Strength regain

So I've recently reduced the amount of cycling I was doing for the last few months. I moved really far away from work and had to bike 4 times the usual amount which added up to 20-34 miles a day. I quit any kind of strength training altogether and worked strictly on technique stuff. Most of the time I was biking and though my stamina was at an all time high, I could feel myself getting weaker. I've been lucky enough to have a regular car to drive to work so I am back to getting stronger. For about 5 weeks I kept up with the simple routine of:
pull-ups
dips
deadlifts
leglifts

I did split these up and added a few random things every once in awhile all while working on pk/tumbling skills. Now the simple routine is:
Weighted pull ups/chin ups and dips
Leg lifts-sometimes weighted
box jumps
max broad jumps

I have a few logs of my past training to compare and my plan is to regain and surpass my previous strength. I have to surpass 60lbs for the weighted pulls and dips. I'm currently doing 5 reps at 25 lbs. It feels good to be strong again and it's exciting to see progress so quickly. Everything is easier when you're stronger. I'm the kind of person that cannot simply just work on a skill over and over again to get really good at it. I have to have a surplus of strength to acquire new things, it has always been the bane of my training. I think it has to do with my more analytic mindset always working on new skills instead of being able to bear down and focus on one thing for awhile. Anyways, I'm getting stronger and it feels great. updates on progress as it comes.

Training log

Been sticking with my basics lately, parkour runs, climbing, tumbling, handstands, and calisthenics. It's been nice, I'm keeping my tumbling super basic because I don't want it to interfere with everything else and I still want to gain mastery over the most basic flipping skills whilst using them in different situations. I got the opportunity to do some tricking recently but it does not hold the same appeal that it used to for some reason. I find that there is so much more to discover in "pure" parkour that I have not even touched yet. All these years have gone by and I keep getting distracted by corks or double fulls, mere eye candy. To be truly good at climbing and navigating any terrain has so much more volume to it. It may not look as amazing as the big flips off stuff but I'm starting to get better at these things that I would spend much less time on. I'm glad that I stayed connected to basic jumping and climbing all this time though because it's easy to see where to go to get better. I'm going to be offline for awhile to stay a little more grounded in my practice along with some meditation stuff that I've been working toward. The internet can be very useful but can serve as a huge distraction. I'm limiting myself to 30 min a day on the comp. This allows me to read full books offline, to go out and train rather than watch videos of other people doing it, and to focus on real life a little more instead of getting a fractured version of it.

Parkour is an Open Source Project

     I've always held a more broad definition of parkour due to my early influences watching the old yamakasi documentary. Throughout my journey I've generally kept up with their philosophy from what I've seen of it through the lens of the internet. People have different ideas about training parkour and it is often thought of as something that is practiced in the urban environment. I think that is just one aspect of the discipline that has been more popular due to parkour culture. I don't think there is consensus about what and how we should train and still capture it under the label of parkour but I think that's a good thing. It seems to me that parkour is more about a mindset that all of it's practitioners share which prevails regardless of location or overlapping practice with other disciplines like gymnastics. Those principles would include:

•  The spirit of exploration
• Adaptability 
• Reliance on the body with minimal dependence on gear 
• Progression
• Creativity
• Play

So the history of parkour as it developed in france appears to have these qualities but applied to an urban environment. Through the internet, the gist of this practice has spread, grown, and changed into a variety of different iterations of the core discipline. There are basic movements that every practitioner should learn like shoulder rolls and vaults but it branches out from there depending on what a person wants to explore. This makes parkour a kind of open source project where people add their own things to the core movements. I feel like, as this project moves forward, we will see many different styles just as in martial arts. Also there will be more effective forms of training/moving for getting over obstacles that prevail in one style and fail in another. It's the same reason that no one ever pulls a flashkick in the ufc.

    Another aspect of the open source concept applied to parkour is the "free" part of it. People should be able to take this discipline and its principles and tailor it to their own needs without being blocked by our economic system. Parkour is such a basic thing that can be learned in such a progressive way that anybody can learn it on their own. This requires patience, caution, and problem solving abilities but with the internet as a resource it really doesn't require a coach. I myself have spent the last 8 years discovering parkour without any "official" people or organizations guiding me. I asked the internet, went outside to explore, and found the discipline myself in a gradual organic way. Doing it this way can really make the discipline "yours" in a lot of ways because it becomes a journey of self discovery rather than simply listening to other people telling you what to do.

    All that said, I still get paid to teach parkour because some people need personal guidance on their journey and they're not the kind of people to go outside and figure it out themselves mostly because they don't have the time or desire to devote a lot of time to a parkour lifestyle. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just another way of doing parkour. I'll post more about what I found to be the "core" practices/movements of parkour versus the variety of extensions and add ons that people create.

