Some lateral moves

Been thinking lately about the different styles of movement emerging. A lot of people may be inclined to think that the level for parkour has been raised to an impossibly high degree. At least that was one of my first thoughts seeing someone land a double flyaway precision in a recent competition. Where does one go from there at that point? Well obviously triple flyaway is the next logical progression.

All kidding aside I've had to make certain concessions with my training regarding my current strength levels and the risks I'm willing to take now. I've found that instead of making the vertical move upwards to ever higher strength/speed/power I'm forced to make some lateral moves instead, to fill out the map a bit more. 

The main concept here is to derive attributes from the current practice, and build those up to a high degree. The main example I can think of is training barefoot. It's not required and it greatly reduces ones degree of freedom. In fact, it feels like learning parkour all over again especially for those who only ever trained parkour with shoes. New techniques, levels of strength, awareness, and balance naturally appear when one takes up this kind of training. This lateral move can then feed back into some of the more standard vertical progressions almost incidentally, as a happy side effect. Just as a side note, I've gotten back into training barefoot more due to seeing a few different videos of some high level practitioners working at it. I felt immediately drawn to it partly because of the stark contrast between this more connected way of training to more popular movements/competitions that have been showing up in my feed.

I guess the point of even getting into this concept is to suggest movement possibilities that feel meaningful still amidst a the power/strength sport mentality. I don't mean to suggest that the other way is wrong, bad or "diluting" the sport. I'm a movement pluralist in this regard, let any and all forms arise. I will just get into a few more here and then just name off more as I remember/discover.

Disadvantaged leverage in calisthenics is a pretty obvious and often used tactic which can replace the more vertical move progression of just adding weight.

In a similar vein, training movements in a handstand, or even with the hands behind the back. This "subtraction" method creates new movements and exposes weaknesses pretty quickly. For a more concrete example I am thinking of the box jump movement. Instead of just jumping up higher and higher, you do it with your hands behind your back, and build your way back up with that restriction.

Endurance routes. One can create a line that requires a medium to high degree of power/strength and just cycle through it with an endurance mindset as opposed to just doing bigger, more powerful jumps.

More to come. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not covering any new ground since parkour has always had these ancillary practices, but it's useful to start categorizing and distinguishing between  the vertical/lateral moves we are making. It's important, in my opinion, to show the other ways we can go and still have a meaningful practice.