I’ve been pretty depressed the last few days. I think what happens is that I come back from these trips (quite a bit I haven’t been blogging about, sorry!) to a larger workload than when I left, and I usually reserve the day or two afterward for resting and recovering which lives quite a lot I have to catch up on. The last few days all this random crap weighed down on me and I started procrastinating and sleeping a lot, which just makes everything worse

Well tonight I simply could not rest my mind at all, it was just crazy full of little things I had to get to and take care of. I hadn’t been training the past few days so I just decided to go out to Cowen and see if I could calm down my head. Well that didn’t work at all. There were some annoying drunk people there and I was very anxious about everything I tried. I couldn’t land the simplest precisions well, and it was bugging me so much and making it worse.

I needed a change of scene and a fresh perspective so I started walking till I found something else. I ended up on the other side of the park where some simple wooden posts were lined up. The posts were not far apart so I trained some simple falling to hands stuff in between them. Like the precisions earlier I was trying to be as precise as I could, but the difference here was that I took as much time as I could (probably 5 or so minutes to traverse 6 posts). I focused all of my attention to how my body wanted naturally to move, which foot I favored, how I breathed, amount of impact, etc.

It was very refreshing and calming, I probably was out on those posts for a good two hours or so. More importantly though I think I figured out why my knee has been hurting, why my right leg is so weak, what I need to focus my stretching on, and four or five different movement types for that method of traversing It all just had to do with paying better attention to my body and listening to what was natural for it (which tells you how to better challenge it as well).

Parkour is a huge part of my life and I’m finding that if I don’t train in it regularly (no matter what other related important stuff I’m working on), my life just kinda…sucks. Take Bobby McFerrin’s advice and don’t worry so much, just be happy. That and:

If I could give only one piece of advice to someone in order for them to stay in shape, to be a well-rounded person, or to keep their mind sharp, it would be to challenge themselves to learn something new every single day.

This is how our mind and body are meant to work in my opinion. We are by nature inquisitive animals with a great power of adaptability. The more you challenge yourself to do something difficult, the easier it becomes and the better you get at it. The more you stick to doing the things that are easy, the less adaptable and active you become.

Parkour

We already do this in our parkour training (if you don’t I highly suggest starting). Part of what makes parkour so fun and challenging is that there are an infinite amount of new things to learn by pulling your inspiration from the obstacles in the world around us. But, you can still get stuck into habits of familiar movements. Training a thousand lazy vaults in a row will definitely make you better at that movement, but training a thousand different ways to do lazy vaults on a thousand different obstacles will make you a master of that movement (not to mention all the movements that come from it or rely on it). Change the angle, the speed, the foot placement, the hand placement, the height, the entrance, the exit…experiment, break the rules, have fun!

Crosstraining

And why stop at just parkour? Parkour is meant to increase your capacity for movement in your environment. There are a lot of different ways to move and movement arts dedicated to them. Try rock climbing, slacklining, capoeira, martial arts, gymnastics, yoga, etc. If it is challenging and hard, give it a try and see if you like it! Some aspect of it (however small) will most definitely find its way into your parkour practice and give you some new insight or a better way to answer a challenge.

As corny as it sounds, if you train the same type of thing all the time then you are training yourself into a box. And parkour is definitely not about thinking and moving in the box. Learn something new every day, and have fun with it

I was wrong again

When jamming there Thursday, Alex started experimenting over there, and we ended up training close to an hour straight on some of the most challenging and fun climbing and parkour lines I have ever done. What I once thought was impossible is actually really easy with the right move, and once you get into the hallway we came up with some great challenges. For instance the whole area is a sequence of difficult stemming transitions, and we came up with the idea that you had to flick a light switch off at the end of the hallway. After getting that one, we found another switch, and decided to work until we could get both. After a great deal of crazy experimentation, we got both, and decided to up the challenge so that you could only turn off the switches with your hands (previously we just tapped them with our feet while stemming).

