Natural Athletics

Competition and Parkour

2010-01-05T15:08:00.001-08:00

We are going to take a quick detour on the blog here and talk about specific issues in the world of Parkour. I will be back to blogging on my ideas about and evolutionary approach to fitness over the weekend.

Two years ago I wrote an article about my opposition to competition with in Parkour. It was well received within the Parkour community and I think in many ways came to represent the anti-competition stance, in this article I am going show why my position has changed.

In my previous article I outlined two primary reasons for being against parkour competition. The first was that parkour as a discipline was general and that a competition would perforce be specific and that this would narrow the definition of the discipline as has happened with martial arts, where people stop training for the discipline and start training for the sport. The second was that the competition would encourage athletes to take dangerous risks with their body and this was contrary to the ideals of parkour as a life long discipline.

At the time Jesse Woody made the point that these problems already existed but I held hope that we as a community could overcome them and feared that competition would greatly exacerbate them.

In my view, neither of my primary concerns have proven true. Even then parkour was a competitive sport, practiced for general ability by only the smallest handful of people. Most people are attracted to parkour from seeing videos online and most people then wanted to put their own videos online to impress everyone else. We copy the movements we see online, you can see trends develop as to what is the latest fashion in parkour - kong to precisions, cranes, kong to cat, etc. There is competition in parkour and has been from the very beginning; the competition of who can put out the best video.

Between the time I wrote the last essay and this one I have gone from being a gymnastics coach who teaches occasional parkour clinics to a full time parkour coach. I have worked with over 400 athletes as a coach, and met countless others as at jams and gatherings. Here is what I have seen: parkour, which when practiced safely is one of the safest possible sports in the world, is damaging lots of people because they're trying big drops and jumps far before their bodies are able to handle them because they're trying to live up to the videos they're seeing on YouTube. All the problems of competition are already part and parcel of our community.

In addition to the video competition, there are now competitive events; red bull art of motion, barclay card freerunning world championships, parcouring, and most recently the world parkour free running ultimate challenge. The capacities displayed at these have not been broad or general. The athletes competing have largely been unable to continuing moving for even a couple minutes, and all of the formats so far have focused primarily on acrobatics which were never the focus of any of the founders of parkour/free running/l'art du deplacement. Finally, injuries have been frighteningly common at these competitions. At the recent UPC, 4 of 8 athletes were injured or had dramatic falls during the competition. King David fell attempting a large jump diagonally to a ladder. Daniel Arroyo slipped on a lache and landed on his head, spraining his neck and suffering a minor concussion. Brian Orosco knocked himself loopy banging his head on the ground on roll out of a diving front flip. Ryan Doyle shattered his leg at the red bull art of motion championships, and Gaettan Bouillett blew out his knee at the WFC.

There is one upside to these competitions so far; they have mostly been poorly produced and have had little impact on the parkour community or mainstream conciousness. The prediction that competition would make the rest of the parkour community more reckless in their training does not seem to be true so far.

At this point though it seems clear to me that we cannot ignore competition in parkour. We cannot hope that online protests or ignoring or boycotting competitions will have any effect on them.

As I see it, Parkour/freeruning right now is competitive. It is extremely narrow and specific in application and has very limited transfer to utlity application as commonly practiced.

However there are possible benefits to competition which the current formats have not given us. Competition can benefit a discipline. Just as some martial arts fall into the trap of becoming sports and forgetting the parts of the discipline not applicable to the sport, so martial arts that do not compete often become directionless; all theory and no practical application. When military, police and security want extra training in combat skills they do not turn to Tai Chi, they turn to Judo, Muay Thai, and competitive styles of Karate. They turn to these disciplines because they do something very well; they have a measurable way to say what skill is, and they have solutions honed by competition.

In my own practice and the classes we teach we have found competition to be both fun, rewarding and immensely developmental of ability and understanding in what it truly effective. We do time trials through obstacle courses, run races, and play tag and capture the flag. All are forms of competition and all are in my opinion not only good parkour training but absolutely necessary.

Competition does increase the chance of injury but it also helps us discover what really works, it can create community by bringing people together for events, and yes it can help the individual athletes who wish to eventually earn a living from it.

