Technically, the jump shouldn’t have been that challenging. I was trying to jump to an upright wooden pillar, about a foot in diameter, only six feet away, and three feet off the ground. Sure, there was a decent gap from the hilltop I was standing on, but it shouldn’t have freaked me out as much as it did.

Fear is a weird thing. I’ve dove into lakes off thirty-foot cliffs and blazed rocky chutes on my snowboard, but trying to jump to that little target had me super nervous. I was mustering up the nerve to huck the jump (injury-be-damned), when my training partner suggested something profound: “Why don’t you try scaling it? It’ll build up your confidence.”

Identifying the Need to Scale

My training partner, Ramman, is an elementary-school teacher, athlete, and adept movement instructor. When he gives you advice about how to move better, you listen. What he was telling me to do is the best piece of advice that anyone new to parkour should understand.

There is always a way to work up to a certain skill. The way to manage your fear and gain the ability to do a scary movement is to figure out how to scale it to your present level.

“When you’re faced with a scary obstacle, seek out a way to get as much support on it as you can.”

In my case, the way I scaled that jump was to start closer and progressively work my way back to the full distance. I was able to successfully land on it from three feet away, four feet away, five feet away, and then 5.5 feet away. The final six inches from 5.5 to six feet was barely noticeable, and definitely not as scary as the first time I looked at it.

I did it! Not a major feat, but certainly a personal victory. Fear conquered.

How Do You Approach Scaling?

When you’re faced with challenges that are freaking you out, pause for a moment, and think about how you might scale the movement to your ability level.

What steps would build your confidence to be able to perform the movement without hesitation? How could you modify the situation to make it less risky? Are there elements of the environment that you could control to boost your success?

Throwing yourself at an obstacle without preparation is a recipe for disaster. By learning to scale skills to your comfort zone, you’ll save yourself a world of hurt.

Five Elements of Scaling a Parkour Skill

1. Distance

Is there a way to master a skill over a shorter distance before working up to a something longer? My story above is a perfect example. Running jumps where you need to clear a gap is another situation. Likewise, bar-to-bar laches where you release one bar to catch another applies here, as well.

The basic idea is that you want to find a similar obstacle that doesn’t have such wide span to cross. Can you find a smaller gap to jump? Could you take off closer to your target and work backward, as I did? Look around your environment to find ways to practice the movement over a shorter distance. With a little creativity you’ll be able to come up with something.

2. Height

There are many times when trying to get onto or over an obstacle can be daunting due to how high it is. Maybe you feel like you don’t have the leg power to vault a chest-high obstacle. Maybe you doubt your upper body strength for climbing an overhead wall.

The solution is to practice on lower obstacles before committing to the full thing. Find a shorter vault to pass and a lower wall to climb, before working your way up. By gaining confidence on shorter features and slowly increasing the height, your brain won’t perceive the obstacle as insurmountable.

3. Speed

Decreasing the speed at which you approach an obstacle gives you a better sense of control and comfort. Beginners learning the step-vault are certainly familiar with this phenomenon. You just watched someone fly over an obstacle with a super fast vault, but now you doubt your chance of success.

“By learning to scale skills to your comfort zone, you’ll save yourself a world of hurt.”

Don’t fret. Slow down. Walk up to the obstacle, place one hand, place your opposite foot, and then step your second leg through. You just did it. Now start to take it faster.

4. Degree of Support

The more limbs on an obstacle, the more support you’ll have, and the safer it will feel. For instance, a step vault is always more stable than a speed vault, given the contact with your foot. If that two-limbed support still seems precarious, you can scale it down by using two hands to get onto the vault before raising your leg.

More limbs equals more stable. When you’re faced with a scary obstacle, seek out a way to get as much support on it as you can.

5. Elevation

Whether cat balancing on a five-foot tall playground structure or striding across elevated girders, operating at height always takes nerves of steel. Rather than succumbing to your fear, build your confidence by performing the skill at ground level.

“Use your brain and take your time.”

If you can cat balance or stride the same obstacle on the floor, why can’t you do it off the ground? Nothing has changed about the effort required. Show yourself that you can achieve success at ground level before attempting any balance challenges at a higher elevation.

Putting It All Together

These five techniques aren’t the only methods to scale a movement, but they will give you a good foundation to build your training. Use your brain and take your time.

Parkour is a lifelong activity – there is no need to rush!

You’ll also enjoy:

• What Is Parkour? Are You Already Doing It?
• Lessons in Parkour: How to Land On Your Feet
• Go Run Up a Wall!
• What’s New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photos 1 & 4 courtesy of Shutterstock.

Photos 2 & 3 courtesy of Ben Musholt.

The post How to Overcome Fear By Scaling Your Parkour Practice appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Descending from an elevated surface can be a unique challenge. Land wrong and you risk spraining an ankle or injuring some other joint. Forget trying to get down from something – sometimes even a faulty landing from a simple jump can lead to a blown-out knee.

As the saying goes: What goes up must come down! So, in the name of an injury-free training career, we are going to talk about key concepts with landings as they pertain to parkour.

In this article we aren’t going to delve into break falls and rolling techniques for when landings go bad. For the sake of brevity, we are going to limit the discussion to landings in which you drop directly to your feet.

Flexibility First

To begin, let’s think about basic flexibility as a key requirement for safe landings. You would never drop straight-legged from a jump of any kind, would you? Your heels would get bruised, and it would be a pointless amount of impact to take through your knees and hips.

“A tenet of parkour conditioning is that your landings should always be on the balls of your feet.”

Instead, what do you do? You allow your legs to bend, sucking up the compression as soon as your feet make contact with the ground.

