As specific as you may be able to be with individual techniques, Parkour is a generalist’s sport. There is no way to focus on one aspect of the game while still assuming that you can rightfully wear the mantle of “Traceur”. You have to hone the ability to overcome ANY obstacle in a variety of different situations. This is an ongoing process, one where you never reach a point where you can say; “There, now I’m truly ready for anything.” There will always be another situation that you couldn’t have possibly accounted for, especially if you tend to rely purely on Parkour itself for your training. This is where a specific cross-training regimen comes in, allowing you to custom tailor specific conditioning concepts that address the ever-changing demands and varied paths for which we strive.

    So when I set out to create what I hope becomes a “standardized” system of sport-specific cross-training for Parkour, I had to address this concept as thoroughly as possible. Some of the questions I asked myself were; how do you replicate the random nature of a day-to-day Parkour regimen within the constructs of standardization? If there are any physical demands that you could consider specific to the sport, what are they? How can we address these demands thoroughly while still establishing a random and broad-range application of fitness? How do we do all of this while still allowing the majority of sport-specific training to come from actual Parkour practice? My hope is to create a system that addresses these points in a manner consistent with constant improvement. This is a work in progress, but the following are some of the answers at which I have arrived, along with the solutions I have chosen to implement within this regimen, in order to address them.

            The random nature of Parkour mirrors closely the random nature of our day-to-day life. Though we may seem to have set patterns in our activity, every day provides a different set of challenges. If we make a point to specialize in any one aspect of these challenges, our performance in all others will suffer. A well-rounded fitness program for both life and Parkour will tend to address these ever-changing demands. Along those lines, I have attempted to forego the usual “3 sets of 8, three days a week, of the same exercises for a month” mindset. Imagine the different instances where you may be practicing your Parkour; you go to a new city to jam with some different people, you are training in your daily area but trying new moves, you are invited to represent the art for a media event….all of these require different aspects of your overall Parkour game to be at a sufficient level, and that, in turn, requires different aspects of your “Parkour specific” fitness to be at an equally proficient level. By randomly mixing the different elements of Parkour-specific fitness from day to day, I hope to more precisely mimic the ever-changing challenges of our sport. This will naturally negate any attempt at standard periodization, along with the idea that you need to always rest similar body parts and energy systems on subsequent days…you never really know ahead of time what the next day may bring, and if you’re out training, will you say “Well, I worked my legs yesterday; today I’m doing leg-free Parkour!” I doubt it. So, the crucial aspects of this philosophy are those exercises which we can infer to be Parkour-specific, mixed randomly throughout both a single workout, a group of work-days, and broadly over the course of weeks, months and years. So, what exactly are these specific exercises?

            The American Council on Exercise recognizes 5 aspects of physical fitness; Muscular Strength (within which also exists the aspect of Power which is the ability to apply strength within a short span of time), Muscular Endurance, Cardiorespiratory Endurance, Flexibility and Body Composition. When you combine these aspects of fitness with the required Motor Skills of Balance, Agility, Accuracy, and Coordination, you begin to form an idea of what is required for aptitude in a generalist’s realm. If you choose to negate any one aspect of Parkour technique your overall skill as a Traceur declines, so does your fitness and physical mastery in general decline if you choose to focus solely on any one aspect of the overall picture.

            Parkour demands different combinations of these aspects of physical fitness and the required motor skills, and it can often require random combinations of each depending on the situation. This is the reason that I choose not to separate our fitness plan into “strength” and “cardio”. There is no such separation while practicing Parkour, so our plan for physical preparedness should address this fact. The strength that Parkour demands is such that strength-to-weight ratio is paramount, and the ability to control your body-weight in a variety of situations and positions is an absolute requirement. This fact, coupled with the convenience of a body-weight strength program influenced the decision to base our workouts on a variety of different body-weight exercises. Some of the most influential athletes in regards to body-weight conditioning are gymnasts, who use methods to decrease the leverage advantage of their muscles exclusively, and possess strength-to-weight ratios along with coordination and agility that many of us can only dream of.