A good example of this is the Sasuke Ninja Warrior competition. These do not carry the parkour name, and they existed before parkour was well known in Japan, but the competition is an excelent testing ground for parkour skill. More and more traceurs have been traveling to Japan to take on the challenge. This show is almost universally admired by traceurs. It is all about movement, effectiveness, has a great history of safety, and has postively effected training as I know many traceurs who are now practicing more climbing skills due to the influence of the show, a skill that is necessary and sorely lacking in much of the parkour community.

This last summer I went to two major jams, Toronto and Denver and helped host a third in Seattle. At each jam there was a small competition. The Toronto competition was based on the game Mirrors Edge and the Denver one was based on Ninja Warrior. The Seattle competition was less formal, just a time trial training period during the jam based on some of the training we had been doing. All were very well recieved by the people at the jams, no significant injuries happened at any despite over 70 participating at both the Toronto and Denver jams, and 15 or so in seattle. This despite very limited preparation or safety precautions, and I felt like we all walked away a little enlighted as to what really works.

Brayden Jones beat out Dim Monk in Toronto despite a slightly rougher set of techniques because he was simply the fastest runner. This is something few traceurs focus on or realize being able to run fast is more key to most escape and reach situations than any parkour technique. The same thing occured in Seattle. Brian, a former soccer player with minimal parkour experience, blew everyone away due to footspeed. How many practice hours has the average traceur put into sprinting and running technique compared to say Kong vaults, or silly things like flips and spins? In Denver, Tyson won the challenge in large part due to superior upper body strength and climbing skill, two things that are also underfocused on in the parkour community.

Competition crystallizes what works. The problem with the current parkour/freerunning competitions is that, like the competition on the Internet, it has not been about what works but about what looks good. Aesthetics-based competition truly misses the heart of this discipline, as well as being inevitably subjective and subject to endless politics. The job of a soldier a firefighter, or truly needing to reach or escape is competitive, because your life or someone else may depend on your abilities. Free-form training does not capture that intensity or inform us about what works in that type of situation, but proper competition brings us closer to it.

It does not matter to me if these competitions are called parkour or not. At this point the name is not important. What I care about is the discipline of improving myself through movement, and becoming faster, stronger, more coordinated and agile, more courageous and focused. If competition helps me do that and helps me train athletes to achieve those things, then I am in favor of it. I also believe that taking competition into our own hands and creating formats that reflect the grass-roots level understanding of parkour, not the show that Hollywood wants to make it, is the best way to protect and grow parkour in the long run. One thing I think might be protective of the wider aspects of Parkour is a specific name for the competitions. Just as sparring in Karate is called Kumite, we could come up with a specific work for the competitive aspects of parkour training. I suggest the word "Coursing." The name is of course not important but clear communication is.

The competitions so far have been poorly designed spectacles created by people who don't understand the discipline, but rather as a marketable product. But this is not how great sports grow. They grow internally. Look at the coverage of the UPC vs. the coverage of track and field or gymnastics in the Olympics. Which model would be preferable for parkour?

Most of all, what I would like to see is us as a community finding ways to develop competitive formats that help us achieve the basic goals of this discipline, and take the future of parkour and competition into our own hands.

Posted via web from Evolutionary Athletics's posterous

Conceptualizing Fitness Evolutionarily

2010-01-02T21:20:00.001-08:00

Let me preface by saying this is all conceptualizing based on the best information I can find. None of this is experimental, verified, or based on long term observational studies. It's not science, it's just an attempt to understand fitness logically based on information pulled from scientific sources.

Evolutionary science defines fitness as success in propagating your genetic material. This definition does not intially seem to be related to our concept of physical fitness, or what is sometimes defined as physiological fitness, but in truth they are closely connected. Before an animal can reproduce it has to survive. Everything we see as fitness or athletiscm can be seen as directly relating to the ability to survive: strength, speed, power, agility, accuracy, balance, flexibility, endurance, and stamina. Every one of these elements can be crucial to survival. Fitness is the extent of the development of those physical qualities which improve survival. Fitness is survivability.

While this may seem less meaningfull in the modern world were survival to reproductive age and beyond is virtually assured, these same qualities that allowed us to survive help us survive longer and healthier now, the strong muscles and dense bones that helped us hunt down prey or fight of predators in the past can help us survive car crashes today or in old age it can be the difference between a fall having fatal complications and being a mere inconvience.

