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 Is Parkour an elite discipline, reserved to the young, male and athletic? Can I train my weak body without hurting it? What does it take? Well, effort AND time AND care, unfortunately. No shortcuts, no miracle two-week program. A lot of dedication, and maybe keeping in mind the four points below. Read More for the rest of Pilou's article.
To give you some background, I started training Parkour two years ago
after 33 years of no physical exercise. I was in good health (read:
thin) for my age, but had no muscles, no experience in martial arts or
climbing or gymnastics or fitness, pretty much a blank slate. Since
then, I have worked hard to reach what I consider a decent level,
learning the theory behind the moves and getting more and more involved
in training newcomers at Primal, the Parkour gym in DC. Working in a
gym, I had the opportunity to see many different types of people in
action, young and old, male and female, heavy and light, strong and
weak, flexible and stiff. So here's a few observations, derived from my
experience, about what can make training Parkour easier for people who,
like me, are physically challenged.
1. Condition your joints first
What do traceurs complain about? pain in the knees, ankles and shoulders,
mostly. See a pattern? Parkour training is very demanding on the
joints, no doubt about that. And yet, we tend to condition first our
major muscles - biceps, triceps, hamstrings, then abs and lats...
rather than improving the strength of the smaller muscles around our
joints and our flexibility. I was surprised to note that Georges Hébert recommended as elementary conditioning exercises to do shoulder rotations, leg balancing, squats and stretches rather than strength exercises. And here's another idea: when we build up our larger
muscles, we tend to increase our muscle mass and thus our body mass.
All of a sudden, our articulations have to cope with increased mass to
move around at high acceleration, resulting on much more force upon
them. So maybe doing ankle and shoulder circles looks funny, but maybe
not doing them ultimately throws your body out of balance, where your
joints cannot follow what your muscles ask of them and complain.
2. Increase your flexibility
Another
under-appreciated thing to train is flexibility. When I started, I was
stiff as a board and hating to stretch. Well, I quickly discovered the
down side: if your not flexible enough, you will overburden your more
flexible (and usually weaker) articulations to compensate. If your hips
are nice and flexible, you can bend them more upon landing, and not
bend your knees and ankles (and use tendons, ligaments and bones to
absorb the acceleration) as much. Flexible shoulders and core also
increase your range of movement, so stretch!
3. Pain = bad, part I
We
often dismiss or show off our scratches and bruises, and expect to go
through some suffering in our daily training. "no pain, no gain",
right? right. Our bodies are reactive, in the sense that they build up
muscle in response to physical activity. You can't get the strength to
do a climb up by just looking at your arms and shoulders, and think
"grow". Sore muscles are inavoidable, and even welcome to a degree, as
they are the sign that the body registered a need for extra strength.
But you have to let it work! Especially for older people like me, this
process is slow, and over-exercising a sore muscle will not accelerate
it, and rather weaken you to the point where you start hurting
yourself. After a hard workout, ever had insomnia? felt nauseous? had
poor digestion? these are some signs of exhaustion taking over your
body. Ignoring all these signals (soreness, muscle and joint pain,
exhaustion) may allow you to keep training and improve your skills, but
it also prevents your body from fully benefiting from your work, and
ultimately weakens it. Alternating heavy conditioning and skill
training with lighter workouts focused on improving form, balance,
flexibility and joints (it fits nicely together, doesn't it?) will let
you rest your ailing muscles while staying active.
4. Pain = bad, part II
Bruises
and scratches happen often as a result of attempting a harder move,
going over a new or more difficult obstacle, sometimes loosing our
focus. And they also are signs, signs that our technique is lacking or
that the obstacle we train is too ambitious. They are the marks of our
failures as traceurs, our inability to clear the obstacle well,
accomplish the move smoothly and efficiently. We should acknowledge
them, and hear what they tell us: that we need to train more
repetitions of the move at a slightly lower level, to think back about
where and how and why we lost the full control of the move and pay
attention to it. Bruises are the slap on the back of the head our
invisible teacher gives us when we're not doing well enough.
So
in the end, it all boils down to listening to your body, and training
it patiently and respectfully. All the more if you're old, fat, weak or
stiff, as you're coming from a lot further away than the young athletic
traceur whose body is (sometimes, but not always) ready to take on the
challenge. Sure, it takes much more time to train with such care, and
it is often frustrating to waste time on silly exercises when there is
still so much else to learn. But if you want "to be and to last", to
develop a strong and durable body at the same time, you will need
patience. With determination and humility, I think anybody can learn
Parkour and become a traceur, even the physically challenged!
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