The difference between pushing your limits or taking an unplanned break is most often a function of your outlook on the little things...
We’ve all been in this position; you’re in the middle of a training session, and it’s going great. You’re slightly fatigued, but not dead-tired, and you know you have another hour or two of productive training left in you. Then you slip a bit or lose your focus and you have to re-adjust mid-technique. Not really a bail, but you feel a slight sharp pain in your shoulder (or hip, or knee, or ankle...). It doesn’t feel too bad, so you keep on going, not wanting to waste such valuable training time. Then you get home, and you can hardly move your arm. It’s swollen, throbbing, and weak, and you wonder what went wrong. Unfortunately the same enthusiasm that can lead to the greatest leaps in Parkour performance can also set you back immensely if you choose not to listen to your body and become proactive about the little injuries that we’re all bound to incur throughout our time with the art. Parkour carries some obvious risks, but one of the greatest points of the art is to minimize these risks through a conservative approach, covering the bases on our progression to assure the utmost level of skill and understanding for each situation we might encounter. If we are diligent in this practice, taking it slow and doing a few simple things such as checking our surfaces and knowing an area before we train, we reduce the risk of injury immensely. In this case, overuse injuries and those injuries that can be attributed to a lapse in judgment become the most prevalent cause for our unplanned breaks from regular Parkour training. We have to be able to carry our awareness of our surroundings to a new level with a complete awareness of our bodies and their limitations. There’s a thin line between pushing your limits in a healthy way and overdoing it and getting injured. If you let your ego or unbridled enthusiasm take the wheel, you’ll end up getting an hour or two more in a training session only to lose a few weeks to a nagging injury that is much worse than it necessarily had to be. Once you begin to feel that slight insistent pain, it is best to step back and reassess a bit rather than trying to push through, ignoring the signs to prove something to yourself or others. A couple of clues that you’re heading towards an overuse injury: the pain that you’re experiencing doesn’t lessen as you warm-up, there is slight swelling around the area after training, you start to favor the opposite side body part in order to continue training or the pain continues outside of training. If you have any of these signs, or you’re just not sure, REST. A little rest never hurt anybody, and it’s better to take a short voluntary break rather than be forced to take a much longer unplanned hiatus later. We push our limits every day in our Parkour training, so over time we develop a sense of what we are capable of handling. It’s important to pay attention to our bodies and heed any warnings of excessive fatigue or overuse before they force us to a screeching halt. With a little bit of mindfulness and a willingness to slow down a bit when we’re tired or hurt, we can assure a long and productive Parkour career. If we instead choose to ignore those little signs that suggest that we change gears a bit and take a break, our time with this wonderful art will be short and painful, and we’ll never realize our full potential. Take the time to step back a bit when you feel it’s warranted, and it will pay off immensely in the end.
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