If you define fitness this way, it becomes clear that development of only one aspect of fitness is not sufficient. Being very very strong but unable to walk up two flight of stairs without stopping for breath would not have kept you alive in our evolutionary past, just as being able to run for miles and miles but being unable to lift heavy objects, jump powerfully or fight would not be sufficient. I believe that a balanced physical development not only makes survival in the unlikely event of a life or death situation more possible, but it also improves quality of life throughout life.

There are three broad categories you can divide survival-relevant movement patterns into: locomotion, manipulation and combat. Locomotion is any movement pattern that moves the individual's body through space. Manipulation is any movement pattern involving moving an external body through space. Combat is defined as movement patterns devoted to dealing with or resisting an external force.

I view this as a sort of pyramid of fitness:

Each Level builds upon the one before it. An athlete must have the proper mobility, coordination and strength to do an air squat before they will be able to squat with a object balanced on his shoulder, and he should be strong lifting inanimate objects before he tries to lift a resisting force on his shoulder and toss it off. Each level in this pyramid represents increased motor complexity.

Looking at it as a pyramid also reflects a pattern of regularity of occurence as well. While demands across these activities have varied over time, it seems safe to say that virtually always we have moved ourselves more often than outside inanimate objects, and inanimate objects more often than resisting opponents. Even soldiers in war spend far more time marching and lugging gear than actually fighting.

Finally, each level represents increasingly potential dangerous challenges. A push-up is safer than a bench press is safer than trying to push a opponent off of you who is trying to rain punches on your face.

An evolutionarily-fit athlete must have development across all of these levels.

It is clear that sports fall into these patterns as well. The most popular sports tend to demonstrate some level of capacity across all three realms of fitness. To excel at football, basketball, or soccer, one must be able to run and jump, manipulate an object effectively, deal with contact from other athletes, predict patterns and employ strategy. In short, sport appears to be sanitized rituals of group combat.

The basic idea here is that fitness can be defined as those physical capacities related to survival, and that balanced development of these capacities must be based on understanding the relationship between locomotive, manipulative and combative capacities.

In the next installment I will look into some examples of how this pattern is congruent with what we see in child play behavior and in the movement patterns of traditional cultures.

Posted via web from Evolutionary Athletics's posterous

Untitled

2010-01-02T21:18:00.001-08:00

I view this as a sort of pyramid of fitness:

An evolutionarily-fit athlete must have development across all of these levels.

In the next installment I will look into some examples of how this pattern is congruent with what we see in child play behavior and in the movement patterns of traditional cultures.

Posted via web from Evolutionary Athletics's posterous

Transitioning

2010-01-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

I am going to be writing a allot more on my evolutionary athletics blog again I since i have this nice autopost function I will send them over here for awhile but I encourage everyone to subscribe to me over there.

Why Evolutionary Athletics

2010-01-02T13:06:00.001-08:00

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." -Theodiosis Dobzhansky

The thesis behind this blog and my approach to physical training and lifestyle is based on this quote. The human body is a biological phenomenon we can not hope to understand how to best optimize its function for health or performance without approaching it from an evolutionary perspective. We need to understand the context from which we have arisen.

This is my second blog; my previous blog was given the name Natural Athletics. You can find it here. There is a reason for the name change. As my thinking has evolved it has become clear to me that evolution is poorly understood by many in the fitness field and that far too many in the fields of health and fitness fall into naturalistic fallacies when trying to understand the human body's function.

According to Crossfit, squatting is natural but leg pressing is not. According to Methode Naturelle, it is natural to be nearly nude and it is not natural to wear clothes. According to MovNat, practicing movement is natural and conditioning training is not. According to the Paleo Diet it is natural for humans to eat meat, it is unnatural for us to eat grains. According to vegetarians it is not natural to eat meat. According to bodyweight culturists it's not natural to train using weights, etc., etc.

Each of these are based on assumptions of an inherent human nature that is unchanged and unchangeable from some primordial beginning. Instead of basing believes on Genesis, Paleo proponents for example see 100,000-10,000 years ago as our time of being natural and everything that deviates from that as unnatural.

