Now you get to prep for a rant... a respectful rant, of course.
I haven't bothered looking into pkgens training methods but from previous posts in this thread it seems to be "pointless conditioning" or something to that extent. In Australia, we do a lot of conditioning and depending on the individual, strength training. I've watched the progression of my community and it seems this "pointless conditioning" has some merit. The leaders and students of the community continue to see gains (in terms of power) through repetition (whether it be a series of challenging plyos or simple pistol squats). Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like most people in the American parkour community are training for power and only power.
I don't like the words "you're wrong", so I will put it this way - you have the wrong impression of how people in the American parkour community train - and how the American parkour community PROMOTES that one should train.
Firstly, the "gains" you are seeing from the "conditioning" you are doing is due to the fact that people who are untrained (that is, dont or never have followed a training program) seem to gain strength very quickly because of neurological adaptation and motor learning. This only gets you so far, but to the average joe this seems terrific. Once you get to a certain point though, supplementing your sport training (parkour outings, lets say) with S&C (stands for strength and conditioning) is going to help you much more than randomly jumping around. After all, by that stage, you have probably executed 10s of thousands of jumps, but still haven't worked on the strength you need to progress beyond that.
Secondly - I think you are defining "conditioning" wrong. The conditioning in S&C means the act of preparing your body for an event or force or situation. Conditioning means to change your body in some way. PKGen promotes what I call "pointless conditioning" because the exercises that they call "conditioning" do not prepare the body in the way that they are saying it does. In fact, it makes it more vulnerable to injury. Any orthopedic, personal trainer or experienced intellectual trainee will (and should) tell you that. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not saying that these professionals are some sort of end-all, but to ignore this and think that jumping up and down for 45 minutes straight is somehow helping your vertical leap is laughable and irresponsible.
Finally, just because we here in General Fitness say that one should take up an adequate S&C program doesnt mean every traceur in America is actually doing this. On the contrary, most American's train like the rest of the world - just randomly jumping around off of and on top of things. Some people try to shoot for goals like "that really big gap at the park" or "that long K-to-P with a front flip" -- but many also just cat walk for miles in all sorts of wacky variations as their main conditioning method. All of this is mostly thanks to PKGen.
(TL;DR up until now - What you are calling conditioning is not conditioning. You are seeing gains because your trainees are what is considered "untrained" or "novices" in the terms of S&C. We DO promote conditioning, even though most American's don't actually take our advice).Is parkour just a seriess of plyometric movements?
Is parkour the amount of weight you squat?
What happened to being strong to be useful?
You talk about being compared to elite athletes. How "useuful" are elite athletes?
Ever compared yourself to a soldier? Lets be particular - an elite special forces soldier? Now their purpose is much greater than killing as they have such a diverse skill set. Just as parkour's purpose is much greater than jumping and climbing.
Parkour is none of these things and all of these things. Strong to be useful - YES this is the point. We are promoting strength that is USEFUL. If you think that training and achieving even a modest goal of a 1.5xBW squat is NOT useful, then you have never done it and cannot fully appreciate the doors this opens up in your training. And as much as a 1.5xBW squat opens doors, a 2.5xBW DL and 2.2xBW squat opens even more doors. Strong to be useful - this is strength that is very useful. Sadly, this is not something that can be explained, but needs to be
experienced.
Now this is what I believe separates the Australian community from other communities.
We train like soldiers.
No, we don't pack (or ruck) march or do any direct military training per se.
But we train to test ourselves physically and mentally using the movements in parkour (swimming, fighting and longboarding included). It's not something we do everyday. That's dangerous. This is done once a week.
We're still powerful practitioners. You've seen our videos. I respect and appreciate your stance on strength training for parkour, I'm not trying to shut you down.
And I am all for grueling training that would product even a rough, brutal, never-stop soldier. But TRACEURS AREN'T TRAINING THIS WAY. Jumping around in a park for 3 hours 1x a week and doing some army crawls on the ground is great, really great - its fun and it DOES prepare you for army-type stuff....but have you ever walked your groups through workouts that you would find on
www.crossfit.com or
www.sealfit.com? Now, I don't agree with everything done in these workouts - but they are f#cking GRUELING. This kind of shit prepares you to be a soldier. Jumping around for 4 hours and doing fireman's carries or whatever you do does not. If you DO do thing similar to sealfit/crossfit or strength training, then I stand corrected; but I would be VERY surprised if you did.
There is also a difference between grueling and excessive volume for a purpose, like mental toughness, and purposeless, like PKGen's 2 hour dive bomber pushup workout or training 6 days a week with mixed 5/3/1 and parkour training, for example.
I too lift weights. I have to now that I'm pcl deficient.
Being able to squat ***lbs doesn't make you good at parkour. The way you guys train (I know very little on how thought seems very lifting dominant) seems a little naive.
I think I addressed these above, but to reiterate...
Being able to squat XXX lbs doesn't make you good at parkour. Of course not. But it prepares your body AND it opens a lot of doors in your training that you can't appreciate until you actually do it.
The little you know of how we train is off. We train just like you guys - everyone all around the world, whether we all like it or not, trains parkour THE SAME EXACT WAY. It comes to the training we
promote ASIDE from parkour, to supplement it, that the nations seem to differ. Here at APK our community promotes a solid lifting program to supplement your parkour training that is based on science. I have yet to see another community base their promoted training regimens on science - its all based on "this guy has more experience than me, so I am going to do what he says."
I am sorry, but if you make your living on parkour (i.e. Blane and the trainers at PK Gen) then you need to understand the science behind training, even if you just choose to refute it. Saying "I don't know, therefore it is not good" just doesnt cut the mustard anymore.
BTW, you didn't look like a troll - it has been great talking to you thus far.
EDIT: Just wanted to add this; Strong to be useful is a good quote - so is "Power is nothing without control." These are probably my 2 favorite PK quotes. That aside, what is Control without power? Just as useless. Its time we actually started training our power, so we actually have something to control.
