The Community-Driven r/Parkour FAQ

A complete write-up answer for this question is impossible, since there's hundreds of things you can do to 'get in shape', and that term initself depends completely on what an individual's goals are. If you're overweight, your goal should be to lose weight while training, in which case you need to focus on nutrition. This is easy if you have a community, because jams often go for half a day (4-6 hours), and burn crazy amounts of calories. So if you want to lose weight, my recommendation would be to check this out http://examine.com/topics/Fat+Loss/

If you're skinny (usually this means 150-200), and lack muscle (want to work on your explosive strength for precisions and vaults), then the only thing you have to do is train more, and eat more. More fruits, more meat, more vegetables. All three of those are amazing for muscle and joint recovery, and a healthy diet is pretty much the biggest factor in making sure that your knees and ankles don't die on you after a year. The second biggest factor is rest. If you're losing weight, then you're focusing on burning calories, so you're training as much as you can, resting when your joints feel weak. When you're training, you want to go 100% every time you train (pushing for things you couldn't get last time), and to rest 2 days after a heavy session. Proper recovery is the best way to avoid plateauing, or injuring yourself. Always warm-up before you train, and feel free to stretch after you train. Static stretching is ok, but if you want amazing results, google Deep Tissue Massage. That thing that professional masseuses charge a hundred dollars for, because it fixes back problems, and other muscular ailments (like shin splints)? All you need is a tennis-ball/baseball and a foamroller/pvc pipe.

If you want to improve your upper-body strength, research upper-body calisthenic exercises. Learning planche-progression is great for your kong-vaults, learning l-sit-progression is great for your dash-vaults, and learning to transition between your planche and your l-sit makes your Kash vaults insanely smooth. You can work on these on days when you recover from intense lower-body sessions (working on vaults, precisions). Some other stuff that'll help you and is doable on upper-body days is: laches, kipping muscle-ups, dips. All three of those will build the strength foundation required for learning proper muscle-ups, and proper climb-ups. Handstands are also a good skill to learn, since handstand press-strength helps with both learning double-kongs, and with making your rolls smoother. That's 6 total exercises you can do on your upper-body days, so in my opinion, No you do not need to lift weights when you start out. Bodyweight calisthenics will have a greater carryover to parkour-specific movements.

Sorry if I don't really explain much of the words in that answer, but like I said a complete write-up is impossible. You need to look up the explanations, citations, images, and videos for all these things on your own.

TLDR: Becoming strong and losing weight aren't just about "training hard". They're about "training smart", and "recovering smart". How you train and how you recover depend completely on your goals, which differ from person to person.

Calisthenics (or bodyweight training) is the best way to ready your body for parkour. I've only recently started doing some of this for myself, but after my mate put me onto it, I've read a lot and watched a fair number of explanatory videos. Because it is all based around pulling and pushing exactly your body, that is exactly what you'll be able to do, whereas weights train and prepare your body to pull and push a weight from here to there.

Squats will help with overall muscle development, as well as jumping power. Weighted pull-ups and dips are very effective in training for muscle-ups and climbing in general. I would recommend visiting the r/fitness FAQ and looking into the starting strength program if weight lifting is something you would be interested in supplementing your training with.

I'll also try to make this an announced post and make it infinitely editable if I can figure that stuff out.

The trick to falling is to never hit the ground with one point, but to keep moving. Always try to relax your body and transfer momentum. If you fall on your butt, never place your arms behind you to support yourself, that's an easy way to hurt your wrists. If you're falling straight down, transfer momentum with a tap-out/slap-out. Practice rolling in every single direction. Forward, left, right, and back. Here's a video that discusses the subject of falling in-depth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpGoN_aQatA&list=UUMjErPbXm3vkfKXi_pyxZtQ&index=3&feature=plpp_video

Adam McC's roll tutorial breaks down the roll into it's basic elements. It also covers the most common issues in the roll and how to correct them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6I1J0zmE7U

Personally, Levi's tutorial helped me the most:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JoBLxFKkbM

As for training tips, the biggest one I have is experiment as much as you can with your form on as many surfaces as you can find. So instead of 'practice more', 'practice differently'. Find woodchips, sand, hard soil, long grass. Try paying attention to what each individual limb is doing at various points of your roll, and try moving those limbs in different ways. Rolls are frustrating, because even though oftentimes everyone know's "what" to do, getting your body to find that "diagonal line" that the roll has to follow is hard. Then finding exactly how to contort your body so that you don't hit any sensitive part of your back, is even more difficult.