Imagine what happens if you are restricted in any range of motion in your legs. Gravity is a law of nature and your mass is returning to the Earth regardless of your tight joints. Something has to give, and if the force is great enough, you risk snapping some connective tissue.

Without writing a treatise on flexibility, let’s keep it simple and say at the most basic level, the ability to obtain a full squat is essential for not getting hurt. You’re shooting for full ankle, knee, and hip flexion, allowing your heels to stay on the ground while your body is curled up in a tight crouch. Remember the squat you did when you had go number two outdoors while backpacking? That’s what we’re looking for – nice and deep.

Strong Legs for Safety

Next, what is your leg strength like? Can you counter the force that is about to grind through your joints?

“[S]mooth and soft forefoot landings simply look way more ninja than crashing to ground on flat feet!”

When you land and let your legs bend, you aren’t being passive. You are actively countering the force that is pulling you into that deep squat. Your calves, quads, and glutes must fire eccentrically to slow the rate of flexion. If they weren’t working in this manner, you would crumple to the ground, unable to change your direction of travel.

Let’s go over a few of the exercises that you can do to improve your leg strength for safe landings:

Air Weight Squats

Start in a standing position, and then bend your hips and knees to lower your bottom to the ground. Try to keep your weight balanced between your toes and heels, and avoid letting your knees cave inward.

Aim to move through your full range of motion, from full and upright extension to a completely crouched posture. If you feel any stiffness at your knees or ankles, make a note of it and add specific flexibility work later. You should be able to do at least ten repetitions at time without rest.

Tuck Jumps

Think of this like a squat jump, except you should pull your knees up to your chest as high as you can at the top of the jump. Land back on the ground as softly as you can, absorbing the impact through flexed legs.

Shoot for a goal of five reps at a time, jumping as high as you can and really compressing yourself at the top. Aim to be as quiet as possible during the entire movement.

Drop Jumps

Stand on a low park bench, weight bench, or plyo box. Step off the top and allow yourself to drop to the ground. Land softly and absorb the impact by allowing your legs to flex beneath you. Again, be cautious that your knees don’t cave inward.

Once you feel comfortable with stepping off, change to hopping off the top with both feet. Still land as softly as you can. And there’s no point in punishing your knees with too many drops, so limit your repetitions to a handful at a time. Likewise, keep them low to the ground – don’t be in a rush to try these from progressively higher surfaces.

A Final Word About Technique

A tenet of parkour conditioning is that your landings should always be on the balls of your feet. The rationale has a variety of explanations, including better shock absorption across the ankle and a smaller surface area to help with more precise landings.

From a biomechanical perspective, another critical reason for landing on the balls of your feet is that it drives your knees forward into a flexed position. Landing with extended knees can be catastrophic, leading to injuries such as an ACL tear. So, for the health of your knees always strive to land lightly on the balls of your feet.

Plus, smooth and soft forefoot landings simply look way more ninja than crashing to ground on flat feet!

For more parkour skills, strength, and drills:

• Parkour Plyometrics: 3 Drills to Develop Explosive Leg Strength
• 7 Simple Ways to Avoid Injury in Parkour
• Mastering the Parkour Wall Climb
• What’s new on Breaking Muscle Today

The post Lessons in Parkour: How to Safely Land on Your Feet appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Congratulations! You’re now ready to start tying everything together into the fun part of your training. Once you’ve got a basic command of the common movements found in parkour, it’s time begin drilling the movements in sequential patterns.

Think of Movement as Music

In the movement arts, including martial arts and dance, the introduction to sequences of movements can be thought of in the way musicians learn to make music out of basic notes. Once a flutist understands how to create the desired tones by manipulating her instrument with breath and finger placements, she can start to tie a sequence of notes into musical phrases. What starts out choppy eventually begins to blend together. By building competence with phrases of music, she gains the ability to tie everything together into a beautiful song.

The APEX Movement instructors, Ryan Ford and Amos Rendao, take the movement-as-music metaphor one step further to say that as your parkour skills improve, you can begin to improvise movement sequences, the way a jazz musician creates new music on the spot.

Time to Make Your Music

So, that’s what you’re going to start doing at this phase in your parkour training. Take some of the skills that you have under your belt and piece them together into a movement flow.

At the most basic level, begin with tying together two similar moves, such as two vault variations. Find a set of obstacles that are spaced an appropriate distance for you to vault one and take a few steps and vault the other. Start with just doing a step/safety vault with your left foot first and then alternating to lead with the opposite side on the second vault.

Repeat this sequence dozens, if not hundreds, of times until the moves flow together with minimal hesitation. Strive to eliminate extra steps (stutter stepping) between the two obstacles, and let your subconscious mind take over steering your body.

After that, begin mixing up the two types of movements. Can you transition from a vault to a roll smoothly? How about switching gears from a vault to a precision landing? Be creative and drill as many two-movement variations that you can think of: precision jump to roll, stride to vault, vault to climb-up. You get the picture.

Make a Whole Song, Not Just a Phrase

For a second phase of sequence drilling, start to tie three, four, and five skills together into longer flow lines. Create a run through a series of obstacles that demands a variety of movements. Can you transition from swinging from your arms to a precision landing, into striding, and then to a vault without tripping over your feet? If it feels awkward and clumsy at first, cycle through the run over and over again until it begins to flow better.

Repetition is key at this point in your training. Drill the movements and sequences over and over again, focusing on making your movements more and more efficient. Achieve perfection through elimination. Work to cut out any stutter steps. Get rid of unnecessary body movements. Stop flapping your arms. Keep your chest up and pay attention to your posture.

Similarly, what is your breathing like as you move through the sequences of skills? Are you holding your breath? Are you short of breath and panting? Try to pace your breaths to match your movements and give you better stamina through out the series of obstacles.

