Excellent job Craig.

Rather excellent video from my friends in Tokyo by Kaspar Astrup Schröder. Makes me want to go back! See http://pktk.jp for more. Thanks Brian!

Not all that bad! They hit on the newish http://www.parkour-online.com/, Blane’s excellent blog, and a bunch of the stuff I’ve been doing including the RED video shoots with NuRD Productions and the classes we’ve started to teach through the nonprofit Pacific Northwest Parkour Association with the whole thing illustrated through pictures pulled from my Flickr and video from my Youtube! (enough linkage for ya?)

So if you came here through AOTS, welcome to the blog and I hope you enjoy it or it helps in your training It needs some cleaning and re-purposing but I still dig it.

Train hard,
-”One of the best known traceurs in the world” hahaha…

A 20-30 minute portion of this warmup I believe was inspired by my inability to hold that sitting pose Forrest pushes people into much at all in the previous days warmup Also the reason I was up front and center…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeMEgqTFRk8

Watch the control Stephane and Kazuma are demonstrating here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xw24SaAEg

Wow. I was right there in the bandana and black shirt, and I don’t even remember how rock solid Kazuma’s balance is. That’s ridiculous.

Oh BTW, that jump to the railing he tests first has a 10ft drop on the other side…hence the spotters.

Cheers to Parkour Generations, Julie Angel, and Parkour Horizons for these!

It was then when a miracle was performed – the likes of which have never been seen at a Parkour event since the beginning of time. Not only did (almost) everyone get in bed before Midnight, but everyone was up by 6:30, and ready to go by 7:30. That’s right. 7:30. In the morning. AM. Ante Meridiem. Janine and Zac got up a bit early to make about sixty banana filled pancakes to serve to people as they woke up, and then the whole group of 25+ people got out the door and to the train station earlier than scheduled. Everyone split into two at the World Trade subway station, with one group of traceurs navigating their way through Central Park, and another exploring Roosevelt Island.

Zac’s writeup of PKNY is up on APK, his video and my thoughts after the gap.

First of all if you didn’t notice, Jesse’s backyard is awesome. And him and his parents hosting everyone with an included barbecue was incredible.

Secondly, Zac pretty much covered everything except the reason we got kicked out of Chinatown: “It’s not an exercise park, it’s a children’s park.” And he missed the conditioning group with Jesse in Central Park (before the night conditioning session) which was awesome, nuff said.

Awhile ago (edit: 2 years) in the heyday of parkour.net there used to be some sort of bias against “flow” or training directly for fluidity. Whenever some new person would talk about trying to gain more fluidity in their movements or how cool something looks because of its flow, we would always say something along the lines of “Fluidity comes as a byproduct of training for parkour, it’s not the end goal.”

Too Strict?

And I can totally see why that seemed important to say, it was part of the never-ending battle to move parkour back to its origins of being a useful discipline, rather than just something that looks cool. But what’s wrong with training for fluidity directly? (if you are not already making that original wrong assumption)

In order for something to look effortless when it really isn’t (fluidity), it takes a complete understanding of all of the components of that movement. Track stars and gymnasts make horrendously difficult things look easy because they’ve drilled every step and every tiny movement into their muscles relentlously. Attaining perfect fluidity in a movement takes great control, strength, agility, and grace.

Fluidity Training

I think there are many different paths to achieve those qualities, and many different goals that will lead to the same end product. And again, as long you understand where parkour comes from and why, I always say train however you like. I just had a great night of fluidity training moving through trees, which is what got me started on this whole line of thought. It was an exploration of different pathways through and around all of the limbs, with the focus on making it as fluid and as simple as it could be. It felt great! And progression came very obviously, unlike what happens with straight repetition training a lot of the time.

An Example

I think there are a few points in this video that do a pretty great job of explaining what I’m referring to, that of the original Yamakasi. And watch how amazingly adaptive and precise they are!

Oh and on another note, I’m 21 years old today

There are so many important undertones in this video, it’s beautiful.

But he needs your vote, check out the video, register and vote at:
http://www.g4tv.com/ninjawarrior/contest_video.aspx?ninjawarriorentry_key=11

It took me approximately 3 minutes (minus the time seeing the cool video), how long did it take you? Voting ends after this weekend so get that in!

Stefan drew 100 of these daily monsters and posted them to his blog originally to bring more attention to his design studio 344. Over time, it became more and more interactive with people submitting stories about each monster and eventually creating their own through his open source inkblot project. An awesome project from an amazing artist if you ask me.

But he didn’t stop at 100, and he still posts and encourages interaction from his readers. This is one of my favorites, number 108. Enjoy!

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!