So instead of 'practicing more', since you usually make the same mistake in terms of form/technique in the course of a day's practice, my advice would be 'practice differently', and 'practice often'. As long as you don't have a serious bruise, practice rolls 7 days of the week. Soon you'll get them.

I'll keep it short.

Progression,Progression,Progression

Start out small, and build up to it.

Progression won't get rid of your fear, but will help you know that you can do whatever you are trying to accomplish

Take for example, a run up cat but there is this 10 foot gap in between the wall and the floor

I would start off with starting with a 3 feet running cat, then 5, then 8, then finally, 10.

Never try something with a drop until you're certain you can do it 99/100 times on flat ground. When you can do it on flat ground, start looking for things with a 1-4ft drop. So stuff you can bounce off of, and land on your butt, but be A-OK. Go up to the object, jump onto it, and fall backwards on your butt on purpose. It won't hurt, and you'll realize there's nothing to be afraid of. After this, you slowly start progressing to doing the same exact move, but a foot higher, and higher, and higher.

If you're still at the point where moves on flat ground scare you, practice going UP as high as you possibly can, and landing straight in front of the object. Going UP is a lot harder than going forward in parkour. Once you can land an inch away from the object, just go for it, knowing that you'll probably fall backwards on your butt.

If you're afraid of falling on your butt... then practice falling on your butt -.- If you're afraid of practicing to fall on your butt, do some backwards-rolls. If you're afraid of backwards-rolls, do forward-rolls. If you're afraid of forward rolls, then maybe parkour isn't for you.

It does depend on what you are talking about. If you are talking about drops and things one thing I like to do is to hang from the thing I'm jumping off of first just to see how it feels a whole body length shorter. With things like flips this issue is harder and more pressing. If you want I can post a video tutorial of exercises I use to teach people to get over the fear of backflipping, front flipping, side flipping, and so on. I have had five "apprentices" and they all know how to do these moves with no fear now. Just message me.

So far, in my whole eight months (massive huh :P) of training, I've found that if you take it back just a tiny bit in these situations, it can be VERY beneficial. An example would be my standing 10' jump that I only just got. I knew I could jump 9' every time, without a lot of trouble, and there's a 10' gap over a creek that I frequent for training. Every time I went there, I felt more and more confident that my body could make the distance, but each time I stepped up to try it for real, I chickened out and went and trained other things. After a while of that I decided to find a jump that was 9 and a half, and try that. I was a little worried, but it looked a lot more like the smaller ones I had been training. Sure enough though, I made it without any hassle. I did that 3 times and figured that if I can two-foot 9.5, I can at the very least crane 10. Went back and took the 10' after a minute or so of telling myself I had just jumped that distance, minus the balls of my feet. Went awesome and I do it every time I'm there now. Once you do this with a few different areas you have mental blocks in, it gives you a MASSIVE confidence boost, and future mental blocks are much easier to overcome.

TL;DR - take the movement back in difficulty just enough that your mind allows you to do it, and believe in your ability when you go for it.

My Parkour/Freerunner mentor told me something about parkour/freerunning shoes.

You know what I use for a parkour shoe? Its called technique. Even if you have the best of the best shoes for parkour, and really bad technique, the shoes will not help. Learning and having good technique is essential when doing parkour.

Anyways, what should you look for? Grip, durability, confortability, and if you personally like it or not.

One sole shoes that have plenty of grip and support. Thats what I find best, but I should point out here and now, try not to get ones with the hard plastic under the bridge of the sole, if your on a rail, those things are deadly.

Kalenjis are good, but then again, preference, try out different shoes and find what makes you feel most comfortable

A good training shoe has relatively thin soles to teach you good form, and grips well to a variety of surfaces.

Five-Ten makes shoes which are known for their grip.

Feiyues are a very popular choice: thin soles, they grip well enough, and they're cheap.

Some people train in Vibrams for the extra sensitivity, though they don't last long and they're a lot more expensive than Feiyues.

If you're interested in practical parkour, you should regularly train in whatever shoes you wear in your day-to-day life. Occasional barefoot training is also helpful, to really get landings down.