Bottom line: Pay attention and be as present as possible during the sequences that you start to drill. Sure, you want to your movements to flow like water, but at the same time you want to be very intentional.

Instead of chucking a series of movements and accomplishing the run with brute force, strive to tie the moves together with as much grace as you can. Think of yourself like a dancer, interacting with the environment with virtuosity and poise. Be the musician, letting the notes flow into a smooth melody.

How to Play the Add-on Game

“Add-on” is a fun game that you can play with a partner to help drill sequential movements together. It is a game well known across the spectrum of creative athletes – gymnasts, skateboarders, and even snowboarders. The key value is that play helps you break out of your rigidity and lets movement start to unfold in natural sequences.

Here is how you play Add-on:

• Find one or more obstacles that you and a friend are comfortable moving on, over, and around. A large rock, a downed tree trunk, a long handrail-almost anything will do to get you started.
• Choose one person to go first, and have that individual perform one parkour skill with the obstacle. Vault over it, jump onto it, or bound off of it, it doesn’t matter.
• Next, the second person mimics the first, performing the same exact movement, but then adds a new movement at the end. So, if the first movement was a vault, the second person would do a vault over the obstacle, and then follow-up with a roll, stride, etc.
• After the second person adds his or her new movement, the first person starts back at the beginning, doing the initial movement, the second person’s add-on, and then contributes a third new skill.

From there, you can imagine how the game unfolds. Each player performs the last sequence of movements, and adds a new skill, so that you end up with a long chain of unique movements tied together. It ends when someone cannot complete last performed sequence or you both are simply drop dead, tired from having too much fun!

Here is an example of a game of Add-on:

You can even play add-on with a group of people, but the logistics of who gets to add a new skill can quickly become hard to follow. Still, don’t be afraid to add some creativity, like a cartwheel, or even a basic tuck jump. Dig in and play your heart out!

The post Movement Is Music: How to Make Your Parkour Flow appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Hauling your entire body to the top of an overhead wall with speed presents an entirely different challenge. In fact, just standing beneath a nine- or ten-foot wall and contemplating how to get on top of it can be daunting. It might even invoke a mini fear-response. If you’ve ever paddled a surfboard through overhead waves, you might know what I’m talking about.

Yet, it’s not impossible. Parkour athletes routinely scale overhead walls with speed and apparent ease. The technique for getting yourself on top of an overhead wall is known as a wall run, and can be learned through a few basic steps.

Note: Are you an aspiring obstacle course racer? Listen up. This technique will help you glide over barriers faster than the competition.

At this point, it’d be helpful for you to go back and read an earlier Breaking Muscle article about a parkour technique known as the climb-up. Having a strong climb-up in your movement arsenal will have a dramatic impact on your ability to perform a fast and effective wall run. Without being too repetitive, a climb-up is basically the skill for getting your body from a hanging position to the top of a wall. By piecing together a way to jump and grasp the top of a wall, with a way to pull yourself up and on top, you will have the skills to perform a wall run.

It should come as no surprise that to perform a wall run, a bit of running is involved. It’s not much, but you’ll need an approach to the wall that allows for at least three to four running strides. More running is fine – just don’t wear yourself out on the approach with a super long run.

Before you take your first run-up, stand away from the vertical surface, with one leg extended and the foot placed against the wall at the height of your pelvis. The position of your other foot on the ground marks the launch point for where you are going to want to take off. Next, take a few steps backward and practice striding up toward the wall so that you end up with one foot positioned at the launch point. Work on lifting your other foot to strike the wall at between thigh and waist height. Once you got the basic step pattern down, try to add a hop, so that you bounce from the ground and rebound through your foot on the wall.

A word of caution is needed at this stage. Be sure to stay very “active” through the leg that makes contact with the wall. If you strike the wall with an ankle that isn’t ready for impact, it could be easy to tear your Achilles tendon or suffer a nasty ankle sprain. So, as you raise your foot to strike the wall, get in the habit of reaching through the ball of your foot, emphasizing active plantar flexion of your ankle.

Now here comes the fun part: Start to add some speed on your approach to the wall and begin pushing through it to translate your forward movement to vertical motion. Think of your using your “wall” foot as a pole-vault, propelling yourself upward. Your leg shouldn’t be locked out in extension. It should be slightly flexed, ready for impact, and prepped to recoil.

Drive hard through that leg, pushing yourself even higher. Imagine pushing off a ledge, basically performing a second single leg jump up the wall.

Reaching up to grab the top of the wall is the next step and it should come quite instinctively. Try to grab the edge with both hands at the same time. If you’re really stretched to your max height, reaching up with one hand will give you an extra reach, but it is much harder on your shoulder.

Get as much as surface area of your hands on the top of the wall as you can. And, protect your shoulders from the force, by retracting them down your back.

You’re now dangling above the ground and ready to top out. Scramble your feet beneath you so that you can push through your legs, recalling the mechanics of the climb-up. Fire your lats to pull your chest above the top edge, and then push down through your hands to lift your entire body up the wall.

Place one foot on top, and stand up. You made it. You ran up a wall!

The post Go Run Up a Wall! How to Do a Parkour Wall Run appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I was reminded of his death upon hearing the tragic news that CrossFit athlete Kevin Ogar suffered a spinal cord injury in a competition a few weeks ago. Anderson Silva’s gruesome tibia fracture during a UFC fight is another recent example of an athlete getting injured in action. Everywhere you turn you are confronted with news of another athlete’s tragic experience. Injuries within elite athletics aren’t necessarily inevitable, but they are way more likely to happen when you consider the escalation of risk that is so popular nowadays. Big air. Balls-out-intensity. Immense fatigue. Many factors contribute to the danger that is encountered within high-level sports.

