Since their inception in September 2006, the Colorado Parkour classes led by myself (Demon) and Matt Marshall (kannagisai) have been constantly evolving and improving. In March 2007, we redesigned the classes into a 10 week parkour fundamentals course and a more open-ended intermediate program. On May 5, the first cycle of the new programs came to an end.

Both Matt and I continue to learn a lot about teaching parkour and we have really come to understand the benefits that parkour has to offer to all types of people. We had 16 people signed up for the fundamentals program in its entirety and an average of 20 participants between the two classes each Saturday. In our classes, we have had high schoolers, college students, moms, dads, brothers, and more. We have had participants ranging from age 10 to 30+ and even a solid representation of females! Jim Parker, who is in his 30s, proved that parkour is about the progression within oneself by being voted on by his peers as the most deserving student for a prize of free shoes. Voting criteria was based on best attitude, attendance, improvement, work ethic, and more.

The improvement we have seen has been outstanding. Everyone has developed a good foundation of basics to practice safely and efficiently on their own and many of them will be taking their efforts to the next level in our intermediate program or our newly formed advanced class. In addition to the skills improvement, we have been able to witness a tremendous increase in physical abilities. From the fitness benchmarks we established in week one, the same students in week nine had, on average, improved by:

- 11.5 max kipping pull ups

- 4.4 inches on max broad jump

- 5.6 push ups in a minute

- 6.1 squats in a minute

- 6.6 sit ups in two minutes

- .2 seconds faster in our shuttle run

- 11 seconds on max wall handstand hold

We even had some people doubling and tripling some of their original results! This has been a great improvement in physical fitness, especially considering these students only came to one 2 hour class per week! We are very proud of our student’s accomplishments but as teachers, Matt and I are aiming for even better results for the new classes starting May 19. We would like to congratulate our students for their massive improvement and we look forward to the new cycle of classes starting again in two weeks!

To read more about the classes, please visit:

www.coloradoparkour.com/classes.html

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