Review of Parkour Strength

Usually I read books that are not about parkour and I tend to show how something can refer back to my discipline but this book is just all about parkour! It's almost too much to write about so I'm just going to pick up on some of the points that stuck out to me.This is by no means a comprehensive review.I read this thing about a month or two ago but it has taken forever to catch up on my writing/reading ratio. Anyway, this book can be extremely useful for all experience levels in parkour. It can serve as a quick reference work for an experienced practitioner who might be looking for something new or perhaps to get back on track once they've plateaued at some point.

The book's main focus is on providing an encyclopedia of parkour specific strength exercises. One thing I love about this book that differentiates it from other strength books like overcoming gravity or convict conditioning is this idea of obstacle based fitness. It's strange, having trained parkour with hardly any "official" sources of information, practitioners have had to rely entirely on making stuff up or the standard understanding of fitness and strength. The fitness industry is a large and confusing mixed bag of training methods that are not always helpful and can actually take us away from our parkour training. I don't know about you , but the reason I got out there in the first place was to use the environment around me rather than sweat in a room, walking from station to sweaty station in order to complete the minimum amount of exercise possible. Obstacle based fitness throws out the standard fitness rules in favor of specific exercises.

I remember buying rings many years ago so I could work on my muscle ups, I found later that it was the only tool in close range that I could do dips on. I lamented the lack of parallel bars in my immediate surroundings and would often just skip dips altogether just so I didn't have to set up the rings. It took me a while to realize that parallel bar dips and even ring dips are super specific to those apparatus and my focus should be on wall dips because (duh!) that's the most common obstacle that I need a wall dip for. This book is a reminder that such a simple oversight was clearly limiting my thinking. There are always ways to train, thinking in terms of optimal/suboptimal limits one's ability. Thinking, "well, I don't have access to a barbell today so I can't really work on pure leg strength right now" can be a barrier to physical progress. With obstacle based training, there's never an excuse to not train something. It's not that I didn't do this kind of training at all, it's just that, in my mind, I viewed it as suboptimal strength training as I had read so much about the benefits of weight training, or rings, or whatever, which were all outside the range of what I was doing with what I would have considered "skill training."

Opportunities are all around you. While it's clear that the authors here have tried to show as many parkour specific exercises outside, I see this effort as an idea generator for people to work with their own environment, to find progressions using what you've got wherever you are. The general idea I'm getting is that we're not supposed to merely copy what they're doing in the pictures, but to import the general sentiment to our own training. Obstacle based training is endless and infinitely adaptable. My friend does muscle ups on his windowsill all the time. For myself, I will often just hang from my door for a spinal decompression and some hang time. What about door knob pistols? The only structure to impose on this is an understanding of intensity and progression so that you're not just being a random ass. 

Here's JCVD doing some OBT:

My favorite part of the book is actually the programming section. I feel like it's a compilation of all the strength training "rules" but in a nice, organized manner instead of the patchwork frankenstein understanding in my head along with the hardly legible scrawlings in my training notebooks. Does that say tempo, or tempeh? Anyway, it's exactly what one would would want. The standard 3x5 approach represented along with all the other pieces, tempo, volume, frequency, deloading.This is seriously the only reason to buy a parkour book in my opinion, to have all the information in one place that you can easily refer back to. This section should scale for anyone as it's broad enough to accomodate all skill levels. One thing that always gets me however, is this idea that strength is purely in the 3-8 range in terms of reps but trainers often recommend having a much higher number for higher strength skills. For example, the prerequisite number of pull-ups in this book for training eccentric one arm chins is 15. If I remember right, the same seemingly random number popped up in Overcoming Gravity as a prereq for bar muscle ups. What this tells me, and there are a few lines on this in the book, is that stamina plays a much larger role in the strength equation than we give it credit. Parkour Strength does not miss out on this concept as AMRAP sessions and guantlets are suggested later in the chapter. It's clear the authors understand the value of endurance but it is, understandably not really the subject of this book, though it has a few mentions. 

I admittedly have an endurance bias. In fact, our whole group tends to lean toward the endurance in natural settings side of things with our parkour training so it's really just a local difference that we have. We prioritize running, climbing, and swimming/freediving over some of the more basic parkour staples. I should say that, as is written in this book, our strength and power does take a hit compared to what our more bouncy counterparts can produce (less of a difference than one might think though), but it's also a hit in the other direction when focusing solely on strength. I've found this to be true for myself back when I was able to chin with an extra 90 lbs. I would keep my reps low, no higher than five, but found myself unable to do more than 5 or 6 BW pull-ups before I had to stop, though I could pull up and through more explosively. I'm not saying, "don't focus on strength training." I'm saying , do strength but figure out how to integrate it. This idea is implemented in the parkour skill section. Get stronger, then take that strength to endurance levels, then get stronger seems to get the best of both worlds, I've written about this idea in several other posts, so won't harp on it any further. The programming section is not a cookie cutter approach, is full of nuance, and well worth a thorough reading.

A few things I haven't really seen before: the demon dip and the ankle dorsiflexion test. We have a lot of slippy walls in our area so certain levels of climb ups just aren't going to happen but I see this explosive dip as a solution that I wouldn't have considered before. Again, I'm biased by the traceurs around me who have just incredible pulling strength and can kind of skip the whole dip portion of a climb up, even when it's slippy (I'm not one of these people) so it's interesting to see another portion to work on that can get my climb up speed a little faster which is not just a repetition of the mantra "pull more explosively, pull faster." 

The ankle dorsiflexion test is also something I haven't seen. I have used the bottom of a pistol position to check my dorsiflexion as per KStarr's recommendation but have found it's pretty easy to cheat. I'm interested in seeing more of the measurements behind the dorsiflexion test, the actual numbers. We don't have enough studies going on in our discipline. I think it's one of the other reasons that we've had to cannibalize other sporting methods. Self experimentation can clearly take us quite a long way. One really cool part of the book is this tiny section entitled "The Power of Plyometrics" recounting the correlation between merely doing plyometric training and strength in the deadlift without prior weight training. More data like this please! I would definitely read a book on parkour science.

What else can I mention here? There is a massive section in the beginning that encompasses mobility/prehab. Every chapter has a challenge for different skill levels so we're encouraged to actually apply the information we just absorbed.There's the nitty gritty details on climb ups. There are progressions and regressions for all the skills. Almost every skill in the book is done by a woman, which is just cool in my opinion, but I think it also makes it so that a book like this is inclusive to everybody, not just hardcore testosterone laden 15 year old boys. Many sections contain hidden nuggets of information that encourage a thorough reading. For example, there is a mention of building equilibrium in the pulling muscles with an inverted row. It's only one sentence that might just fly by in a more cursory reading but I think I had my ears pricked up for it because Steve Lowe emphasizes it so much in the programming section of Overcoming Gravity (horizontal pulling pushing/vertical pulling/pushing, etc.) It's certainly worth taking notes and dog earing the pages a bit. I know I'll be referring back to it for years to come.

Overall this book is certainly the kind I wish I had when I first started, I would have saved a lot of time and injury. It belongs in my library next to Supple Leopard, Overcoming Gravity, Convict Conditioning, and Stretching & Flexibility. I hope there's a follow up. A whole book could be done on Parkour Science or just Parkour Skill in my opinion.

One final note to other parkour practitioners out there, don't simply pass this up just because you think you might not have anything to learn from it. I've sensed a bit of this pervasive attitude that masquerades as self-reliance but is really just an ego issue. I started my parkour journey 10 years ago and there's still always something new to learn, ways to think differently about what we do, enjoy the process and save some time by picking up a book or two. I know those who actually read through this don't have this issue.