Does that mean that you, an amateur athlete, are at the same risk for catastrophic injury when performing similar events? No. Not if you’re in it for the simple joy of movement and are smart in your training. By definition, professional athletes are paid to take on immense risks. They challenge their bodies at levels that you and I simply don’t need to entertain.

Take parkour as an example. When I tell people that I do parkour, it’s common for their eyes to go wide and for them to utter that they’d never leap between buildings or flip from rooftops. Guess what? Neither do I. I stay low to the ground and train well within my safety zone, challenging myself only when I’ve weighed the risk versus reward.

Yet, many people’s first impression of parkour is what they have seen on YouTube: advanced practitioners pushing the limits of the sport. To say that when you or I train parkour is to prepare ourselves for the same antics of those athletes, would be like saying that anyone who has taken a karate class has the end goal of competing in a five-round MMA fight. That’s obviously not the case. When you do a sport it doesn’t have to culminate in the most risky situation imaginable. Your decision to participate in any sport can be for fitness, entertainment, or just to be a more complete human.

That said, injuries do happen to us non-professional athletes. Heck, they even happen us when we’re not doing anything athletic at all. Even after thirteen years as a physical therapist, I’m always surprised when someone tells me how he or she broke an ankle doing something silly, like stepping off a curb. Accidents happen, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take steps to prevent them.

These seven reminders will help you reduce your risk of injury in parkour or any other athletic activity:

1. Warm up: Before attempting any rigorous athletic activity it’s crucial that you get your body ready for motion. Your warm up should loosen your joints, awaken your nervous system, heighten your awareness, and prepare your muscles for quick action. Shoot for ten minutes of bodyweight activity to elevate your heart rate and initiate a light sweat.
2. Take lessons from qualified teachers: Let other people’s hard-won knowledge keep you from getting hurt. Someone who has traveled the beginner’s path before you can give you pointers about how to execute movements effectively and with less risk of injury.
3. Scale your movements appropriately: Understand there is an infinite number of mini-steps you can take to build up to a risky movement. For example, before you try balancing on a railing, practice with precision trainers on the ground. Don’t try to jump ahead of your skill level.
4. Know when to call it quits: There is a common story in snow sports like downhill skiing and snowboarding, that it is often the last run of an afternoon when someone gets hurt. Your nervous system is exhausted, your muscles are worn out, and you’re just not as mentally sharp as earlier in the day. If you’ve been training for a few hours and fatigue is starting to creep in, it’s best not to attempt a skill that has a high degree of difficulty. Save the big tricks for when you are fresh.
5. Understand how people get injured: You should try to understand the common ways that people get injured in parkour or whatever sport you are doing. Athletic activities have common patterns of injuries based on the movements that are unique to them. I did a small survey of parkour athletes in 2012 and found the vast majority of injuries were traumatic in nature and affected the joints of the lower body.
6. Practice “bails” and escapes: Part of your day-to-day training should drill how to fall safely and how to get out of a movement that has gone bad. Amos Rendao of APEX Movement has a dedicated YouTube channel about safe falling techniques, called Parkour Ukemi. Subscribe and learn.
7. Be aware of the environment: Trail runners use the term terrain surveillance, to describe how they look at a trail to keep from rolling an ankle or slipping in the mud. When you are outside training parkour, make it a habit to look for things in the environment that could impact your safety. Is the concrete damp? How stable are the obstacles? By scoping out the environment you can anticipate how things might go bad, influencing your risk of injury.

Photos courtesy of Ben Musholt.

The post 7 Simple Ways to Avoid Injury in Parkour (Or Any Other Sport) appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Next to gaining some inhuman superpower, working to develop explosive leg strength is the most surefire way to increase your jumping ability. And, what is the best way to develop explosive lower-body power? Plyometric training.

By now, everyone is familiar with the term plyometric training as it relates to jump training, but let’s go over a brief review for the fun of it. Plyometric work is defined as an explosive movement that minimizes contact with the ground during landing and takeoff. For jump training to be truly plyometric, the time from transition from the eccentric (lengthening) to the concentric (shortening) phase of a muscle contraction should be as short as possible. Jump, land, and rebound back into the air as quickly and high as possible – that’s the basic format.

Repetitive tuck jumps in which you minimize how deep you drop into a squat upon landing are the most fundamental type of plyometric training you can do. Box jumps and depth jumps are two variations that start to introduce an obstacle into the mix. For a box jump, you face off with a box or bench and jump up and down as fast as possible. In a depth jump, you step forward off of box or bench, land briefly on both feet and then spring up and away from the box as fast as possible. If you haven’t tried those three basic plyometric variations, then get to work. They are fundamental to improving your jumping ability.

Want more? Here are three additional skills derived from parkour that are also great for building explosive leg strength:

3 Parkour Skills for Developing Explosive Leg Strength

1. Stride

The stride is a skill where you propel yourself forward along the ground, bounding from one leg to the other. Perhaps you’ve seen videos of athletes leaping across picnic benches from one leg to another? That is striding, and it can be applied to running across any number of elevated obstacles that are spread many feet apart.

To train strides, simply try to cover a set distance on the ground in as few steps as possible. Run up to a starting mark and then begin to leap from one leg to the other with as minimal contact with the ground as possible. Be light on your feet and try to make as little sound as you can. Spring forward as quickly as you can, reaching through your free leg and pumping hard with your arms.

2. Plant Plyos

The plant plyo is similar to a box jump, but you place your hands on the top surface of the obstacle and push down through your arms to gain extra height. It’s a great skill for training on a box or a low wall that is higher than you comfortably jump onto with just your legs.

