I was wrong. I was wrong to stop the structured strength training that made me strong. It's okay though. The freedom of just moving and training was nice for awhile, until I had a harder time climbing up something, or a drop was a little harder than it ought to be, or when a rotation did not spin as fast as it should have. Or when the guy on the fixie bicycle zoomed right by me as I fiddled with my gear shifter. So instead of just freestyling it, I've gone back to adding in more structured strength training sessions. In retrospect, I'm not sure what I expected. Strength training is like wearing special armor with anti gravity rocket boosters that enhance the skills I perform. Without the armor, I still know how to perform my skills, but have a harder and harder time doing them because of lacking strength. The "russian" approach I was going for before may work for others still, but not for my body apparently.
I've seen it hundreds of times in the students that I teach. I have a whole class of about 7 kids and a new one arrives. Not only does this kid find everything that we have been practicing for months to be super easy, but he/she is able to do things that none of the other kids will be able to do for months to come. I've had a 6 year old come in who could almost do a manna and a 17 year old who can do a 55"+ box jump. Some people just start out with phenomenal strength and fast twitch epicness. Imagine my ego ripped to shreds when I find out that my 17 year old jumper has never even touched a weight before and has just been jumping as he would naturally jump. How lovely it would be if this could work for everyone. I have another friend who could do a pull up with over 100lbs attached to the waist without ever having seriously trained weighted pull ups, only basic climbing. It's confusing examples like this that led me to think that doing all this weight training and BW calisthenics stuff is a waste of time that I could be spending just training parkour and getting stronger doing what I love to do. I was sorely mistaken.
It's not so obvious from my first person perspective. From the inside, the ego i had built up from the years of improvement told me that I was special, that I was different from the rest of the sedentary people just starting out parkour. To be honest, I am now, but I started out just like them, super sedentary, drinking lotsss of soda, watching movies, and playing video games all day. Then I started training basic movement and getting stronger. I experimented with many different ways of training. I found weight training. Deadlifts, weighted squats, weighted pull ups, weighted dips. I got pretty damn strong but was also training a lot of parkour at the same time. I would be resentful of my weight training sometimes because it would not allow me to train parkour as much as I wanted to. Even though my landings and jumps felt more solid than ever, seeing others succeed without the weights pushed me toward that more natural approach. That approach ended up with me in a weaker position than I had been in years past.
From the outside perspective, my cognitive bias is clear. I looked toward the outliers of the parkour practitioner population for advice on what I should do. I'm an outlier in several ways, but not when it comes to natural strength. I've got none and have had to fight for every ounce of what I do have which seems to be the case for most people. I think it might have something to do with not living a very active lifestyle at a young age. I always ran around and climbed things I guess, but I gradually lost that throughout my years in high school and only really kept up with skateboarding until I found running and parkour. The "more natural" approach had a very large break in the process. I think that if I had continued my parkour exploits from the time I was six to now, I could be incredibly strong without having ever touched a weight. But I'm still doing rehab for the years that I've spent couped up in my room watching kung fu movies and chomping on abba zabbas.
One invaluable lesson I did learn from stopping the weight training and focusing on the body was all the biomechanical issues that I had. Training to correct these issues before getting back into weight training has been quite useful. Again, had I been training as I should have since I was 3 or so, I wouldn't have any biomechanical issues. Hopefully people can train their kids from an early age so that they won't face the same problems that so many parkour people have to rehab now.
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