Using Powerlifting to Boost Your Performance in Free Running or Parkour
Free-running or Parkour is a sport which fascinates almost everyone. To those of you who haven’t heard about it before, it is a sport focused on overcoming obstacles in your path, which involves moving or going to some place in the fastest and most efficient way possible. It can be thought of as a combination of a variety of movements like jumping, climbing, swinging, vaulting, leaping, rolling and last but in no means the least, running! But it is wrongly considered very difficult to perform by most of the aspiring traceurs/traceuse (practitioners of parkour) and future free runners! It can be very difficult for most of us to just perform a single push-up or pull-up Therefore, advanced Calisthenics, which are most commonly advised and used for beginning Parkour can be a nightmare for most of us! Thus resulting in many people leaving their practice in between.
But we do have a solution for this problem. The solution lies in a sport, which is unknown to most of us, namely Powerlifting! Powerlifting is a weight training discipline which involves just three main exercises and with a focus on achieving the highest one-rep weight. But it can be modified to suit your needs.
A perfect example, which even I used, is the StrongLifts 5×5 program, and most importantly it is free and tried and tested by 1000s of people around the world. If you are such a person, who can’t perform a single pull-up, using any such powerlifting program, you can achieve anywhere from 2 to 10 pull-ups in less than 2 months! Which is next to impossible to achieve with just Calisthenics and more importantly, it will be a boring process. As we add weight every time in most of the powerlifting programs, it keeps the person glued to the workout unlike other gym routines and exercise plans. Thus, you start enjoying your workout and reach your goal towards a much fitter and STRONGer body, the perfect recipe needed to start freerunning or parkour!
BENEFITS OF POWERLIFTING IN FREERUNNING
We can consider some of the practical examples to prove the fact that Powerlifting does improve your performance in Parkour/Freerunning. Weight training is considered wrong by majority of free runners as it increases their weight which is not good and they are correct. But what many people fail to understand, is that Powerlifting is not like the usual Bodybuilding process, where people just keep doing workouts for achieving hypertrophy(Muscular Hypertrophy is increasing the size of the muscles) rather than strength. But Powerlifting programs focus on core strengthening and increase body’s strength level to a much greater height.
For eg., the Deadlift, one of the fundamental exercises of Powerlifting, involves picking up a barbell loaded with weight from the floor up to the lower waist level and keeping it back on the floor. This strongly strengthens the spinal chord, lower-back, and overall body parts which can provide so much help in increasing the core strength for calisthenics and the ability of lift your own body much easily.