All of this is logically very weak and easily falls into dogmatism. If humans are an evolved phenomenon and a product of nature then would not everything we do be an expression of nature? How and where do we define the line between natural and unnatural? Furthermore, there is an assumption that what is natural is good and what is unnatural is bad, at least in whatever domain we are talking about. Of those who advocate for a natural diet, few are advocating for abandoning their central heating or plumbing, which are certainly no more natural then Hot Pockets. "Natural" is an ill-defined concept that does nothing to further our understanding. Peach pits filled with arsenic are perfectly natural and they are not good or bad in and off themselves. What we can say though is that humans do not have an evolved capacity to handle the levels of arsenic present in them and that using them as food sources is a dangerous and stupid idea.

Therefore, by basing our hypotheses about health and fitness on evolution, rather than what's "natural," we are able to use and apply a logical and extremely powerful theoretical framework to our understanding of how best to optimize human function.

This blog is not about claiming to have an answer; a system perfectly derived from understanding human evolution and sports science for how to optimize physical function for all individuals in all athletics pursuits. Far from it. What I want to achieve here is to help move the dialogue about fitness forward; to be putting forward my thoughts on training and trying to ground them in sound evolutionary thinking.

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to produce articles outlining my core ideas and how I have come to them.

1. Defining Fitness Evolutionarily

2. Fundamentals of Movement

3. A Critique of Crossfit, Methode Naturelle and MovNat

4. Evolutionary Thoughts on Diet

Posted via web from Evolutionary Athletics's posterous

12/29/09

2010-01-01T21:54:00.001-08:00

Last workout of the year, Deload week on 5/3/1 still working hard on my gymnastics and pull ups.

Weighted pull ups +5x3, +10x3, 15x3, 25x3, 30x3, 20x3, 15x3, 10x3

Squats, 45x10, 135x5, 155x4, 170x5, 205x5

L-hold-Tuck planche 3second hold x 3 3x press shoudler stand

First set had to break up the shoulder stands second set I as short on shoulderstands, 3 sets was the best got the second on video.

Gymnastics Sequence

205x5 squats

Lost the footage of the pull ups.

Felt great after this work out very fresh liking the ramp up and down on the pull ups feel like I need more volume but again want to keep the movement quality real high.

Posted via web from Rafe's Training Log

Moving My blog

2009-12-29T00:44:00.000-08:00

I will be moving my blogging over to posterous.com it gives me chance to connect a blog for musings on evolutionary fitness, with a training log and a general log for everybody at parkour visions to update about classes. Check out my new blogs at

evolutionaryathletics.posterous.com

rafestraininglog.posterous.com

parkourvisions.posterous.com

Thanks.

Rafe

There is no monster

2009-12-23T15:12:00.000-08:00

Over the last three years I have been exposed extensively to Crossfit, Methode Naturelle(or so I thought), MovNat, and parkour. I have seen flaws and wholes in each of these methods and have wanted to compose and write my own method synthesising the best elements of my training with my understanding of evolutionary theory and sports science. I have struggled with this allways running into more questions everytime I tried to figure out what my answers were.

Opening my own gym has really created an awareness in me of how much I don't know of how much experimentation and experience it takes not just with yourself but working with other athletes before you are really. The strength and conditioning Authors I currently respect the most have worked thousands of athletes I have not. It would be arrogant of me to try to write something and present as complete system when I am still testing so many of my ideas when my own practice as coach is still so young.

My goal now is grow my practice on ground continue learning and changing refining my knowledge and helping as many people as possible develop their movement capacities, health and connection with the world. I will what time I can into the blog in hopes that it will do that but I will not be trying to come out with special system or approach to training not anytime soon anyways.

Parkour Programing

2009-12-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

Lately this blog has become a place to put my personal training and most of that has been focused towards weight training in no small degree due to injuries that have limited my parkour training. However I have been coaching 14 classes a week and having a great deal of fun doing that. I think we have come up with some very interesting classes and excellent programming for developming movement skill and I want to share that with people, we have been uploading pictures and videos and occasional thoughts to the parkour visions mini-blog at www.parkourvisions.posterous.com I will be moving my personal blog over there as well soon and trying to condense and connect all my activites. Check it out.

Upper body 2

2009-12-21T23:17:00.000-08:00

Irritating day, foot was feeling better so I played around in parkour and found myself to be far more rusty then I had excepted stuff that seemed like it should be easy just wasn't that got me frustrated and pissed of then I put my foot down wrong and basically jammed up the 1st and second metatarsals bad enough that I am limping hopefully the damage is not of the lasting kind this foot thing is killing me. Before that stupidity I had fun setting routes on our new rock wall for about an hour not hard climbing but nice to stretch that element out a bit.