Expanding Practice

   Gymnastics has a very nuanced and technical judging system for its routines. As complicated and interesting as their system is, it all boils down to how they define difficulty. Difficulty in gymnastics means adding in an extra rotation or twist, the bigger the better. For more strength oriented events like the rings, the more physically demanding feats rate the highest. My point here is that the smaller "easier" movements fall to the wayside in gymnastics while the more basic stuff gets left behind, mere stepping stones to the bigger stuff. I've seen this in the parkour community a bit and fallen prey to it myself, not realizing that there are other variables to tinker with to get 'better' at parkour.

    The idea is to expand parkour practice rather than just raise the level. Instead of learning a backflip, then a double, then a triple, then a quadruple, one could just take the backflip by itself and work through a bunch of variations. Pike, layout, flashkick, onto things, off of things, and out of an infinite variation of other movements. The same thing works with a location. I've been with a lot of parkour guys who train in a new area for five minutes, do the biggest jump they can find, then move on. They miss out on some of the more rewarding non obvious routes in favor of a superficial adrenaline rush. I've been a fan of lists lately because it's such a quick way to disseminate information. So, ways to expand practice rather than just getting bigger and better:

• New combinations of movements already known
• Variations on single movements
• Slowing or speeding up rate of movement
• Adding increasing complexity to a sequence or route (layering)
• Increasing difficulty by decreasing efficiency/leverage (ex. cat leaps to one arm cat leaps)

The biggest insight for me with expanding my training is all about having a long term perspective. I still want to be a competent practitioner as the years pass by and it would be impossible to do so if I have that bigger is better mentality. Also, expanding training means there is always something to work on and progress with. I'll never get stuck without something to train when I go out there.

Thanks Mr. Leopard for Preventing Me from Sitting Around

   "Sitting is the new smoking." Kelly Starrett has had a huge impact on my understanding of body positioning, rehab, and stretching. If you have not heard of this guy, check out MobilityWOD and his book Becoming a Supple Leopard (BASL). Of course I realized that connecting parkour movement with my everyday movement was important for gaining as much familiarity with my body as possible. But BASL showed me that a lot of the things I did throughout the day had a detrimental effect to my athleticism that I would not otherwise have had the resources to understand. The first time that I did the "couch stretch" I could not believe how tight my quads and hip flexors were (and how much pain I was in). I found out that I could squat without falling over but it would take a lot of work. I've since largely fixed my mobility issues enough to do much more stable landings and alleviated my knee pain from previous years of training. Stopping myself from sitting for long periods of time has prevented my hip flexors from remaining adaptively short after all that mobility work. Some general heuristics I like to follow from Starrett/BASL/my own thinking:

• 2 minutes of couch stretch on each leg for every 30 minutes of sitting. 
• If the hands are free and I'm just watching a movie or something, work on squatting, handstands, hanging, stretching or just standing, Do not just sit or lay down.
• Stand up and move around every 20 to 30 minutes
• Never let the butt get numb from sitting
• Use a standing desk (in my case an electric piano stand) when possible instead of sitting down

Supplemental Training, Balance

     One of my caveats to a more natural training approach in my previous posts is not having enough time to go out and interact with the environment. Substituting "conditioning" can be a good approach but has to have a specific goal in mind. For this example, say I've been missing out on some climbing so I opt to do pull ups. Instead of busting out some random cookie cutter routine with a the goal of producing hypertrophy, strength, endurance, or preparedness for rock climbing, pretend that you're climbing a mountain.You're climbing a mountain and it's X many reps high, and maybe you need to pause to rest at certain point to get to the end of each pitch, or you can even use the doorway to rest your legs while you go for the next bout and just hang there. How long should you hang there? Depends on how long you want or need to be able to hang. For me I feel like there should be no upper limit because hanging should be one of those default rest positions. Once you have that base capability of hanging on forever, it is your tether to other more advanced movements instead of a weak link in the chain later on.
   I'd like to include all types of hanging/pulling into the hanging category because it fosters a more balanced use of one's musculature.  So "hanging" could mean holding at any point along the range of motion of a pull up, front levers, back levers, inverted hangs, one arm, one arm pull ups. Instead of taking a reps/sets scheme though, such training should have more of an exploratory nature. Can I pull at this angle with my legs straight or tucked? How long can I hang in this position vs that one? By exploring the options afforded to you on a bar or anywhere else, you can see where your limits are, create new movements, and most of all, gain familiarity with the obstacle and your body. This idea is not much different from the more methodical approaches but it's more subjective so I can't just put it down in a nice and easy format for everyone to follow. I think I can convey the thought process though.
   Another related concept to conditioning that substitutes more natural training is purposefully balancing out one's parkour training with movements that aren't as directly related to your normal sport specific training. Something like german hangs or back levers are totally weird movements/static positions that one might not really do normally but they balance out the other angles we normally train when doing just muscle ups or just pull ups. Training all the angles for muscular balance is just an extension of the idea to train both sides of your body doing parkour.
   My writing is a mess sometimes so bullet points might help:

• Train both sides
• Consider the muscles you're not using, and use them
• Make supplemental training as similar to the actual activity you train
• Use perceived level of effort to gauge volume

   

Default Positions and Modes of Locomotion

     Something that always stuck with me from my physical anthropology class in college was the categorization of locomotion attributed to different primate species. Lemurs are vertical leapers and climbers, gibbons are brachiators, and humans are just plain ol' bipeds. Needless to say I was not too happy with that assessment of human ability. It's true though I guess, humans are mainly bipeds and slouch sitters but we have the potential to move in all sorts of awesome ways. Since I'm focusing more on specific movements instead of conditioning exercises I want to put out some info about the main staples of my approach to movement.

    Default positions:

Squatting-includes other forms of low squatting motions like the pistol position

Hanging position/cat position- can be one arm,two arm from the legs, from the feet

Handstand-can include L-sit, elbow levers, bridges, and planches since you can get to all these postions from the handstand

    My personal approach has me turning these strenuous positions into resting positions where I can hang out long enough that it doesn't really tax me any more than standing would. I have yet to master these things but I'm working toward them.

Modes of Locomotion:

QM

Climbing in all directions

Brachiation

Walking -> running -> sprinting(forward and lateral)

Jumping

Vaulting

Acrobatics

Handstand Walking

Swimming

All of that together along with the little nuances of each category is enough for a lifetime of epic training. The goal should be to combine these forms of locomotion as often as possible and/or train them individually over the course of a week. 

Handstands by Default and Learning to Walk Again

  So for the past few years I've randomly looked up "how long is the longest handstand?" and I've been really disappointed with the results. There are varying records that range from a few minutes, 1 hour 17 minutes and 23 seconds (specifically), and even up to a week. My thought has been that there is no consistent record because people could potentially stand on their hands as long as they can stand on their feet but we're just not used to it. Well maybe we just need to learn to walk again, make handstands another default position just like standing and squatting are. I gained a lot of handstand/planche strength a few years ago by just doing handstands a lot. I would do a handstand before I came out of my room, before going to the bathroom, before eating, etc. I'd see every event as a cue to jump into a handstand. I also got a lot of handstand push up training by having to "save" the handstand if my feet were falling backward.
     Came across this link that a friend sent me a few years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hurlinger
    There are all sorts of different programs out there for getting your handstands but I'm going to treat it like learning to walk all over again. I'm going to explore the limits of this, see if I can't get up there. In the batman comics, robin could do a one arm handstand for 20 minutes. So there's some work to do.

Training The Eyes

    I once witnessed the strangest and most unnatural progression while teaching a guy to vault over a rail a few years ago. He first saw me do the vault, then asked about the placement of my hands, feet, and my hips relative to the location of my chest position, etc. Once he finally did the vault, he spent the next 5 minutes explaining and theorizing about what he had just done in order to perform better. I think he had to leave not much longer after that so he definitely had a higher talking to training ratio. This story is an extreme example of what I often see in people when they learn a new movement or sequence of movements. Of course you have to learn the basic mechanics of certain movements, especially if you've never really trained before. But once you've reached a level where you have a good base to draw from, you can draw on your abilities to learn new movements quickly by training your eyes.

     If you have a training partner, ask them to do a route while you watch them closely. The goal is to be able to perform the same route in the same way on the first try after seeing it only once. You probably won't get it the first time, work on it until you figure it out, then change the route and see if you can get it on sight alone, identifying every little nuance at a glance. It's another case of monkey see, monkey do and it gets you to internalize movement that you see immediately. I tend to do this with videos, and especially with tutorials so that when I actually get outside to practice something it's as if I've trained it a bunch before.

    We just had the monthly out in Sacramento yesterday. Jams are the perfect setup for this kind of eye training because you're bound to meet up with someone you don't know and you're not used to mimicking their movement. I like to spend time watching quality movement and often end up watching  a lot of the same things over and over again to get that visual training in. I use a similar visualization technique when I go to sleep, imagining certain routes and skills that I don't quite have yet but they're performing cleanly in my visualization. It's just another, less taxing way to grease that neurological groove.