Through a series of simple experimentations and challenges we ended up with a balance line to a lieback transition, to a stem move, to a superman stem challenge, back down the hallway staying off of the floor (more stemming), to some tricky superman (extended) transitions. Hard to describe but a hell of a lot of fun! <- means="" >

Creativity and Exploration

One of the greatest things I’ve found about parkour is that the possiblities truly are endless. There are areas I have trained at almost every day, for two years, that I still find new and interesting challenges hidden in to this day. Forcing your mind to learn new patterns of movement every day is an amazing way to keep yourself sharp, physically as well as mentally.

I have noticed in myself as well as in others, though, that this ability to explore old familiar areas and still find new challenges isn’t always there. A lot of traceurs tend to look at an area seeking things that they already know how to do (I’ve been guilty of this myself many times), and just want to try bigger versions of. When in this frame of mind you can hear people describe slanted railings or strange obstacles as “not good” for parkour, when in reality they can foster some of the most incredibly difficult challenges with a little creativity applied. Just training bigger and bigger vaults will get you nowhere with parkour, the devil is in the details. If you want to actually be able to “use” parkour one day, it most likely won’t be you choosing which obstacles you face, you need complete mastery over any possible environment. This means experimenting and learning something new every day, to truly train for adaptability.

Teaching Creativity?

This has led to a new teaching idea for the Puget Sound Community School’s parkour class starting soon. Rather than taking the time to travel to new locations that are “good for parkour,” I’d like to foster creativity in the kids and stay at a single area for the whole class. Exhausting that area’s possiblities to the point of ridiculousness. Everyone will be encouraged to come up with their own challenges, and steps will be made to complete each challenge every class day. Sharing their personal challenges with others and helping them to achieve those challenges will hopefully inspire more teamwork and problem solving.

This is how to make leaders and good instructors I believe (but don’t tell them that). I found myself last year not spending that much time teaching actual techniques, most of my time instead was spent coming up with new challenges for the students and helping them overcome those crazy things. I’m not all that sure how I’m going to pitch this class or even run it, but PSCS has a way of making it all come together as long as there is passion behind it.

I was trying to find nice quote from someone wiser than I to start this article off, but then I came across this little gem:

/*****When talking about the Urban Ninja video*****/
…God I hate that guy, think his name is socal ninja or something, real jerk. I don’t actually think his stuff is very good, his form looks so tense and jerky to me…

Wow, pretty crazy right? Being judgmental enough about someone you haven’t ever talked to or met to actually say you hate them, who could have said that?

Oh yeah. I said that a year and a half ago. And you know what? I was utterly wrong. I’ve now worked with Xin twice: once on the K-Swiss spot (he doubled me and Levi on some parts that never got in), and once on the Taurus World Stunt Awards.

He’s actually a really nice and fun guy. He went out his way a few times to make Janine and I feel welcomed and at home while over there and I respect him greatly for that. You know why I had such a strong dislike for him before I had even ever talked to him?

Why would I say that?

I thought his video was supposed to be a parkour video and I had been conditioned to not like parkour videos with flips in them (except for David Belle’s videos of course). Pretty stupid reason, eh? Especially since his video isn’t even meant by him to be considered a parkour or freerunning video, it’s an urban ninja video. Conditioned is a strong word and may not be what I’m looking for, but basically I was in a community with an unspoken tradition of placing freerunners a rung below traceurs. And I’m not just speaking about videos, freerunners in general were looked down upon by a large group of traceurs a few years ago and that view spread everywhere they had influence.

For example, I was talking to Jesse on the ride from the airport and he mentioned not liking Xin at first as well “for the basic parkour reasons.” That statement really stuck with me and made me wonder why in the world would parkour ever make someone not like someone else? In my history with parkour it has always opened doors to meeting new amazing people, it has never closed any. That statement doesn’t make any sense to me anymore, but here is the general theory of how it came about:

Some Parkour History

Parkour in France was developed with the idea of it being a useful thing. This is something that changes the way people think about obstacles and trains their bodies to be able to efficiently overcome anything in their path. For example, when David Belle was starting to form parkour he used to imagine his family in trouble somewhere he could see, and he would try to find the fastest way to get there using just his own body. When parkour started to drift away from France, however, mistranslations and misinformation spread with it and a lot of people just used DB’s videos to define parkour for them. You simply can’t understand the roots of parkour without being there in person. A video will never suffice, and most (if not all) videos are never even designed to.