Strength training followed the end of open gym Overhead press and Weighted pull ups I am feeling like a little hypertrophy in my upper body would help gain strength in what is huge trouble area for me not only is is hard to gain strength in my upper body its easy to lose. So I am going to see how adding volume work after my strength work helps plus heavy post work out nutrition.

Overhead Press

115x5, 125x3, 130x8

pull up 25+BWx3 30x3 35x4

Volume Work

85 pound press, Kipping pull up, Dip, BW row

Round 1, 10-10-10-10

Round 2, 8-10-8-8

Squat problems

2009-12-19T19:03:00.000-08:00

Theres an old saying in the strength training community if your the strongest guy in your gym your in the wrong gym overall for barbell strength that is definately were I am in, and I have had trouble getting my training partners to cue me properly it looks like this has resulted in insufficent depth in my squat. Which I will have to fix now hopefully with the help of video now I will be able to get my training partners to give me the right cues.

12/18

Strength training

Squat 255x3, 290x3 320x10 with the aforementioned short range of motion.

L-hold-Tuck planche 5sec hold x3x2 6x1 press pike press to shoulder stand. Gymnastic progression very hard after heavy squats will try to start doing my gymanastics sessions seperately. Going to narrow my focus to in order to make better gains just the above sequence and press to handstands.

Prior to my strength training I did 1.5 of parkour mostly warm up with rail balance challenges basically doing my best to dance on top of the ground rail trainers I am no Oleg Vorslav but it was fun. Then lots of stride challenges tic tacs, vaults avoided climbing due to very sore upper body from the previous days training. Got one fun line on video one transition was a little week and theres some excess tension in my upper body but I think it looks fairly nice.

Upper Body

2009-12-17T21:54:00.000-08:00

This week has been hard, I have had serious sleep disturbances all week plus earlier morning commitments. Been following the debates about rest plus noticing my major performance fall backs when tired so decided to wait till my rest got better.

Today was not that day. I got off work last night at 12:30am asleep at 1:30 up at 6:30am undisturbed sleep though. Demo for local news from 7:30-9:30am, mostly jumps and tic tacs a few underbars.

Decided to go ahead and work out body felt the need for it despite mental fatigue 9:00PM

Pull ups 2x5 1x10

Bench Press 1x5 155, 1x3 175, 1x6 195

Dips 3x10

Assisted Straddle Press Handstand 3x5

Notes:

Had noticed I had lost strength with my pull ups attributed to back spasm in september, had similar problem following bicep injury in febuary. Going to really focus on pullups 3 days a week alternating between pull ups max reps and weigthed pull ups want over 15 dead hang chest to bar pull ups and 1x +70 by febuary 1st.

Bench stronger then last time still not as good as my peak last cycle hopefully will be stronger with better rest next week.

PR's

2009-12-11T21:38:00.001-08:00

12.10.09

Scheduled Deadlift and Press day, slept went to bed at 1:30 am, tossed and turned till 4:00 am woke up 4 times during the night before waking up for good at 10:00 am. Skipped. In bed by 1:15 asleep by 1:45

12.11.09

Still fatigued but functionally, foot feeling much better still delicate though. 1.5 hour light parkour trianing, some frustration with intially really week box jumps and climb ups seemed to break through the fugue and had some good climb ups finally hit the big box jump which felt awesome first time I have box jumped in 2 months due to the foot. Took a while to get rid of neural inhibitions. Hit a 9^4 standing broad which is 4 inches shorter then my all time best once my foot heals I want to really focus on getting my all my jump goals going again I want a 10 foot broad, 16 foot running precision, 35 inch vert and 13.5 foot wall pass. Tyson and I tested one step one foot jumps vs, one step double foot jumps verdict no real difference both of us were able to get 8-12 inches further off one step using either method.

Broad jumps 9^4x1 9x10

One step broad jumps 10x9^8-10^6 depending

49 inch box jumpx3

Strength Training

Deadlift 350x10

Press 125x9

Funny I seem to be hitting 10's just about every time on the deadlift. On quibble on this one I pulled a muscle in my forearm some how doing muscle ups so created a makeshift strap for that hand. Anyways this was satisfying, minor back rounding, not worrisome, front loaded on my last rep and finished my hip before my knee meaning I had to finish the lift all quad which was hard, had to scream it out everything else felt solid.