On Cultivating Gratitude, Training Log

     I've had a few unlucky streaks the past few days with getting sick and stubbing my toe really really hard. It was purple for a few days but it healed up pretty quickly, probably due to the bed rest I had to endure. I always find a bit of resolve after I've been hurt or sick. I resolve to appreciate my normal every day circumstances more. I've read that gratitude is one  of the biggest pieces in the puzzle that is human happiness. I often write and think about how I'm not strong enough to do this thing or I don't make enough money to do that thing, but when I take a step back to see where I'm at in life, I'm flooded with gratitude. I've got a lot of friends that help me out, a loving wife, hot running water, and an able body. These are some things that people never find in life.
     The positive psychology movement suggests that people look for what's wrong with the world when looking for what's right with the world makes us happier. It makes sense on an evolutionary level to constantly scan for problems in the environment so as to avoid catastrophe at all costs but in today's world it can lead to us wanting more and more without ever being satisfied. Yes, it's good to understand the crappy things in life so that we can work toward changing them but if we want to be happier people, we ought to keep a wider perspective and be grateful for what we do have.
   I've studied buddhism for the last few years as part of my philosophy training and for my own personal psychology. The literature is full of methods to cultivate various mind states, one of the major ones being gratitude. Once you can cultivate gratitude in yourself it's not so bad when you miss that precision you've been working on for a few weeks, or you stub your toe really hard. Additionally, when you train your mind to also scan for things to be grateful for, you end up doing that all the time as a reflex.
     As for other training, I've just been climbing, jumping, and blasting through various routes in vic's backyard. I've also recently got  a pretty clean russian front step out bhs to back flip the other day on video with jonah. Frontflips have been the bane of my existence for a while so it's nice to see a breakthrough. I should get myself to film more but it takes away from everything else a bit so I keep holding off. Soon.

Training to train and the role of classical conditioning

Training to Train

    My perspective on training is split into to somewhat contradictory ways of thinking. One way is the path I went down when I started parkour. I just jumped into it and did what I could with whatever abilities I had. A lot of running and shoulder rolls for me in the beginning. I later learned all the different kinds of vaults, precision jumping, climbing,  and acrobatic stuff. It all had it's natural progression. Sometimes I went beyond my natural capacity and got hurt but for the most part I could reign it in. Then I found conditioning, fitness websites, rep schemes, and mobilitywod. The second way of thinking emerged with other people's take on athletic ability and how to get stronger. This second way  has given me a lot of grief, a lot of cognitive dissonance. This new way of thinking has subverted my understanding of parkour as a training method in itself. I found myself asking what I could do with weight training, calisthenics, and other physical training programs to help me do parkour better. I'd have debates in my head about whether or not I should do calf raises (the answer is no, at least in my case). What I've come to realize is that parkour is the training method itself. Duh, it's so obvious now. Why would I do weighted squats when I could do progressively higher drops and jumps (with an obvious physical limit)? Why would I even mess around with weighted pull ups when I could do tons of climbing and campusing and gradually build up that unilateral strength in a way that actually directly helps me get better at something. I've been debating with myself about the purpose of training to train for a while but it all came together for me when I saw this video on Rafe Kelley's  blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kgO5uiINaU.

Human See What Monkey Do and Do It 

    I've used monkeys for inspiration for the past few years to train parkour the way I do. I've only seen them in person at the zoo in Sacramento and one near Stockton. Some of my observations of monkeys and apes in captivity:

    A lot of the smaller monkeys like the cotton top tamarin do the same route over and over again. They have a preset way of going about their surroundings. I liked to think of this as training routes over and over again to perfect them. When you know an area really well, you can integrate improvised movements into the runs you already have making for beautiful, efficient,  and varied movement.

     I once saw a bonobo hang onto the top of his massive cage over 20 feet in the air from one arm, finger tips only, for 20 minutes without moving much or switching arms. This has lead me to try and hang for at least 30 minutes from a bar or on a tree, switching positions, hanging from the legs etc. just to get that reliable base. I've also seen gibbons hang for ridiculously long periods of time.

    Finally, watching warrior of the monkey gods a few years ago has since inspired me to think about jumping as a another default activity instead of something we go out "to do" for a short period of time, then recover and repeat.

    Anyway, seeing this most recent monkey video re-sparked some of those old ideas in me which have since been squashed by the more rigid "optimal" training methodologies. Why are these monkeys so strong and capable? It's because they move that way every day. Not only that, movement is how they do everything. If they need something, they climb up or jump down or do whatever they have to do to get what they want. They don't push buttons and wait for someone to deliver stuff to them, or sit on the couch all day watching movies, or (write blogs about movement). The deepest revelation here is what I've come to realize over time with all the "expert" recommendations people give. Training programs and dietary suggestions are for "normal" people who do basically nothing else physically. Everything from serving sizes to high intensity interval training, it's all about getting as much as you can with the least amount of work. That way you can get on with your normal sedentary lifestyle. There is something to be said about this and I won't knock training programs that offer this to people but all that information confused the hell out of me, making me think that I needed to do all of these things to get better at basic movement skills when all I needed to do was work on parkour/climbing/tumbling etc. specifically.

