Winter couch training

I had planned to talk about appropriate outfits to fight the bitter cold of winter, but instead it has been uncommonly cold and gray, courtesy of global warming. To me, this makes it even harder to motivate to go and train, and so I end up watching Youtube videos to regain some inspiration.

Thankfully, there is actually quite a lot of useful videos to watch: American Parkour tutorials (under Playlists, check the Parkour guides), the Demon Drills and Hawaii Parkour's drill series. There's also this ridiculous compilation of strength exercises, a nice demo of exercises designed by Ido Portal (who also makes insane QM drills) and many many videos from other sources.

Then there's also the videos that just motivate you to go out even in the rain, and make you want to train more and have fun moving. Happy viewing and see you soon back outside!

Plyo Monkeys

Here's a quick link to Hawaii PK's new exercise video on Plyo Monkeys. The exercise is much harder than it looks when Ozzi does it, as usual (check also his push-up variations video in the Conditioning Videos section of the website).

We will definitely add this to our regular exercise diet!

Posture

An often ignored element of parkour training is to improve our general posture. Most of us lie somewhere close to the left side man on the picture, thanks to poor sitting habits and a desk & computer job. Without going to the excesses of the right side man (showing the equally bad military posture), we can stand (and sit) much better. Signs of a good posture are: 1) a straight spine; 2) forward-engaged hips; 3) shoulders rotated back. It should make you feel slightly taller, show off your muscular chest and perhaps seem a little constipated until you learn to relax into the posture.

To switch from lounging to straight posture, start with rotating your pelvis forward onto your hips. Your lower back will naturally straighten (and then arch back if you go too far). Then pull your head up, straightening your upper back, and finish with rotating your shoulders up, back and then down to open your chest. Take a deep breath, and try to relax without moving..

With a better posture, you can breathe better (your thorax is open, making it easier to fill your lungs with air), lower the amount of torsion on your spine (and associated back pain), maintain a strong torso when moving in parkour, and most importantly improve your looks!!

Parkour Visions Summit 2011

Like in many places in the US, the traceurs in Seattle organize a big Parkour gathering every year, and now for a couple of years they have tried to make it more of an organized sports meeting than an oversized jam session. From this year's, here a couple of interesting-looking videos:

• A short discussion on injury prevention and healing
  
• A lengthy presentation of Ukemi for Parkour, with many examples and demonstrations.
  

There's also a few videos of some of the best traceurs out there completing various challenges; it's quite interesting to compare their styles and methods on the same routes and obstacles.

And remember if you ever travel to Seattle, go and visit Parkour Visions!

Rollin'

So, you've done a bit of training, and now your muscles are SORE. Do not despair, as there is a secret technique to make them happy again: the Foam Roller. The foam roller is a very, very simple piece of equipment, but an extremely effective one. Where to get one? on the internet, of course, and maybe at the local sports store. Choose the high density kind, which will hold longer. How to use it? put the roller on the ground, put the sore limb on top, and then roll gently back and forth while putting the weight of your body into it. Make sure you roll the entire muscle: if the front of your quadriceps, (close to the knee) is in pain, then you must roll the entire thing all the way to your hip to make the entire muscle relax. If you're not sure about this, have a look at an anatomy atlas, it helps figure out how it's all put together!

Jumping and landing

Jumping and landing is the first building block of Parkour training. Good landing technique is the key to safety, protecting your joints and controlling of your movements. It is the first thing you need to learn, and yet one of the hardest to truly master.

Here's the basic idea: your body is a spring. Your only point of contact with the ground are the balls of your feet (the widest part, between the toes and the arch), everything else is springs, tensing and releasing in the jump and coiling back in the landing. Your ankles, knees and hips all work together against your mortal enemy, gravity. To improve your landing form (and your jumping form as a side effect), you must understand what each of these can and should do, and what they cannot.

