not be able to distinguish anything, so trying to focus on seeing will only keep you distracted from your training and goals. Remember the distances and try to keep track of where you are in your surroundings. Close your eyes if you have to.

Avoid the noise

This probably means both trying to refrain from listening to music and from training in large groups. Night training requires a lot of concentration to get right, so avoid distractions as much as possible. Training alone is a good idea, or in a group of maximum 3 people. More than this will most probably ruin the whole purpose of what you are trying to achieve.

If you can train at night, then training during the day will become much easier and you will be able to perform movements with more precision and learn softer landings. My guess is that you can improve up to 30% your landing techniques and flow by training more often in the night. It is not an exact number, but I have seen a lot of improvements in my own evolution.

Just because the sun sets, does not mean you need to stop.

Like everything else, usefulness of a movement is achieved through projection, work and precise goals. So if your training is only targeted to aesthetics and speed, you will never be able to be usefull. You might be able to look good, but not to actually use your abilities. In order to be used for something useful, your Parkour training should be done in a single mind set: Usefulness.

What are the most common situations you meet in everyday life? Think about it. Tripping over a raised ledge, slipping on wet surfaces, car accidents, fires, being trapped in a confined space (elevator?). What would you do? What would your first reaction be? Parkour? I doubt it.

Over 95% of the practitioners are extraordinary athletes and can get out of a lot of dangerous situations in their trainings, but Parkour is not their first choice in risk situations. They freeze like everybody else and they tend to panic like normal people. Even if it´s normal, it should not be… at least not for a traceur.

I have always been an adept of the usefullness of Parkour. You might try to perfect or to invent a faster way to move in an enviroment, but you also need to put it to good use. To real use! So, let’s try some exercises that can help you train that practical side of Parkour:

Projection

When you start your training, try to imagine a hypothetical situation in which you are in physical danger. A car is speeding towards you, you slip on a wet surface, trip on a ledge or you are trapped in a confined space. This is called projection and it helps you determine how your body and mind will react in a real situation. Once you have achieved that state of anxiety go to the next step.

Work

Try to identify 3 different ways in which you need to react in order to escape form the situation unharmed. Train them all. It is very important to have redundancy and variation in your movements, mainly because it help you to make swift decisions on the spot and gives you the possibility to pick the safest one.

Precise goal

Do not stop your training until you have mastered all of the three methods of overcoming the obstacle or situation in your path. Once you are done, asses the efficiency of each one and choose the movement that best suits your way to move and technique. All you have to do at this point is get the chance to use it.

Try to choose the most casual situations you encounter to train first. This will help you see the usefulness of the way you train and get you out of a lot of bad situations.

We are not going to talk about urban Parkour training here. No huge cat-leap fantasies for the frazzled mind or sliding through and under obstacles in the city. (Sorry to disappoint.) Let´s talk about nature for a change. We train in the city so much, that we forget that the Parkour discipline started thousands of years ago, in the woods. And it´s important to remember that.

Forests, like other wild settings, stimulate our senses in more subtle but evolutionarily familiar ways than our typical modern environments. Sounds in nature are quieter but more subtly layered. Our sight is more expansive. Our sense of touch, finer. Our smell, more acute. Surrounded by nature, our perception reorients to its default setting. So as we start going out in nature we go back more and more to our natural state of awareness and perception.

This is where you can practice your body’s natural inclination to move. Out in the outdoor environment where the obstacles are not that well aligned and the order of things is ruled by chaos. This is where Parkour becomes movement and not just sport.

The nature theory

E.O. Wilson and his theory of biophilia, says that humans have an innate, biologically determined need for nature. Wilson’s theory has been around for years, but the concept is getting a lot of attention lately. And I want to highlight this for good reason.

Richard Louv, noted journalist and author of a book called Last Child in the Woods, said an increasing number of child psychologists and education experts note that regular time in nature is vital for children’s cognitive and emotional development in addition to their physical wellness.

I believe that this requirement for nature isn’t very cultivated in modern lifestyle and training methods. But it’s allegedly in our biological blueprints. Nature remains the default setting for our senses, our concentration skills and physical backdrop. So we should try to train it and make it part of our tranings and life.

How to train Parkour in nature?

This is an easy question to ask. It’s not that different than training Parkour in the city, only the environment changes slightly. Here is a perfect example of such a training:

Because the surroundings change you need to adapt faster and you learn to make decisions on the spot. That is why training Parkour in nature is a great way to improve your flow and complement your regular training. If you add the emotional benefits that nature bring into your training it is really a shame not everybody is doing it.

So next time, go wild!

Press-Ups – This workout trains the triceps and the pecs. It’s the perfect exercise as both a warm-up exercise and strength building routine.

Clap Press-ups - Adds explosiveness to the regular Press-Ups movement. This trains your muscles to react faster. Remember to return to the same position. Don’t arch your back when doing this, it’s better to do less repetitions than a lot of bad ones.

Feet Up Press-ups – This exercise works the biceps. You can do them rapidly to improve your explosive strength or slowly to improve your resistance.

The V-Sit – It is a perfect workout for your core/abs. It means that it works all the muscles necessary to have a perfect stance when training in Parkour. This should be done until exhaustion.

Sit-ups – Pure core muscles training. Place your feet under a couch to have a better anchor to the floor.

Leg lift sit-ups – Abs exercise. Maintain your feet up and static. Move only your upper body. The stance is more  important than the number of repetitions.

Parkour stretch (Cobra) – Works the arms and back. This is very good as a last exercise to warm-down after you finished all the other routines.

Handstand push-ups – This develops your upper body strength and balance. This exercise can also be done separately from the previously described routine, as an individual exercise.

If you would like to know more about conditioning techniques you can look at my blog posts about upper body conditioning and lower body conditioning. These can be done outside and will help you improve your strength and speed.