A few key pointers are that you want to place your palms flat, rather than just pushing through your fingertips and you also want to shift your shoulders to be stacked directly over your hands. Obviously, you’ll want to spread your arms wide enough that your feet can land between your hands without banging your knees into your elbows. That hurts.

To get back on the ground, place your hands next to your feet, lower your chest and kick your legs back to the floor. Touch your shoes to the ground and then hop right back onto the top as quickly as you can, exploding through your legs and arms simultaneously.

3. Plyo Step-up

Step-ups are a basic lower-body strength-building exercise that I’m sure you’ve done at one point in your athletic career. Place one foot on top of a bench or stair, shift your weight forward onto that leg and then stand up fully. Easy.

To make it plyometric, all you have to do is add a hop at the top of the step-up. Push extra hard through your weight bearing leg so you catch some air. Drive your free knee upward, and swing the opposite arm forward to maximize your momentum. Land back on the obstacle with the same leg you kicked off from, and then lower back down to the ground. Switch legs and repeat on the opposite leg.

The more powerfully you can pump your opposite arm and leg, the greater air time you’ll catch. Plus, that motion prepares you for bounding upward from one leg to the other if you were jumping up a series of higher and higher obstacles. Think of it as preparation to stride with a vertical component – up a hill or stairwell for instance.

A good cue that will help you improve in any plyometric training is to imagine the floor being a hot stovetop. Touch and go. Make contact with the ground but then hop off as soon as you can to avoid getting burnt.

Time to fly, Superman. Get after it!

The post Parkour Plyometrics: 3 Drills to Develop Explosive Leg Strength appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Two things start to happen when you open your eyes for unique ways to move through your immediate environment:

1. You become better prepared to move with speed and efficiency when the need arises.
2. You find you’ll never have an excuse to be bored in your training.

At the most basic level, cultivating your parkour vision begins with considering all of the abnormal ways that you could move through your environment. Walking down the sidewalk or along a path is the most obvious way to negotiate any given setting. But see what happens when you cut across a lawn, zigzag through the bushes, hop over a bench, or tiptoe along a planter. At first, it can feel a bit reckless, like you’re breaking a social norm about the proper way to behave in public. If people are giving you the stink-eye, pay them no attention. Persevere. The real fun is yet to come.

Once you’ve broken the spell and gotten over the initial discomfort of being the odd one out, start to challenge yourself with a few fun games:

• If you were escaping from an assailant, what path would put the greatest distance and number of obstacles between you and your attacker? Hurdling a hedgerow or climbing over a wall could be two immediate solutions.
• If the ground was suddenly transformed into hot lava, how could you move from point A to point B without getting burnt by the ground? Crawling along the top of a fence might be in order, as well possibly swinging from a few tree branches.

Try out the exercises. Imagine being pursued by an attacker. Imagine being surrounded by hot lava. For maximal effect, really move as if your life depended on it. Don’t hesitate. Don’t stumble. Move with confidence.

Once you feel like you’ve thought through the logical ways you could move through an environment, switch gears to access your right-brain creativity. Let go of your tactical mind and shift into free-flow mode, letting your body and subconscious take over.

A simple game of tag can be a helpful kick-in-the-pants for turning your brain off and getting you to move with greater spontaneity. With someone actually chasing you, you’ll harness a more instinctive movement repertoire. A running leap across a sand pit – that makes perfect sense! Why hadn’t you thought of that before? When you get outside of your head, you’ll find that your body can achieve what you previously wouldn’t have considered as feasible.

Another way to access stress-induced spontaneity, is to run an established course for time. Mark a starting and ending point, and identify what features within the environment are in-bound versus out-of-bounds. Then, have a buddy time your run through the makeshift obstacle course. Work the course over and over, through different iterations, findings new ways to move with greater speed.

A different variation of the timed run is to do it sight-unseen, meaning you don’t give yourself a chance think through the run before hand. Have someone identify a path for you, without your previous viewing, and then just go!

Harnessing creative movement through spontaneity is one way to build your parkour vision, but there are also a handful of drills that you might find helpful:

Drilling different movement challenges is a good way to peel open your parkour vision, but don’t forget to also just scan the environment as you walk around during your regular day-to-day activities. Get in the habit of considering all of the unique ways you could get through a park, a playground, or even an alleyway. What features of the environment could you swing from, vault over, or jump across?

There is no end point to this journey. Have fun and keep moving!

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Creative Sight: Improving Your Parkour Vision appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

A soft landing is a luxury that is simply not encountered all of the time. When you practice jumping for distance in the real world, hard earth, concrete, and unforgiving metal are the surfaces that you’re most likely to encounter. Slam your butt on anything beside a sandpit, and if you haven’t broken anything, it will at least take a minute or two before you can walk again.

So, when you are trying to jump across a gap of any significant distance and still be able to walk away afterward, a different type of broad jump is necessary. In the parkour community, broad jumps in which you land upright with minimal impact are known as “precision jumps.” The precise landing is the unique characteristic of this movement. You can do a running leap or a standing broad jump, but it is your ability to land with accuracy and poise on a specific target that you want to foster.

As with any movement-skill acquisition, it’s critical that you scale your training in a safe manner. In this case, before jumping to targets of any height, you are going to start learning how to land with grace and accuracy on the ground.

Here is the drill:

1. Identify a line on the ground as your target. The painted lines of a basketball court or a parking lot are perfect.
2. Stand approximately thirty inches away from the target.
3. Jump forward and try to land with the balls of your feet directly on the line. Don’t let your heels slap the ground.
4. Strive to be as quiet as possible and land with as much grace as you can.
5. As you get comfortable landing softly on the balls of your feet, start to increase the distance you cover by moving the starting line farther and farther backward.