            Both Muscular Endurance and Cardiorespiratory Endurance can be addressed together in regards to Parkour training, because the specific demands of an actual run dictate the energy systems that are involved. Though Parkour does possess some aspects of Aerobic Endurance, the overriding energy system is Anaerobic. A Parkour run is less like a marathon and MUCH more like an interval training session. The trend towards focusing on Long Slow Distance runs for Parkour training is a mistake, because this training leads to a loss in Muscular Strength and Power. Interval training, on the other hand, positively affects general Aerobic Endurance while retaining the strength and power that are important for any well-rounded Traceur. There’s no benefit in being able to run for hours if you are too weak to perform the powerful techniques that are essential to choosing any path you wish. Another benefit of an interval system is that it is easily coupled with body-weight strength exercises and agility training, thus achieving this random mix of skills and fitness that we desire.

            Flexibility is an important aspect of the overall picture for both injury prevention and maximizing economy of movement. The most well-known method of increasing flexibility is Static Stretching, which we’ll use variably throughout a week of training, but perhaps a more important method of ensuring proper flexibility is actively facilitating a full range of motion on every exercise, which ensures proper flexibility throughout a variety of essential movement patterns. This, once again, allows us to combine yet another aspect of overall fitness into a random combination for use during a workout.

            Body composition, the last aspect of physical fitness, is important for a variety of obvious reasons. Strength-to-weight ratio is affected by your ability to maintain a positive balance between lean-body-mass and adipose tissue (fat). Though a fitness program goes a long way towards ensuring a positive body composition, diet is at least as important if not more so. Suffice it to say that a topic such as diet is far too broad to address in this essay, but the basic concepts are based on a common sense approach: Eat enough whole foods to maintain activity and recovery, but not enough to support body fat. Though there are many subtleties to a well-honed diet, it basically boils down to that simple sentence. Base your diet on fresh fruits and vegetables, lean protein sources, whole grains and heart-healthy fats (monounsaturated fat such as that found in olive oil and avocados, and omega 3 fats such as those found in cold-water fish like salmon). For people who have no medical reason to abstain from certain macro-nutrients, the approach should be to vary your diet within a broad range of minimally processed foods, balancing individual meals with sufficient levels of carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Beyond that, it is mostly a matter of tweaking your existing knowledge in relation to what you find to be your essential dietary needs.

            So we’ve addressed many of the questions that I posed at the beginning of this essay. Parkour stresses a wide range of abilities pertaining to both physical fitness and motor skills. By application of a random mix of body-weight conditioning, interval training and agility exercises, we facilitate the broad-range response that is desirable for both Parkour and everyday life.  Once a cross-training regimen such as this is in place, the Parkour you do can easily fall into one of two categories: skills and techniques training, and pure Parkour. When you leave the burden of enhancing your fitness to a separate training program, Parkour can be approached like an athlete approaches any other sport. You spend the majority of your time training both sport-specific strength and techniques, and then reserve a smaller portion of your time for performance-specific practice. The equivalent would be training during the week and playing football on Sunday. Athletes and trainers in all other professional sports realize that you can’t expect to perform at 100% even 3 days a week, so to enhance the days you choose to designate as “performance days” you design a program that balances cross-training, skills training, mental training and recovery time, tapering off to facilitate a peak when it is due. This ensures both optimal performance when needed, combined with adequate recovery and progressive overload for increased ability as time goes on.

            These are the concepts on which I have based my approach to the physical aspect of training for Parkour. Just as mastery of the art of Parkour is a never-ending journey, so this system of training is a constant work-in-progress. I hope to apply new knowledge and concepts constantly, both to perpetually improve the quality of the training that I provide, and also to ensure a constantly variable and interesting system with which to improve our fitness and abilities for both Parkour and everyday life.