Press was even more exciting my upper body has been such a pain lately two steps back for every step forward, this was solidly my strongest performance ever on the press the last rep was a hell of grind but if I am anywhere close to the 160 1rm this calculates out as I would be super stoked as 150 is the best I have ever done and that was a one time fluke I have consistently ceilinged at 145 every other time I have focused on this lift. Hopefully this 5/3/1 programming is working and I can get my recovery in line and bust those old plateaus.

Squat day 3

2009-12-08T22:10:00.001-08:00

Foot is feeling better I can run, and jump without irritating it but if it is impacted on the side or I move hard laterally it acts up its also stiff and needs to regain limberness. I am really wanting to train again I need to be really carefull about it training regressing now would really suck.

Anyways played in the park for 30 minutes with the dog, jogging around short spurts of speed, wall passed into and climbed some tree's threw the ball a bunch, played tag. 32 degrees and sunny beautiful day only guys at the park bareshirt.

Did a bit of parkour stuff in the gym before my training and after during the intermediate class pretty minor stuff. Also did a bunch of mobility stuff.

Strength training:

Squat 245x3, 275x3, 315x9 Really wanted 10 here but I got into the whole rocked forward a bit and just stuck, If I could have stayed back and bounced of my hamstrings better I would have had it.

Pull up going to use the 5-3-1 method here assuming a max of 40 + which is pathetic but cogent with current performance

15+x5, 20x3, 25x5

So disgusted but should probably scale this back even more Suck.

LH-TP-PSTx3

Glute Ham raise 2x5

Sleep is Key

2009-12-04T20:50:00.000-08:00

So I pretty much sucked today. I have been sleeping poorly all week to the point half through my deadlift workout last night I started feeling light headed and decided I would be better of delaying it and doing dead and bench today then I went home and didn't get to sleep till 3:00 am, and woke up twice in night/morning. I decided to fight through the fatigue and get my workout in today anyways the results were sub par though I did try one interesting thing with cool results.

Deadlift 260x5, rack pull 425x3, deadlift 290x5, 330x10

Pike Press to elevated headstand 1x5, straddle press to EHS 2x5

Bench press 140x5, 160x5, 185x3

330x10 is obvously weaker then 340x10 and 185x3 is even more obviously terrible compared to 205x4 and no this time I didn't f-up the math.

The one cool part of today was the deadlifting 290 after the rack pulls that was the best set of the day I was preparing for it to be heavy and it came up like 200 just flew of the ground its technique I have been wanting to try going for supra maximal short range lift to trick the nervous system into precieving my work sets as lighter seemed to work at least for the first set.

The last set I didn't really feel week I just couldn't get a full focus, a full effort out my last couple 10 rep set have left me gasping for the air on the ground like I had just run an all out 400, here my form just got more and more erratic to the point I just had to call it quits. The bench was more pathetic 140 and 160 went up fast and easy 185 felt ridiculous every rep was slow on the 4 rep I stopped mid range and just could not finish. I have some tricks up my sleeve to get my sleep back on track and hopefully will get back to progressing nicely next week.

Bad Math

2009-12-02T00:12:00.000-08:00

Very sore today though not as wiped after my last squat day got my workout in between classes very little accesory work not allot of time to warm up ended up messing up my math on my overhead press I was supposed to finish at 125 for as many reps as possible. I put 135 on by mistake.

Warm up, 20 squats, 10 push ups, quadrupedal movement, 10 lazy spin drop backs, 10 reverse spin drop backs, 20x20kg KB swings and 20 sledge hammer circles.

Strength work

Overhead Press 45x10 90x5, 115x5, 135x2

TFL pulls 3x5

1.5 hours later 120x6 overhead press

Felt very dissapointed with the overhead press untill realized it was 135 though even at that weight 2 is not acceptable. 120x6 after a the previous work and with minimal warm up is not to bad I think. I will will stay at my previous weight on 3's next week and see if I can beat my performance.

Squat Day 2

2009-11-30T22:51:00.001-08:00

Last week was my deload week which I didn't feel like bothering to log, I did miss my deadlift and bench press deload work outs but I am not to worried about it.

Today

Fasted from 11 pm the previous night.