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Okay, so you're in mid-air. Both your legs should be straight, with your toes pointed downward, slightly into front of you. Your chest should be pointing forward, your head looking straight. Your arms should be behind you. You should hit the object with the balls of your feet. Bending every single joint INWARD at once, sort of like you're a spring that's compressing. Your ankles, knees, hips, spine, and neck should all bend, tilting inward, and your arms should swing forward.

The calisthetic basis for this motion is the squat, done on your toes. Start from a standing position, with your arms behind you, bend into the lowest squat possible on your toes, bring your arms to your front, and lean on them. That's how you can practice landings without having to jump, and rehabilitate lower-body injuries to check whether or not you're ready to start training again. (It's also why weighted squats are so good for traceurs, if you can hold 2x your bodyweight at the bottom of a squat, holding your normal bodyweight becomes effortless, even when dealing with large amounts of momentum)

The more rigid you are during a landing, the more impact your legs take. Everything in parkour revolves around using your body as a conductor for momentum. When you hit the ground, the force from the impact should transfer through your body, from your legs to your arms. Like a spring. That's why when your arms come forward, you literally 'slap' both of the on the ground in front of you, putting most of your bodyweight on your hands. Don't be afraid of tilting forward slightly, but always make sure you warm up your wrists/arms before you do parkour (along with the rest of your body), and that you aren't coming back from any wrist injuries.

The only difference between landing on a solid object (top of a concrete wall), and a thin object (rail, curved or with edges), is that you land on the back half of the balls of your foot, so that if you mess up the rail slides onto your arches, and you bounce off forward. On concrete, you land on the front part of the ball of your foot, so that the front of your foot 'bends' ever so slightly.

Now then, everyone messes up at least once. What do you do when one or both of your feet slip, and there's a drop in front of you? Well, that's why people practice dash-downs and safety vaults. A dash down is where you literally stand next to the ledge, squat as low as you possibly can, and 'hop' forward while pushing off the ledge with your hands. Memorizing this motion makes it so that your body can gracefully exit out of a big jump that both of your feet slip out of. If one foot slips, your body simply drops down into the memorized 'safety vault' position, where one hand supports half of your weight, and the foot that didn't slip supports the other half. Then you push off, in what I call a 'safety down', and gracefully reposition your body in mid-air to land on both feet.

Sorry for the wall of text. I prefer to be thorough with my answers. If anything is wrong or requires elaboration, feel free to let me know.

1. The roll basically takes all your impact from your fall and spreads it out all around your body, making it less damaging for your legs.

2. I personally roll if the object is taller than me. Idk about everyone else, but we all have our personnel rules for when to roll and not.

3. I personally prefer Ryan Doyle's roll tutorialbut the best tutorial is one on one. If you can find a local parkour group in your area you will have a lot more improvement in a lot of things, compared to videos IMO

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There is a really good video series called Parkour 101 by Parkour Generations. It is a kind of new thing and they are updating it with new videos regularly. This is a link to Parkour Generations youtube page where you can watch any of the parkour 101 videos

Presuming you're from the USA, the American Parkour Forums

I found the group I train with on meetup.com.

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QM is quadrapedal movement, this is movement on your hands and feet. There are dozens of QM variations that work different parts of the body. "Standard QM" works your abs shoulders arms chest and legs. It also helps you learn to control your body and your flexibility. To do the "standard qm" start with your hands and feet on the groud with you butt up in the air a little bit, it should basicly be the downward faceing dog yoga position. Next stagger your feet and hands so your right knee is close to your right elbow. You move by moveing your opposite arm and leg at the same time. So you move your right arm while moving your left leg. To work your shoulders and arms more you can go backwards. Its done the same way expect you go backwards. This video does a really good job at describing it. It also shows several other variations on how to do QM.

Something to add - quadrupedal movement is pretty much the most applicable full-body core-workout when you relate it to parkour. It's the only workout I can think of at the moment, that while developing your core-strength also works on your total-body-balance. Apart from that, just like all of parkour, because it focuses on interaction with the environment there's countless ways of progressing your QM level/skill, and building your core-strength/total-body-balance. You start out doing it on flat ground. Then you take it on a concrete ledge, about .5ft wide. Then you take it onto a thick rail without edges. Then you take it on a really thin rail without edges. Then you can take it on rails that are angled upward and downward. Then you can work on transitioning from the QM position, to the squat on a rail, to a standing position or QMing in the opposite direction. Then you can take off your shoes, and do it barefoot. Then you can speed up, and attempt to do it faster with all of these different variations. There's a world of possibilities out there, and QM is the only core-strengthening full-body-balance workout that I can come up with. It's simply amazing for training your body to actually CONTROL your body, which is why it's so helpful for traceurs - beginners and pros alike.