This led to a lot of kids in the UK mainly doing large flips and extreme movements in the presence of the news media and calling it parkour. A lot of people then freaked out about this, and rightly so, because they feared that parkour would turn into a collection of extreme tricks/stunts and lose its origins in being a useful and absolutely amazing thing (I’m paraphrasing here, some day I’ll write an article about why I love parkour so much). So the term “freerunning” was adapted from Sebastien Foucan’s original meaning to become this “other thing,” and many in the community started working to make the two seem as separate as possible.

But here is where my greatest problem with the global parkour community began. Instead of putting their energy into creating and promoting positive information about parkour such as writing articles, teaching classes, creating definitions (because DB definitely wasn’t doing it at that time), the majority of people took the easy route and started to simply bitch at people who put flips in their videos, using freerunning as if it were an insult (implying that they didn’t understand what parkour was). Not that any of it is DB’s fault, I think he simply never wanted to become this huge global ambassador for parkour and it spread away from him too fast.

Let’s Fix It

But you know what? It’s time to move on. There are sooo many knowledgeable traceurs in the world today, the only people that get the two confused anymore are those just starting out and the media on occasion (and even that is getting a lot better). And the point is that no matter their differences, parkour and freerunning are both incredibly good for you mentally and physically. Whether you train for efficiency or creativity, the fact is that you are out moving your body and exercising your mind. Repetition training, conditioning, expanding our “vision,” experimenting, helping others learn, playing, thinking, teaching, running, jumping, etc… If you are passionate, this is what you do to become better than what you are. In the end it’s the love of jumping around and seeing/experiencing the world so differently that we all share, and it is what makes the community so great. Whether you are a traceur or a freerunner, your training is quite similar to my own and I would to love to come train with you and see what you have found.

If I had judged Skynative and PD with my old eyes of anti-freerunning, I might have missed out on getting to know two of the nicest and most considerate individuals I have ever met. I am being totally serious, go find a way to meet these two people right now and shake their hands.

There are still a lot of people out there, though, who share the old – almost draconian – parkour politics of exclusion and to them I simply say: “My friends, go outside and play.”

I think it’s important to draw the lines and have definitions, but I shudder whenever anyone uses parkour to act negatively to another human being. As long as people understand the roots of parkour and where it came from, how they personally train and what they choose to put in their artistic creations is totally up to them, as it should be. In the end it’s the responsibility of each individual to be able to describe what they are doing, but we should provide resources for them to learn rather than punish on a one-by-one basis.

Think I found some good advice for roll training. First of all, if it doesn’t hurt than move to something harder, when it doesn’t hurt on concrete that means you are doing something right. To improve the roll in general and get more speed out of it, you have to make it smaller and curl more into a ball. I find myself extending my body more with the more momentum I have coming into it, and that tends to flatten it out and make it slower. Normally for low jumps into rolls I would land with my legs split to enter into the roll easier. But now, to avoid flattening out I’m trying to land all high momentum rolls two-footed while leaning forward and pushing/jumping directly into a tight roll. This is closer to how David Belle does his and I’m making some good progress.

Progression with control does come not quickly. If a movement is difficult, break it down into simpler steps. If a movement is too big, find a way or a place that makes it smaller. That is how you progress safely, one step at a time.

It’s nice to see that even really amazing traceurs follow the same idea in their training even when they are doing things that still scare the shit out of me (kongs to railing precisions). Thanks DC from Team Traceur!

• It’s more natural. Human beings are not adapted to running on flat hard surfaces for long periods of time, it’s really hard on your feet. We have shoes that attempt to fix that issue with padding, but shoes aren’t perfect and many may in fact be making the situation worse.
• It’s good for your ankles. Running on varied terrain increased your ankle strength and responsiveness since you are constantly adjusting to different push off angles and different landings.
• It improves balance. For the same reasons that it strengthens your ankles, running on varied terrain improves your balance, especially if you also run on curbs and tree roots along the way.
• It’s simply more fun. In my experience, more possibilities and more challenges means more fun. I had a great time today jumping over tree roots, bouncing off trees, hopping over the sidewalks, etc…

Give it a try!