8-8:45Very light parkour , foot is not healing so I am going back to trying to rest it as much as possible just did a few muscle ups some ground flow and spinny stuff.

Strength Training:

Squat 235x5 280x5, 300x12

Pull up +20 3x5

L 3second hold-TP 3second holdx3 press shoulderstand x3 2 rounds

Glute Ham raise slight bent hips 2x5

Climbing static strength for grip for the finisher.

Was super excited to get 12 on the squat that calculates out as 432 single rep not a reliable number of course but relatively my strongest performance on the squat yet, especially happy since it came after a full days fast. I was very strong through the first 7 started slowing but still solid through 10, had to make reset mentally to keeping going into 11 but did it fairly well, lost tension and had to reset before my 12th super slow last rep had really struggle to keep from coming forward and losing my lordosis.

Pull ups really need to get stronger, climb ups had regressed today but after some work improved.

Deadlift day

2009-11-21T14:16:00.000-08:00

Good day of training yesterday on and off parkour for 2 hours, mostly light stuff vaults, underbars, cat leaps lots of top outs, weird spiny stuff.

Strength Training

Deadlift 275x5, 305x3, 340x10

Feel like I can rip the bar up faster on the light weights just need to train myself too and I think that will help with the heavy weights. The 340x10 was exciting that equates to max above my tested best 1rm, form felt solid for all but a couple reps front loaded and rounded out a bit on my last rep, I might have a had a couple more in the tank too but again form is more important right now.

Tuck press to handstand shoulders against wall 3x5

Handstand holds

Top outs 2x5 as fast as possible

Glute Ham raise 2x5

Did not feel nearly as crushed from this as from the last squat day, going into my deload week now looking forward to getting back in with the fives again on the next cycle hope my foot is full healed by then and I can step up my parkour training again too.

Crushed

2009-11-17T21:21:00.001-08:00

I knew yesterdays workout was going to crush me, and it didn't dissapoint I was zombie the rest the evening and have been irritable and had waves of fatigue today despite 10 hours of sleep. The thing is I miscalculated I thought I had completed my week of 1's on 5/3/1 except the squat turns out I still had press and deadlift to get through, thursday is going to be fun.

Today I cut down the accesory work to just front levers and tried to get it all done as quick as possible feel like If had been more warmed up and pyschological there I might have been stronger but would have taken more out of me.

Anyways results

Warm up

Swings 25 P-bar swing feeling more confident by the day

Handstands 15 attempts more quality reps every time still way of my previous bests when I was in gymnastics.

Press 105x5 new it was bad day when this was hard, 120x3, 130x4. Was hoping for 6 that would have been better then my previous 120x8, no such luck every rep was a struggle.

Tuck FL 2x10 seconds, TFL pulls 1x5

Back to Heavy Lifting

2009-11-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterdays training wiped me out like only heavy lifting can.

Parkour/gymnastics: 1.5 hours skill work, started with p-bar swings and handstands which are definately improving, then Vault flow, underbars, short running cat leaps, lots of muscle ups starting to get stronger at them again poping through to mid dip not the close to all in one motion I had but getting closer.

Strength training: Squat Day

255x5, 285x3, 320x6

Opened my last set with a crappy rep rounded back, coming forward on the toes, struggled through the middle on the concentric, thought I might have to bail, second was good, third had allot of forward lean, forth and fifth good sixth front loaded a little struggled to finish, might have had another rep or two in me but with form going all to hell didn't want to chance it. Not as strong a performance as my last squat day but all in all I was pleased with it didn't feel like I was going to have a good day but the goal was more then five and I made it.

Accessory Work:

3 runs through the ninja apprentice climbing course

3x 2sec l-hold 2sec Tuck Planche, 3x press to shoulder stand on p-bars.

Finished it all of with a set of 8 glute ham raises would have done 2 more but was feeling absolutely crushed by that time.

Tonight Presses, Front Levers, more light parkour.

Mutant Healing Factor!

