Some More Parkour Training Methods
As well as experimenting with fluidity training recently, I’ve been trying to mix up conditioning sessions to be a bit more interesting as well. Gauntlets are one great way to do this (an example of the new UW one is coming), but we’ve also started to mix in creativity challenges with the conditioning exercises and it’s been a lot of fun.
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)
As much as I love teaching and jamming with new traceurs, it’s still a hell of a lot fun to meet up with old friends and go redefine what’s possible.
And that’s what we did today for a very long session at UW. Rafe and Dane came down from Bham, as well as Alex, Morgan, and Daetan coming out to train as well. Most of it was me showing them the challenges of my new balance line, but we also spent a lot of time on several year old problems I had almost forgotten about, plus a ton of new stuff that I would probably never decide to try on my own.
All in all another great day, and I got some great new things to start working on 
When there aren’t any immediate jobs on the horizon it tends gives me the peace of the mind to be able to train my ass off basically (I always worry about injuring myself right before going on a gig, the #1 thing you do not do as a stunt guy). Which is great, as long as I can pay the rent This weekend consisted of a crazy gym jam, followed by climbing in the rain at Larrabee, and a very sore body.
The Whole World Shall do Parkour
Today at Gasworks was nuts! I had some friends up from Oregon, and the group we had kept getting bigger and bigger. I showed around like ten beginners, some from the site and some just random people. Was in teacher mode for most all of the jam, bt I didn’t mind. All and all I just met and trained with some awesome people. The funny thing was that we weren’t the only ones climbing around on random stuff today. Everyone was! Almost every single person there and their kids were clambering around everywhere. I think partly from our influence 
Saw the same thing even when we went to UW later on, maybe everyone is just enjoying the last days of summer.
I had a great day at Stone Gardens today, climbing until I was thoroughly trashed. I missed my stop on the way back and ended up walking through UW on the way home. I of course took an interesting way back with some wall passes and balancing work like normal, but a great thing happened that inspired me to spend an additional hour or two on a tricky balance problem in the dark.
I had an excellent day of training a few days ago at the Thursday UW jam. There is an area where I used to some balance challenges next to a hallway somewhere over on south campus. I had always glanced over to the hallway looking for possibilities but I always figured it was rather bland and there wasn’t much there.
I just had some of the best two training days I’ve had in months. What started as just me showing around two cool traceurs from Eastern Washington to our favorite spots, turned into two crazy days of conditioning and intense mental challenges.
Had an awesome day out today. Took a long bike ride to pick up something hilarious I’ll show tomorrow, and then went out for a great day of climbing with Jeremy at Stone Gardens.
Haven’t been climbing for awhile! I’m going to be really sore tomorrow
I also managed a full bike ride back home from Ballard, it’s not that far but usually I don’t take the mountain bike long distances because it’s incredibly heavy.
That is all.
Had a great day training today (well yesterday, man it’s late). Have found an incredibly difficult (but scalable) floor-is-lava type challenge that covers quite a distance at UW. It’s mainly a lot of balance challenges with difficult precisions and really draining climbing traversals thrown in.
Trying to walk on a railing for a fair distance after your whole body is shaking from a really difficult climb is really fun! I can’t wait for the day where I can take this whole line without slipping or falling, it’s an amazing challenge.
The route (so far) goes down the bike racks south of Red Square, across the bollards to the long railings. Precision across to avoid the tree, balance all the down, precision back, precision to the smaller railing (haven’t tried this one yet). Traverse across the arch to the inside of the hallway, out through the window, across the next arch (really hard), up onto the curved railing, precision to handrail (it works using one foot, but it’s shaky), precision onto the next railing (not perpendicular, haven’t tried yet), walk down, precision across. Leap to bench (or follow bark to bollard challenge), run through the grass, leap over the concrete, cat leap to the bicycle containers, get to the railing, quadrupedal it’s length avoiding foliage, leap to parking stop, then to the bark, then to the railings, more precisions and walks down (try some duck walks), get to the concrete, standing jump the gap (I one-foot it). Follow the fence around, traverse the side of the building, walk the rail, jump to the concrete edge, standing cat, vault over, and jog to the slanted wall (phew!).
From there I’m not sure where to go but you could follow the white lines wherever, or if you weren’t destroyed yet you could traverse in cat position down the wall, do the cat to cat, and traverse as far as you can to the road.
Oh and I think ending each session with some light barefoot training and stretching is really helpful, thanks for the idea Nathan!
