Great night of training and exploration today. I was all by myself but had lots of time to explore all around Northeastern and Wentworth Universities. Well, not all around since there is always a ton of stuff that you miss, but I covered some good distance and am definitely sore now. Here are my favorites of the night:
Went for some training tonight next to the airport which was fun with all the planes flying 50ft over us, but was very cold when it started snowing.
Yesterday was awesome though. I went to the beach when the sun was actually outside (it goes down at 5pm right now), and did a bunch of running and tricking. The hardest was when I decided to run across to Raccoon Island a short distance away at low tide. It wouldn’t normally be too challenging of a run, but I was attempting to not get stuck in the sand as the water was at about an inch deep in random places. So I would run as quickly and lightly as I could and try to react as fast as possible to sinking spots to avoid getting sucked in. It ended up being a tremendous workout for my ankles and I’m definitely feeling it today.
I also worked on precision back layouts, long distance sideflips, and high momentum speedy frontflips. I feel like I have a great sense of where I am in the air during the trick, but my landings still suck because I don’t train them very often with flips. Two solitary and close together railings also occupied quite a bit of my time as I had trouble finding the fastest way over both without falling off of the seawall. It doesn’t mean much without a picture but I eventually was able to dive over the first railing and kong the second one, which was quite the accomplishment for me and was a good way to end the days training (also ran out of light again).
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.”
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)
Had a great training session today even though I was going light on my wrist and ankle which still feel a bit tender. I worked on a lot of balance and precisions but also experimented with a bunch of random one armed and one legged things. The greatest accomplishments were a controlled one armed turn vault and a strange no armed underbar…
Pretty fun day in all, definitely managed to still get a full workout even with limited capability.
Today was a pretty killer day. I hadn’t been out for awhile to train so when I went out today I was a bit hesitant about jumping back in right away. It didn’t take me long to realize though that my physical abilities were all still the same, it was just my mind holding me back.
So for the rest of the day I mainly limited my practice to railing precisions, balance, and max distance precision jumps from standing. The three things that my mind tried to stop me from doing. I went to UW, Gasworks, and a playground in Fremont. It took almost the whole day but I feel great, my railing precisions are getting better and better and I’m up to eight of my own feet. My balance is fine walking on a rail forwards and backwards, fairly good at turning around, and pretty solid at standing sideways. My standing jump is a bit farther than ten of my own feet, and my landings are so much more controlled and relaxed now. I used to injure my ankles very easily for precision jumps because I would tense them up too much.
All and all a very worthwhile day! My legs will definitely be feeling it tomorrow.
Parkour Training - One Step at a Time
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!