     This is just the SAID principle slapping me in the face again, trying to wake me up and pull me out of the massive wave of info out there. Just move like the monkey and the other animals do, stop looking for the magic bullet to cure everything and make you stupidly strong. Get to work.

The Role of Classical Conditioning Approaches.

Rehabilitation

     If you're short on time, resources, and need to regain basic capability, calisthenics may be the way to bring you back up to speed. I've had kids who could not lift their legs to their chest from a hanging position so they couldn't climb anything and needed to do some rehabilitative work. In fact, most of the "parkour"  I've taught has been about getting people to recover from their lack of physicality. Any exercises that we use have to be geared toward specific parkour movements and can be dropped once the movement has been attained. For example, if a student has zero pushing strength and they're working toward doing cat passes (kongs, I'm a fan of the cat version), I may have them work on push ups on an inclined surface and work toward being able to kong over a low object. At that point, I'd drop the exercise so that the specific kong work can take over unless there are other things this person is using the exercise for. Push ups do have a lot of general carry over. Once you have basic capability though, you can hang from something, c or you an scramble up a wall, you can drop all the superfluous exercises. You cut it off before you end up training to train.

Limiting Circumstances and Injury

     Sometimes you may be in a position where you cannot get outside and explore your environment. Even in this case a conventional conditioning approach might require you to pretend. You wanna work on your climbing and all you have is a pull up bar in your bedroom door?  Just think of pull ups as a form of legless symmetrical climbing. You could even lock off at the top position and reach with the opposite hand to the ceiling. Then hang on for as long as you can until you fall to your feet. Another example would be forgoing sets of squats for jumps over the couch. Forget "3 sets of whatever 3 times a week", just spend a lot of time with the skill. It's almost impossible not to train some skill or another unless you're locked in a box so it's rarely necessary to fall back on classical approaches. In the case of injury, regular conditioning takes the role of rehab.

Preference

Some people might just like doing push ups and pull ups. I used to get really confused about calisthenics guys like the bar-barians because even though I was impressed with their showreels, I'd find myself wondering, "So what's all that for?" The answer has to do with aesthetics and the appeal of getting strong in certain positions. If you think a planche is cool and you want to learn it, then work on the planche, nothing wrong with that. As long as you realize that you're doing the skill for that reason. Yes there will be carryover in strength to a cat pass or some other parkour skill. But you'd actually have to train that skill to get an understanding of it. This is why guys that can squat a million pounds don't necessarily have the sensitivity to do a quiet landing from a 5 foot drop, it's all about specificity.

Diagnostics Tool

Knowing your broad jump, how much weight you can deadlift, how much weight you can do a pull up with are all helpful tools for checking out specific aspects of your physical ability. They are objective measures that can help you to see where you're at.

Summary

So all I'm doing here is harping on the SAID principle, specific adaptations to imposed demand. Classical conditioning approaches with rep schemes and staples like bodyweight squats are useful to a point but, beyond that, can take away from other time that would be better spent just working on parkour/movement skills alone.

The last few days, training log, weight training oscillation

     the last few days have been interesting. I need personal assistance with cleans it seems because the technique is just not hitting me, perhaps I will work with it again on my own or just give up on it altogether. My broad jump is at about 8' 3". I'm going to drop the frequency of weight training and just do deadlifts once a week to maintain the skill. This way I can get on with all my other calisthenics things as a daily practice instead of constantly anticipating the weights. I'll probably also continue with the w pulls and dips. I tried one of blane's challenges; 100 climb ups in 10 minutes. I managed a measly 38. I like the benchmark aspect of this though.
     I continue to change my decision about whether or not I should do weight training. I think it just has to do with practicality. I love the fact that I could just start training pistols anywhere without a care in the world while with weights a lot of concern about where the weight is, how loud it hits, how much weight is on the thing, the mental anguish of doing another set, organizing all my other training around it, it's all a mess. Too much mental bs to deal with. The quantifiable aspect of weights is what really appealed to me but so much of the success of a rep can vary greatly with whatever technique I'm using. I want to see how much force my body can get with just my bodyweight. we already know it works for the upper body, now I'll just have to sort it out for the lower body.
    In other news, I'm sick today so I'm just hanging out instead of training. I also may have fractured my toe doing a dive kong up some stairs. I don't really do kongs that much. I can do them, I just don't like them as much, they don't seem to be all that useful. Good to have in the repertoire but not something I will train a lot just because everyone else trains them.
     Last thing. I've been consumed with watching tumbling drills videos on youtube. There is so much to the art of tumbling that I did not fully understand a few years ago. It is a deep discipline all on its own.