In terms of adding finesse to your precision jumps, try to incorporate these pointers:

• Reach through your toes, pointing toward the target during the jump.
• Instead of landing with your legs spread apart, see if you can land with your feet nearly touching. This technique is good practice if your landing surface area is very small.
• Work on dispersing the landing force through your legs, by exaggerating how much you flex through your knees and hips. Aside from extending the duration of the impact, getting low on a landing can yield better control – should you fall.

Here is a beginner sequence, jumping precisely on a line:

Once you feel proficient with precision landings on the ground, you can start to apply the same principles to a variety of landing surfaces. Try landing on the balls of your feet on a curb, the edge of a stair, or even a low pipe. Precision jumps to railings are for more advanced athletes, but can be practiced low on the ground, with a piece of equipment called precision trainers. Large rocks and downed tree branches can also be great targets to practice your precision jumps.

Aside from mixing up the variety of targets you land on, you can vary how you take off toward the target:

1. A simple standing broad jump is the most basic technique. Swing your arms backward before bringing them in front of your body, and fight the urge to get low before exploding forward. Preload your muscles with a slight squat, but don’t waste your force production with deep knee and hip flexion.

2. Taking off from one foot is an interesting variation and prepares you for doing a precision jump from a running leap. Identify a spot on the ground and then use it as your launch mark for a running leap.

3. One last variation to work on is to do a precision landing from a hanging position. Position yourself above a target on the ground, by hanging from a pull-up bar or jungle gym structure. Release the bar and drop to the target, landing on the balls of your feet as softly and as possible. Once that gets easy, position the target away from the bar, so that you actually have to swing and release to hit the target.

Here is an advanced sequence:

Precision jumps are a fundamental parkour skill. If you aren’t already working on them, it’s time to get started. Start low to the ground, vary your takeoffs and landings, and then spread your wings and fly!

The post Stick it! How to Do Precision Jumps for Distance and Accuracy appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Enter parkour and the need to reestablish ground control as a fundamental fitness skill. As you know, parkour athletes are focused on being able to move with efficiency in all situations. Being able to move on the ground on all fours is no different.

Whether you have fallen to the ground while running, are squirming out of a tunnel, or are ducking under a strand of barbed wire, your ability to coordinate your hands and feet will determine how quickly you can return to standing and continue on your way. Moving on all fours also has applications to quickly ascending a steep slope or safely descending from a rooftop. When height and an angled surface are involved, it often makes sense to get low and use your hands and feet for support rather than risk slipping.

Given the functional applications, as well as the great way it challenges your nervous system, moving on all fours on the ground definitely warrants a place in your fitness training.

How to Move on the Ground

As a first skill, just kneel on the ground and bring your chest to horizontal so you are supported with equal weight between your hand and knees. Now, try to march your opposite hand and knee off the ground at the same time. Alternate sides and keep with the opposite arm and leg arrangement.

This opposite hand and foot motion is critical. Defaulting to lifting the same arm and leg off the ground is a common mistake, but it means your weight isn’t evenly distributed from the left to right sides of you body. If you can’t stay coordinated with this skill, then it becomes much harder to stay balanced when you are actually moving forward. The reciprocating motion can be a bit of a mind bender when you are first learning it, but don’t over think it. Alternating hand and foot motion is a natural pattern, something you do subconsciously while walking.

Once you feel comfortable marching with all fours limbs on the ground, start to crawl forward. Make sure you keep in sync with the opposite arm and leg movement and avoid moving one limb at a time, which is much slower.

Quadrupedal Movement

After you’ve gotten the knack for crawling, it’s time to come off your knees and learn what is referred to as basic quadrupedal movement (QM).

1. Keep your back horizontal as you progress forward.
2. Maintain the reciprocating motion of opposite hand and foot progression.
3. Place your hands and feet on the ground to optimize the support through your hips and shoulders.

For two variations, try doing basic QM backwards along the floor and also up a flight of stairs or a small hill.

Crab Walk

Another key ground movement is the crab walk we all did in elementary school gym class.

1. Flip your body around so you are supported on your hands and feet with your chest facing the sky.
2. Advance your opposite arm and leg in the same reciprocating motion you used in QM.
3. Push through your hips to keep your bottom from scraping along the ground.
4. Stack your hands under your shoulders for optimal support.

Make it harder by lifting your pelvis higher off the ground as if your trunk were a tabletop.

The crab walk is a good skill for descending a steep rocky slope. Practice it now so you are prepared for when the real-life situation presents itself.

Ground Kong

For a final exercise, you’re going to do a more explosive movement called a ground kong, which is a preliminary skill to being able to do the full kong vault. Think of it as a rapid way to skip or hop forward along the ground on all fours.

1. Get in a low squat on the floor with your hands raised and ready to reach forward.
2. Explode from the squat, pushing through your legs, extending your trunk, and reaching forward with your hands.
3. Place your hands on the ground shoulder-width apart.
4. Keep your knees together and pull your legs upward to advance your feet forward, to your hands.
5. First just try to get your toes near you palms, and then work to actually swing your feet through your arms ahead of your body.
6. Keep your momentum moving forward so that you hop along the ground in a quick succession of ground kongs.

Be careful not to crash your knees into your elbows, which could be a painful mishap.

Aside from being a nice way to build coordination, efficiency, and whole body strength, ground movements like the three illustrated above are nice additions to the warm-up portion of a workout. Try them out in a park or your backyard!

Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock, all others by Ben Musholt.