The ankle controls the angle with which you reach the ground, protecting your heel from impact. It has a limited range, and is not very strong, thus you need to train it carefully and often. Upon landing, you will need to extend the ankle in order to reach to the ground with your toes before the weight of your body comes down toward it, and resist its inflection as the first step of absorbing momentum.

The knee is in the middle of the leg, and a major part of the coil, but not the driving part of the spring. The bending at the hips is what brings power to the jump and absorbs momentum on landings. The knee mostly provide a way to keep the lower leg straight and stable, but one can easily hurt it with impact (from the heels hitting the ground), over-bending (when it goes forward of your toes, bearing your body's weight and momentum) and twisting (if landing with any sideways momentum). Like the ankle, the knee can help resist the pull of gravity if the legs are mostly extended (not locked, though!), reaching toward the ground upon landing, and ready to slowly coil back in. But like the ankle, it is not strong enough to absorb fully the impact of the fall.

The hips are at the middle of the whole body, close to the center of gravity. They give power to the jump through tightening of the glut-hamstring chain (back muscle of the upper legs and butt, much stronger than the quadriceps in front), and slow the landing with a progressive release of the same muscle (really "fighting back" gravity). They also provide the needed adjustments to balance the weight of your body and reduce its load on the legs. This joint is not used enough in daily life, and needs some work to get stronger and reach a good range of motion.

Here's a few simple exercises that will be (hopefully) beneficial to this ankle-knee-hip chain. You can work on them often, however remember to warm up the joints first.

Cat paw walking: walk without touching your heels to the ground, trying to be a silent as possible. Explore different paces, all the way to light running.

Squats: really focus on leading with the butt, sinking down and pulling back up. And keep those knees always, always behind your toes. Do 20 of those every morning!

Squatting low: rather than sitting on the ground or your couch, squat as low as you can and relax into that position. You can read a book, watch tv, play video games... maintaining that position a bit longer every day will help improve your hip flexibility and increase your range of motion. Especially important for men!

The Natural Method

One of the main foundations of Parkour is the Natural Method of Georges Hébert ("Méthode naturelle d'éducation physique, virile et morale"), which Raymond Belle followed and passed on to his son, David Belle.

As a fusilier marin (~ French Marines), Georges Hébert traveled the world at the beginning of the 20th century and marveled at the simple physical fitness of primitive peoples. He soon started to incorporate his observations into a physical education method which he used to train sailors, children, Olympic athletes and even women.

His method focused on basic, practical movements: walking, running, jumping, climbing, swimming, lifting, throwing and defending. He invented the term Quadrupédie and developed quadrupedal movement, which shocked the men of his times even more than his teaching of women. Yet, his method laid the principles of today's military exercises such as the obstacle course, and has received a lot more interest recently for its links with Parkour.

Unfortunately, most of Georges Hébert's works are out of print and only available in French. One of his earliest books surfaced on Google Books and was "fandubbed" into English by Gregg from Hawaii PK and myself. You can get a copy of the translation (and links to the original) here. There is still a group of followers of the Méthode Naturelle in Belgium, and a pretty cool derived method called MovNat. You can also find a lot of discussion in this APK / Hawaii PK forum, and a new website from Germany.

To me, the Méthode Naturelle has a few very important training guidelines:

• Train regularly: better to train half an hour every day than four hours every Sunday; better to train a little every week than a lot when summer comes.
• Train everything: rather than focus on highly specialized moves and techniques related to a single sport, it is better to train a variety of techniques and sports. This is why parkour is a good fit for the Natural Method, as it includes many different types of movements and skills.
• Monitor your performance: whether you count a number of repetitions, track the weights you lift, the scaling of the climbing walls, or even keep a mental list of things you can and cannot do in your parkour training, it is important to know what you are capable of and how much that changes with your training, so you can adjust and improve faster.
• Focus on form: understanding the moves, their biomechanics and physics, is essential to progress in training. By paying attention to the details and working on them, your movements become more and more fluid, natural, effortless.

There is much more good advice in Hébert's works, and I'll try to post more of my own impressions here, but I recommend you to check it out if you can!!