The SpeedForce, Super Saiyans, and Deep Practice

    Something that I immediately notice every time I get video of myself doing parkour is my lack of speed. I didn't start out in a slow and controlled manner when I started parkour but it has come to be my default rate of movement. "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." That's a phrase we pass around the gym a lot. I've forgotten its origin and I seem to have missed the second part through my training. Often times I will be trying to make a jump or a flip and finally realize that I could just run faster into whatever it is I'm doing. The most explosive thing I train regularly is tumbling because it was emphasized to me that a quick turnover rate is essential to clean tumbling and force distribution. Turnover rate is essential in sprinting as well.

     My reasoning for attempting to train power cleans on a regular basis has been all about force production. I don't know what the conversion rate is but I can do a deadlift with a really high weight or I could do a power clean with a fraction of that weight and produce the same amount of force. The factor here is speed. After all, extra speed and power is what I'm looking for when I set out to do some weight training. Perhaps this is why so many practitioners can a get away with not using weights even though they produce insane amounts of force. Their sport specific approach has them taking a set amount of weight, their BW, and pushing or pulling that rate at increasingly faster speeds for the particular movements that they want to train for. They don't have to bother with weights because they are focused on skill execution at hyper speed. Maybe weights aren't necessary and i just need to move the weight I have faster. It's a continuous self debate and requires some sort of objective test to figure out.

 So now there are two things that I want to relate to my quest for speed and force, super saiyans and the speedforce. Some background is required first. I'm a huge dbz fan so I draw a lot of inspiration from it. In particular, I'm inspired by the tactic that gohan and goku use to prepare for their fight against cell. They go into the hyperbolic time chamber and train for a year, which is a day outside of the chamber. They come out of the chamber as super saiyans and remain as super saiyans until they fight cell (a really bad guy). Anyway, when they fight cell they go into super saiyan 2 mode which is super crazy powerful. There is a point here, I swear. A super saiyan is an amped up version of just the regular old saiyan. The saiyans are like super men but they need even more power to defeat cell.

     The flash is just a regular guy who gets zapped in some cliche lab screw up that gives him the ability to move at super speeds. It is later revealed in the comics that the source of his power is a fifth force called the speedforce. The flash taps into the speedforce and he can move and think at super speeds. Much like the super saiyans, the flash is always in a heightened state, ready to go at a moment's notice, and out of pace with the rest of the world. Even doing mundane things like cooking or brushing his teeth can be done at an accelerated rate. My point with all this is that the Flash and super saiyans both function with a high base rate of movement and strength. 

     For normal humans, that high base rate of strength and power can come from years of training. But I'm more interested in the constant application of this ability rather than the mere capacity. Yeah sure I can do a backhandspring with little or no warm up but could I spontaneously bust out 20 or more in a row without breaking a sweat? What about other things like reading and writing? Can I do those at an accelerated rate?  What about talking? I mean why not? The rest of the world has a common pace but there's no reason we shouldn't attempt to surpass that. I've always wanted to train my body to move as fast as my mind does. That said, there must be time for breathing and relaxing but my idea is that moving faster and applying great strength regularly can become the default so you're not constantly taxing your adrenal glands. The body takes time to adapt.

     Another way this relates to parkour is in how we figure out the most efficient way to do things. For example, I walk from my bed to the living room every morning. How many steps do I take? Are there any extraneous steps that do not help me to get where I'm going? Why do I move at one pace rather than a faster one? The answer to these questions has to do with habit and tradition. For years and years I've moved a certain way and pace that I never bothered to change simply because I never thought about it. This is a form of parkour I call deep practice because it infiltrates into the very heart of how we move outside of a 2 hour "time block" that we set aside as our moving time. This deep practice penetrates into every facet of our life. Even if we're sitting down reading something, we can apply this principle of efficiency in the pace of our reading.

