Deadlifting PRs make me feel like a f#cking champion.
Truth. Win. 
Haha, thanks Chris!
Sunday Weekly Parkour in Santa RosaWell, as is sometimes the case, it was just me for awhile. Sunday's the main weekly jam in Santa Rosa and we've had as many as 11, but some Sundays it's just me. In Santa Rosa, a town of 150K people, there are 4 of us that have regularly trained parkour for about a year.
In that time at least a dozen others have come out, trained for a month or two, then moved, or changed work schedules, or just quit. When new people show up, I teach 'em what I can, and over the course of the year I've realized I'm pretty good at teaching. (It is, after all, my day job.) So when a lot of new people show up, I teach a lot and sometimes Sundays I hardly get any of my own training in. It's hard to teach and train at the same time.
Whenever I end up solo, I take advantage of it as much as I can. Sunday I worked on turn vaults to under bars. It's an intermediate skill that I know I can do, but I'm not always consistent with it. Also, like most traceurs I tend to only practice unilaterally (to one side). If ballet has taught me nothing else it's the importance of bilateral practice. So, I spent half an hour drilling turn vault underbars, until I got 10 in a row bilaterally. Hooray.
Then a friend of mine showed up, for her first day of training and I showed her the basics. I truly enjoy teaching. I'm experimenting with it a bit. One of the values I'd like to impart to students is to view parkour not as a set of techniques, but as a system of translocating.
I see far too many videos where it's one move, maybe 4 if it's a "flow" segment, then a cut to another move. The implication, to me, is that parkour is a set of moves or techniques that one must master to become a traceur. If that's parkour, then I'm not doing parkour. To me it's not about 15 foot wall runs, or double kongs, or lazy turn vaults. It's about covering ground: moving. Movement is our medium, and a ten foot jog up to a fifteen foot obstacle isn't much movement. A mile or two long run through a forest or cityscape passing multiple obstacles... now
that's what I'm interested in.
This relates to teaching my friend, because I veered away from my recent "Day 1" teaching agenda. First I taught her safe and soft landing techniques, then we played add-on for awhile. When it was her turn to add, she kept looking at me, saying "I don't know what to do," but I'd tell her to just move. I met her in modern dance class, so I had some idea of her capabilities and I knew I was pushing her mind more than her body. This discipline of ours requires both mind and body be exerted. In the end it was a nice, and successful, experiment. In the future, if I'm one on one with a "student" who is in decent shape and can move well, I'd definitely repeat this strategy of a brief skill lesson followed by a game which gets the person moving and thinking. When people move naturally, they often employ "standard" parkour techniques (my friend, Brooke, used a reverse vault, which I had not taught her) as well as using efficient movements seldom seen in parkour videos and for which there are no tutorials.
Gym TonightSquats 3 X 5 @ 225# (10# increase) I think I'll scale back to 5# increases, as this was
hard, which was awesome.
Bench Press 3 X 5 @ 175# (5# increase) Needed a spot for the last rep on the last set.
Power Clean 3 X 3 @ 160# (5# increase) Oy. Hard. Almost at my BW.
Weighed myself at the gym. I distrust their scales, as I've got 3 different numbers on 3 different scales in that building before, but I was 166 according to this one. Which is pretty much the most I've ever weighed. Been drinking lots of milk, although weight gain is not a goal of mine. I'd rather stay light and get stronger, but I know I've got to add some muscle, too. Never been a milk fan, so SS's recommended gallon a day is out of the question, but I can do a gallon every 3 days or so. Lots of smoothies, too. Picked at least a pound of wild blackberries with my parents yesterday. (Making amends for being such a wild child in the past, so I spend time doing ridiculously wholesome things with them now.) Mmmm... wild blackberry/strawberry/banana/OJ/milk smoothies. Yumm.