The post Ground Control: How to Move Efficiently on All Fours appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

However, if I was to elaborate on his description, I’d add that aside from getting around and over stuff, it’s is useful for getting across stuff with efficiency. Using your feet to walk or crawl across a narrow ledge or rail is one example – see the article about beginner rail skills for reference. Using your arms to traverse across an obstacle from one point of safety to another is a second example.

In the parkour community, when you use your upper body to move laterally across an obstacle, it is called a shimmy. As a beginner, there are two variations of the shimmy that you should be familiar with using. The first and the easiest type of arm traverse is called a support shimmy. The second arm traverse to be familiar with is called a hang shimmy.

Support Shimmy

To perform this movement, go find a horizontal handrail or a waist-high wall. Place your hands flat on the rail or wall, directly underneath your shoulders. Tighten the muscles across your abdomen, chest and upper back, and then shift your weight onto your palms so that you are supporting your weight through your arms. Your feet should be dangling over the ground at this point, with your body above the obstacle.

Next, shift your weight into one hand and lift your free hand to reach out to the side. Immediately, transfer your weight to the hand you just moved, and repeat the process, moving your free hand closer to the first one. As you progress your hands in this step-wise manner, you will move laterally across the obstacle.

It’s important that you keep your elbows extended and your hands stacked beneath your shoulders as much as possible. If your arms are bent or your hands aren’t stacked beneath your shoulders, you will fatigue quickly, limiting the distance that you can effectively traverse in the support shimmy.

You’ll probably also notice that depending on what you are moving across, if your feet are able to push against the obstacle it is easier. A railing with your feet hanging free is harder than a wall where your toes make contact. Make sure to try both.

Hang Shimmy

For this movement, you will be suspended beneath the obstacle, hanging from your arms, with no weight through your legs. To practice it you’ll need to find a wall or bar that is at least five feet from the ground, and extends for ten feet or more.

Begin by placing both hands on the top of the wall, with as much surface area in contact as possible, including your thumbs if you are able. Take the weight through your hands and allow your lower body to relax and descend into a hanging position.

As with the support shimmy, you will want to keep your elbows as straight as possible. As soon as you introduce flexion in your arms, you’ll add extra bicep effort, which will make you fatigue faster. Try to keep a firm grip in your hands, but allow your arms to relax all the way until your shoulder girdle.

Now, to advance laterally along the obstacle, here is what you do: First, choose a direction of movement and consider that the arm opposite the direction you want to move in is your far arm and the other is your near arm. Bring your far arm to match the hand placement of your near arm, so that your thumbs are practically touching. Next, shift your weight completely into your far arm, and reach out to the side with your near arm. Take some weight through this arm, and then scuttle your lower body to the new position, beneath both shoulders.

Continue the hand matching and lateral reaching until your have traversed the length of the obstacle. If you are doing it on a bar, and your legs are dangling in free space, the movement is significantly harder. If you have the option to use your legs, try to stay engaged with your foot contact and even accept some of the weight through your legs, the way a rock climber does.

Both of these shimmies are awesome ways to build functional upper body strength, and are neat variations on simple monkey bar brachiation. Do them for distance along an obstacle or also for max time, seeing how long you can stay in either the support or hang shimmy position.

The post Shimmy Shimmy: How to Do 2 Beginner Parkour Arm Traverses appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Whether you’re a long-time parkour enthusiast, total newcomer to the sport, or just want to learn more about what parkour is, you’re in luck. On Tuesday, July 16 at 3:30pm PST/6:30pm EST, we’re chatting all things parkour with Ben Musholt. Ben is our resident parkour expert here at Breaking Muscle and also provides parkour information at his own websites, Parkour Conditioning and Strength Mob.

Not sure what parkour is? Here’s a video of what Ben’s training is like:

Ben will also be answering questions about his new resource for fitness enthusiasts of all backgrounds, The Mad Skills Exercise Encyclopedia. Currently, Ben is in the final publication stages and running a crowd-funding campaign to help cover publishing costs. One lucky participant in our chat will win a free signed copy of the book!

The Mad Skills Exercise Encyclopedia, set to be released in October 2013, will be the largest exercise encyclopedia ever written, with illustrations for hundreds of movements. Learn more about the project and help Ben’s campaign by visiting his crowd-funding page here.

We asked Ben a few questions about how he got started in parkour and what to expect from his new book. Here’s what he had to say:

1. How did you get started in parkour?

I have twenty-plus years of history in gymnastics, martial arts, and board sports, but I’m a relative newcomer to parkour training. Around 2010, after watching countless parkour videos, I decided to learn more about the amazing movement efficiency that the athletes displayed when scaling walls and other obstacles. The incredible balance, spatial awareness, and bodyweight strength used in parkour were natural draws to someone with a lifelong passion for movement.

I began practicing in parks with a training partner before linking up with a larger local group. Online tutorials were initially really helpful, but the one-on-one experience provided from friends was infinitely better. Last year, I felt comfortable enough with my skills that I competed on American Ninja Warrior, and did pretty well, until dislocating my shoulder on the Warp Wall.

I was recently awarded a Level 1 coaching certification from APEX Movement, out of Boulder, Colorado, which was an awesome experience.

2. What do you think are the biggest benefits of parkour training, even for normal everyday people who just want to build fitness?

The term “functional” is thrown around quite a bit in the fitness community, yet nothing is more functional than the bodyweight skills used in parkour. Aside from building great dynamic strength, learning how to lift your body above a wall or jump with accuracy are skills that could save your life one day.

Bottom line, it is an excellent complement to all of the fitness activities that you are already doing. The heightened balance, coordination, and movement efficiency of parkour make you a better athlete, regardless if you run obstacle races or just like to hike on the weekend.