     Before I started reading about reps, sets, the SAID principle, load, intensity, volume, 1RM, rest intervals, interval training, etc. I just went out and trained, a lot. I trained according to how my body felt. If my legs were feeling not so good, I would climb something or do  handstands and vice versa. If everything was tired, I could still work on balance training. There was always something to train and the training didn't stop when I got home or went to the grocery store. I'd QM when I was in my house or precision everywhere. I would run to the store and do shoulder rolls through the aisles and then curl the grocery bags as I ran home or balance them above my head. From a more "scientific" perspective, it looks like random madness with too many variables. I mean what am I getting good at in these scenarios, what specific goal am I working toward?  The goal is to infuse parkour into every aspect of life I suppose. The SAID principle is still at work here, you adapt to the demand. If you spend 2 hours every day training but you spend the rest of your time sitting on your ass, what are you adapting to? Perhaps traditional approaches are not enough but they are useful for measuring our progress. I think it's stupid not to read about training approaches  if you're trying to get better at something but I also think it is wise to not take things too seriously and lose focus on your original goals. I know when I first got into weight training, it became all about the numbers and I geared all my other training around the weights. A part of me died that day. It's kind of like quitting food in favor of dietary supplements and vitamins, you lose a lot in the conversion.

     Now to gather all the strings together, my intention is to move and think more quickly, to practice my art more deeply again, and to recover from the barrage of information out there that tells me to do one thing when I clearly want something else. I will attempt to keep up with pace of my mind, rather than the pace of everything else.

training log

Cycled 6 miles
W. Pulls 25x5x5
Worked on cleans and front squats but mostly on the form with light weight. Cleans are more technical than I realized so I might just have to stick with deadlifts and front squats before I get it all figured out. I'm lagging behind everything else, losing consistency this week. Back on track soon enough.
Trained basic capoeira sequences with my students today.

Making Parkour Quantifiable and Landing Levels

     I'm of the mind that random training and exploration is a wonderful and necessary part of parkour training, but that in order to progress further in the discipline, one must figure out how to quantify their training. I've spent many years myself just enjoying the freedom of going out and randomly challenging myself but it's obvious that such an approach can lead to a plateau if  we don't set some benchmarks and try to surpass them rather than learning something new and moving on to something completely different. I've probably forgotten more movement techniques than I'm currently capable of performing now due to parkour ADD.
     Our biggest helper in busting plateaus and making our progress more measurable lies in numbers. How far can you broad jump in inches? How much weight can you pull in lbs? Most of us that have been training for awhile can easily look at a precision and know intuitively if we can make it or not. But such judgments are situational and depend on a particular location. If the biggest precision I ever did was in Colorado and it was on some weird statue with a funky landing spot, I have a really nonspecific understanding of my capabilities that I won't be able to apply elsewhere. The broad jump, on the other hand, only requires a tape measure and you can measure it year after year to see if what you're doing is helping you improve. Fortunately we don't have to reinvent the wheel with strength standards since people have been doing athletic things for awhile now. One of the most helpful pieces of info on parkour and conditioning I've come across:
http://eatmoveimprove.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Skill-Standards.pdf
also
http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards.html
    Another way to quantify parkour would be to assess movement quality using gradations. I want to riff off of Ryan Ford's levels for climb ups idea and apply the concept to landings. I use climb up levels to teach my classes because it gives a very specific goal to aim for to the practitioner instead of just telling them to climb up  a wall without hurting themselves. So for landing levels:

1. The landing hurts and it's loud
2. The landing is quiet but it hurts
3. the landing is loud but does not hurt
4, The landing is pain free and quiet

There are small exceptions to this structure that practitioners will find as they go out in the real world and try to apply this scale especially because there are so many different types of landings and situations. Despite these variables, the scale can be used to evaluate one's success in executing a proper landing. As an example, one could be taking a drop from a wall onto some wet grass that also happens to be uphill. Regardless of all these factors, the practitioner can check his/her landing against the scale and rate himself. When we have this scale in mind, it will prevent us from settling for a less than perfect landing. Another thing to note with the levels is that one component of it is very subjective and requires honesty. I can't name how many times I've seen someone do a shitty landing out of something and when I ask them if they're okay they wincingly reply "yeah, totally fine dude." The ego gets in the way and they pretend like they didn't land horribly. So this part of the measurement is incredibly important to be honest about. In fact it's half the criteria, your landing shouldn't hurt.

1 The landing hurts and it's loud.
    A painful landing is usually due to improper form or lack of strength for that particular amount of impact. If you end up doing a deep knee bend forward past the toes on a straight drop or you pull a valgus knee fault and smack your knees together, that's a form issue. If you keep good form but you sink straight down to your butt before you know it, it's probably a strength issue. Loudness is most often due to a lack of motor control in  addition to form and strength deficiency. With poor motor control the practitioner is either too loose or too tight at the wrong time. The easiest and most exaggerated way to visualize this is to imagine someone landing with their feet plantar flexed like they're doing a pencil dive into a pool (this makes a loud noise) and then squatting 2 seconds later. In this case, they have good squat form but the timing is way off. Loud landings are typically just a case like the pencil landing but less obvious.