A plethora of different things for a vast number of people. In the literal sense it's overcoming obstacles as efficiently as possible, but only about 1-5% of the people I see training ever do more than 1 move more at a time, unless they're filming. So as much as people love to throw that definition around, barely anyone actually trains with it in mind. For most people it's a communal thing, social interaction, making new friends, and exploring new places with those friends. Getting over fear, and helping your friends get over fear. For some people it's a way to relieve stress, because the number of things in this world that irritate and frustrate us seems to grow on a daily basis, or maybe it's just aging that makes people more and more stressed out. For some people it's just pure joy, a way to put a smile on your face when you're bored or sad. For some people it's constant progression, always pushing yourself, keeping track of your progress and your weaknesses. For some people it's a way to connect with the environment, and to discover places you never would've imagined existed.

Most people that do parkour do it for more than one of those reasons, so it's really a matter of choosing what parkour means to you, and training as often as you can.

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You can really start from the ground. Start in a crouch, reach your hands out and then snap your legs between your hands. To build strength, try to do this with as much control as possible-- lowing your feet slowly and softly to the ground. You can build power by diving in front of you with your hands, and trying to pull your feet ahead of your hands. After that, it's just a matter of finding a nice height to start with and practice, practice, practice. Good luck!

This shouldn't be possible. A monkey vault is pretty much the safest vault out there, because your legs should never be going forward before they go up. If you clip your shins, you're not paying attention to your body's movement in mid-air, and stubbornly forcing it to go forward on an object that's too high for you right now. Find a lower object, like, much lower. Start with something around knee-height. Stand right next to it, put both of your hands on it, and literally 'jump on it', without taking your hands off of it. You should end in a really low squat with your hands outside of your feet, and your feet should be really close together.

Please, do not, do not, do not try diving monkey-vaults for a while. The fact that your shins are clipping means you don't have an understanding of how to make your body 'jump up', and if you attempt to dive into a monkey vault, aka 'kong vault', you'll probably bash your knees. Upward momentum guarantees safety, forward momentum brings pain.

Height in jumps usually corresponds to where your center of mass is when you take off. This isn't exactly about blocking, but it's related. Basically, when you take off, since you do need to more forward and you're focused on that, you will direct your head and body towards your landing zone. Instead, try directing the rest of your body upwards while jumping - swing and throw your arms upward as you takeoff, stick your chin up, pull your chest up. This can help drive your momentum higher and create the arc that gives you a controlled landing.

Use the balls of your feet to transfer shock and momentum into the landed-upon object. Due to this make sure the things you are jumping to and from are stable. Also have good traction on your shoes. Other than that Practice Practice Practice and scale up your jump lengths, height differences, and angles.

http://parkourgenerations.com/article/parkour-history

to be honest, nobody really "invented it"

We just like to jump around. Its human nature to do what we do as traceurs. That's why they have playgrounds for little kids, and jungle gyms, since at a small age, we aren't I guess, matured, and like to play.

David Belle was the first to give this type of movement of playing with your obstacles a name, and that's how parkour got its name.

Parkour is a movement discipline that began in France in the 80s, so there are a lot of terms that have come from France, some of which overlap with English terms. The word parkour itself is derived from the word parcours du combattant, the military obstacle course that inspired David Belle and his friends to move and explore early on. They played with the spelling and came up with parkour.

Traceur comes from a group of early parkour practitioners in France. They called themselves traceurs, which translates to "tracer," as in "a person who traces," harking to a common style of training in parkour which involves "tracing" a course through a series of obstacles. The term spread as parkour spread through the world, and is the generally accepted term for a practitioner of parkour. "Parkourer," "parkourista," or other bastardizations will get you dirty looks, so if there's one term you want to know, it might be this one.

If you are new to parkour, you may also be hearing a lot of French words thrown around for technique names. These are less commonly used in the English speaking world and it's not really important to confuse yourself with too much. If you're interested though, here is a glossary of French parkour terms from Parkour Visions (scroll to the bottom).