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.