3. Tell us about the “Mad Skills Encyclopedia.”

The Mad Skills Exercise Encyclopedia is a project that I have been working on for many years, and is set to be published this October. I’m currently running a crowd-funding campaign to wrap-up the final editing, layout, and other post-production tasks.

The book will be the largest illustrated exercise encyclopedia that has ever been published, and has over 700 black and white images of bodyweight and free weight movements. There are chapters devoted to gymnastics conditioning skills, push-up variations, barbell lifts, kettlebell drills, and even partner exercises. It is designed as a reference tool for athletes to turn to keep their workouts highly varied and challenging.

By helping support the project before July 21st you have the chance to get a signed copy and even have your name listed in the Acknowledgement section!

Thanks Ben! Got questions of your own? Join us for a Twitter chat!

Here’s how to get in on the conversation:

1. Log into Twitter on Tuesday, June 16 at 3:30 PM PST (6:30 EST)
2. Follow the hashtag #RealKnowledge
3. Ask away! The floor will be open for questions for one hour until 6:30 PST. Be sure to end your question with the hashtag #RealKnowledge to lock into the chat.
4. Stay tuned after the chat to find out if you won a copy of The Mad Skills Exercise Encyclopedia!

Note: Twitter is great, but it can be overwhelming. If you want to declutter your Twitter feed and just hear the conversation, you can log in at TweetChat.com to follow the chat. Once you’ve logged in to the website, just type the hashtag #realknowledge into the search box at the top (it’s kind of hard to see) and you’ll be directed to a chat room.

Be sure to stay tuned for future Twitter chats with coaches from every discipline! You can also read highlights from previous chats with Pat Flynn and Nia Shanks.

New to Twitter or have questions?

The post Join Us For a Twitter Chat With Parkour Expert Ben Musholt – Plus a Giveaway appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Balance.

Power, speed, and endurance often get the most recognition as the foundation of strong athletic ability. Think of everyone from soccer players to wrestlers. The ability to generate high levels of force and sustain it longer than your competitor can often determine who will be victorious in a given sport. Yet, without a high degree of balance executed at just the right time, say during a corner kick or a shoulder throw, all can be lost in an instant.

I’ll venture to say that of the ten physical skills, balance is the one that we don’t spend enough time developing. People often think that high levels of balance are just something you are either born with or you aren’t. There is some truth to that, but nonetheless is it is also something that responds remarkably well to persistent training.

I know this first hand, as someone who has been practicing parkour for many years, and also as a physical therapist who helps keep eighty year olds from falling down. Quite simply, your balance responds very well to targeted practice. Work on it and it gets better.

As your balance improves, so does your overall athletic skill. Having mastery of your body in space allows a higher degree of movement complexity, which can mean all of the difference during a critical soccer kick or a wrestling offense. Keeping your center of gravity over your base of support when you are in challenging positions and spatial arrangements determines whether you end up on the floor or get to pump your fists in victory.

So, I’ve got a set of fun balance challenges for you. These series of movements come from basic parkour conditioning and are utilized to improve balance on a narrow surface. You might not recognize the immediate benefit to your specific discipline, but consider them as a way to improve your overall spatial awareness, coordination, and most importantly, balance.

Prior to starting the challenges, find a level handrail that extends horizontally for at least ten feet. It can be a flat bar or round tubing – the tubing is preferable. You’ll be balancing on top of the bar, so make sure it is free of dust or condensation. You don’t want the challenge to be harder than it needs to be!

The first challenge is called a Rail Plank:

1. Lift yourself on top of the rail, place your hands next to each other, and secure your grip.
2. Extend your legs behind you and balance on the tiptoes of one foot.
3. Your other foot should be resting on the ankle of your bottom leg.
4. Straighten your arms and engage your trunk muscles, as you press up into a plank position.
5. Stay tight through your shoulders and hips, while trying to hold the position for as long as you can.
6. Use your wrist muscles to control your side-to-side motion.
7. Shoot for a goal of 30 seconds.

When the rail plank becomes too easy, make it harder by turning it into a push-up. Try lowering your chest to the bar and then pressing back up to a plank, for multiple reps.

The second challenge is a 3-Point Rail Balance:

1. Get on top of a bar in a semi-kneeling position, with your hands side-by-side and your hips elevated.
2. You should be balanced between your toes and you hands, with your knees flexed and your spine horizontal.
3. Now, lift one foot from the rail and try to stay balanced for as long as you can.
4. Try lifting opposite leg on your next attempt.
5. Also play with raising one hand off the rail.
6. See if you can master lifting each limb from the rail, one at a time.

Once you are proficient with the 3-point balance for at least 10 seconds, make it harder by lifting your opposite arm and leg from the rail. The 2-point rail balance takes serious concentration.

The final challenge is to balance and walk like a cat, AKA Cat Balance:

1. Begin in the same starting position as the 3-point rail balance.
2. Your opposite arm and leg should be in synch with each other, staggered forward or backward of the other side.
3. Practice holding this position for at least 30 seconds and find your ideal hip elevation.
4. Now, lift one hand and reach forward, to begin crawling along the rail.
5. Move your opposite foot, to stay in synch with the arm.
6. As you get more comfortable on the rail, try advancing the opposite arm and leg together, so you are momentarily balanced on just two points of contact.
7. Shoot for distance on this exercise – try to go for as far as you can!

Make the cat balance harder by trying it on a rail that has a gentle upward slope.

There you have it: three pieces of beginner rail work to try as your homework. Be patient, have fun, and watch as the improved balance starts to impact your general athletic ability.

In a future article, I’ll introduce more advanced rail work, including standing balance activities. Stay tuned!

Wrestling photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Elevated Poise: Beginner Parkour Rail Skills appeared first on Breaking Muscle.