2.The landing is quiet but it hurts
  This a rare case but every once in a while you've got a pretty good landing but you stub your toes or the momentum is off somehow.

3.The landing is loud but does not hurt.
   Probably the most common landing type. The loudness factor is due to motor control issues (see pencil landing)

4. The landing in pain free and quiet
     The holy grail of landings. You are very pleased with yourself whenever you accomplish this. The people that I've seen do this the most tend to be the strongest jumpers overall. I've seen really good jumpers take drops that I was convinced could not be taken without making a lot of noise, until I saw them do it. Having seen this over and over again in the gym, I've come to the conclusion that almost any jump can have the level 4 landing standard. The exception would be when the surface landed on is resonant like metal or something.
     We can apply these standards to any type of landing to diagnose where we are deficient. The strength, motor control, and form will vary depending on the type of jump and situation. Finally, how loud is too loud? I say do your most quiet landing with a tuck jump on a hard flat surface and maintain that standard. It should be a small "tick." I think a video on this is necessary and will be forthcoming. Looking forward to opinions and feedback on things that I've missed.

Training log 01/06/13

Cycled 17 miles
W Pl 25x3x5
Cleans 135x1x5, 155x2x5
A few hours of random pk mainly focused on difficult climbing routes, lache to precision, and some tricking/acro. The raiz is the weirdest skill in the world.
I was doing cleans even more incorrectly than I thought according to the crossfit coach at our gym. I was lifting the bar explosively too soon so I'm not putting the max amount of power into it. I used a normal olympic bar this time though and it feels much better than the one I was using at vic's. It's nice to just be able to drop the bar if I need to. Also I completely forgot to do dips, rows, HSPU, and a pushing exercise in the horizontal plane.

training log

Headed over to Corey's and did a billion stair jumps. We tried to do a standing precision to the top of the stairs from the bottom. I can definitely feel the effects of the cleans on my tension generation. Trained at two different schools today. The main focus of today was exploration, pushing limits, doing some scary stuff. I still keep the rule of 3. This just means that I do any new jump, technique, whatever at least three times before I move on to something else. No runs today but enough wandering and constant movement to make up for it. It's important to put yourself in a new place and explore, that's play. The training comes when you set out to master the newly discovered territory, then you explore something else all the while attempting to maintain what you've accomplished.

Daily inspiration, Yamakasi

There are a lot of things that still keep me going that I continue to go back to. This video is one of the first that I watched when I started.

training log 01/03/14

Cycled 12 miles
Cleans 3x5x140
Front Squats 3x5x140
W Pl 1x2x50, 2x5x25
Climbed and worked on a few precisions/dive kongs with vic at BV
That's it!
It feels like so much more when i do the weight training because in 30 seconds under tension it feels like forever and I dread each set. My technique for the cleans is not perfect as the bruises on my collar bones can attest. But I've learned a few things. The wider grip on the bar is used for the snatch variations whereas the closer grip allows one to receive the bar in a squat or partial squat with the elbows up so that the bar doesn't smack into the collar bones. Makes sense to me. I want to try the snatch but need to work on my squat mobility with arms overhead to even do that. It's quite an interesting study of movement when it comes to lifting.

As far as the W pull ups go, I need to get more volume in with less weight to make adaptation it seems since I've been screwing around with that 50 lbs for weeks now without much of a result.

Daily Inspiration

Check out Kurt Thomas in 1979: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMVXzytMe8g
I love watching older gymnastics because the moves are simpler but that makes the execution super clean. Notice the 180 muscle up to v sit/manna on the parallel bars at 2:30. Also the landing after his dismount off the high bar he actually absorbs perfectly. Gymnastics looks different nowadays due to the difficulty level. I'm more impressed by a clean execution with a simple skill than a sloppy execution with a harder one

Training log 01/02/14

Mostly worked on fulls off the mini tramp today

cycled 18 miles

not much else. still recovering from the last 2 days but I'm excited to see how I fare with the weight tomorrow.

did a little bit of mobilization stuff.

Training 01/01/14

i'm wooped from my acro session yesterday and tired from staying up so late for new years. Despite this, I slogged through some weight training.
6 miles of cycling
W Pulls 1x2x50, 1x3x35, 1x6x10 (ten lbs felt like nothing, so weird)
Cleans, 1x5x140
front squat 2x3x140
went and got a ton of groceries with the wife, that counts right?
skipped my mobilization stuff tonight though I did a lot of squatting naturally, neeeed sleeeep.
performance was greatly diminished but I want my weight training to support my other training, not the other way around. With that said, it might be better to just skip the weights if I'm super sore from other stuff. I'm too afraid to just work on my strength because I know all my skill training will suffer. It was nice waking up for the new year ridiculously sore.