How To Parkour: 3 Simple Steps To Get Started In Parkour Training
If you want to learn how to parkour, you have to build the muscle strength and coordination to do it.
If you don’t condition or train your body for parkour, you will find when you try to do the basic parkour movements, like the wall run, you will come up short, STRUGGLE to climb up the wall, and likely pull a muscle or injure yourself.
You will find yourself scared before big jumps and not confident in your movements.
When you do condition your body and develop the muscles for parkour. You will be strong with your movements. Your wall run will be fast and smooth. You will be confident before big jumps and know 100% how your body is going to react. You will rarely get injured. You will last years with parkour.
So what kind of strength and muscle do we need to build for parkour?
We don’t want to spend all of our time in a gym, lifting heavy weights in 5 different motions, that’s for sure. We need to build lean efficient muscle. You want your body to be agile, flexible, and pound for pound very strong.
Picture an Olympic gymnast, their body’s are the perfect build; ripped, lean, and extremely efficient.
Their bodies are agile and flexible enough to flip around. They’re built dense and strong to perform incredible feats of strength like the iron cross and planche.
How do we build that parkour strength and muscle?
Weighted exercise are great and needed but we also need to train a lot of body-weight workouts, build flexibility, increase agility, and cut any unwanted fat from our bodies. We throw a little bit of weighted exercises but we concentrate on turning our bodies into efficient, agile, dense, machines.
Here a 3 Simple Action Steps you can implement right now to start your parkour training journey –
1. Perform a light WARM-UP before each workout session and STRETCH after.
The warm-up before training parkour is crucial. If you don’t warm up before doing parkour you will find your body does not feel energized during training and you will get injured frequently (muscle pulls, sprains, and strains).
If you do warm-up your body will be energized during training and you won’t get injured as often.
What warming up does is raise your core body temperature, getting your muscles, ligaments, and tendons pliable and ready for action. When your muscles are tight and cold they have trouble stretching and moving around. So this causes them to pull or strain. Parkour involves a lot of movement and stress on the body. You want your muscles, ligaments, and joints pliable.
Your warm-up should be around 10-15 minutes long and have mostly light exercises and dynamic stretches.
After your parkour training session, end off with stretching. Stretching after your workout will help with flexibility and your muscles won’t be as sore or fatigued the next day or parkour session.
Stretch each muscle group and hold the stretch for 1 to 1 1/2 minutes. Take deep slow breaths as you stretch and try to relax your muscles. You shouldn’t feel pain during your stretches.
2. Start putting pull-up, push-up, squat jump, sit-up, and dip variations into your workouts 3 times a week.
In Parkour you need to have full control of your body and the strength to move it around. These basic body weight exercises are a great start to build your parkour foundation.
3. Implement a fat burning, muscle building diet.
Consume as many fresh whole foods as possible, eat a variety of different color fruits and vegetables, drink plenty of water, this should be your primary drink.
If we have some fat we need to burn, make sure to take in less calories than you’re burning.
This final step will get your body ripped and also give you more energy throughout the day.