2009-11-15T23:34:00.000-08:00

So I got into the doctor on wendesday to find out the fracture was extremely small and in an area with good blood supply and I should be healed in three weeks. Lately I have been recovering really quickly from injuries, people have started talking about my mutant healing factor and I have found in beneficial to believe it myself go positive placebo. Whether its pyschological, because of the quality of my diet, or the regular chiropractic I have been receiving my recovery has been really good and I am not going to disagree. So looks like I will be able to get back to regular weight training monday and hope to be back to full speed parkour by next week. In meantime I have been unable to slow down and have found lots of weighs to keep training. Here is this weeks log

11/10/09
Single Leg gliding Hamstring Curls
Taken from this article
http://www.tmuscle.com/free_online_a..._for_hardasses
Nice tight hammies afterwards
BW 2x5, +25 1x5, plus 45 2x5
Weighted Pull up +25 3x3
This is seems pretty week like i have lost strength here my muscle ups have been weak to I think it is a result of upper back problems I have had.
3x3 of 2second l-2sec tuck-press shoulder stand
on P-bars
1x5 pike press to headstand on elevated mats. 1x5 straddled, 1x5 straddle press to handstand back to wall.
Bunch of Wall climbs
Worked military vaults, lazy spins and this weird backhandspringy thing of the vault, then lazy spin to to the backhandspringy thing.

11/13/09
Bench Press
170x2, 190x1 205x4
Very pleased with this since I only managed 4 at 190 the last time I tried this might just be improving.
1 minute cumulative handstand
Barbell Hip Thrust 135 3x5
More Odd Parkour stuff foot starting to feel better, climbed a bit.
11/14/09
Foot much better still achey but could run and take light landings.
More odd Parkour flow stuff, Gatevault style cartwheels over box, reverse but spin to back drop 3/4 spin and 1/4 spin, some weird miniroutes will upload footage of some of what I did when I get it.
Ninja Apprentice Climbing route at gym x2
Weighted pull up +10 3x6
Free Handstand work
Tuck Front lever 3x10 second hold
Lever pulls 3x5
45 Degree glute ham raise 3x5

Should be able to squat, deadlift and press again starting monday yeah. Go mutant healing factor.

Injured

2009-11-10T12:59:00.000-08:00

On friday I was putting away weight I turned around quickly and managed to kick a piece of railing that was waiting to be used for one of our obstacles with my pinky toe, hard. Shock it off finished my bench press even jumped around a little bit. My foot started aching in the middle of the night, halfway through saturdays classes I got to the point were the pain made walking a problem.

I have a doctors appointment on Wednesday but I am fairly sure I have a hairline fracture in my 5th metatarsal. This may keep me out of regular training for 6 weeks or more so frustrating. Just back to normal training and bam, murphies law. I will keep training of course just no parkour, no squats, no deadlifts nothing were I have really push of my full foot.

11/09/09

Played around with stuff I can do with the injured foot.

Barbell hip thrust supine and elevated back

up to 1x5 at 145

Incline press up to 145 1x5

Seated Shoulder Press up to 120x5

2x20sec hold tuck blanche

3x3 of 2second l-2sec tuck-press shoulder stand

on P-bars

20x1 wall climb ups.

Bench Day

2009-11-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

Feeling pretty well recovered from the deadlifts yesterday ok energy performance seemed week though.

Started todays workout with some playing around on our p-bars, swings, l-hold-tuck-press shoulder stand. Weird under bar transfer drills tyson came up with dip swings.

1 minute cumaltive handstand terrible terrible handstand performance.

Bench 145x3, 170x3, 190x4 much weaker performance then last week hopefully will be back on track next week.

L-hold one minute cumulative 25, 13,11,11 not the best but since I haven't worked l-holds in ages not to disapointed.

Training blogging

2009-11-04T00:12:00.000-08:00

With the gym open and growing fast I don't have time to put down my more in depth thoughts into an article but I am going to retool this space as personal training log and place to put up links and stuff I find interesting or cool.

After a good summer of Parkour focused training, I ran into a string of injuries, I had a back spasm, then was rear ended on the freeway by a semi truck and finally clipped my knee on cat leap spraining my MCL and opening a deep laceration on my knee.

All in all I was out for most of seven weeks training which stalled the program I had written for myself.

This last week I was able to jump start it again.

What I am doing is running Jim Wendlers 5/3/1 using parkour sprints, climbing and technical work and one gymnastics strength skill per day as my accessory training.

I will be doing 4 strength training days and 4 parkour trianing days per week.

Monday: Parkour Sprints and jumps and technical work. Squats, Front Lever

Tuesday: Overhead Press and Climbing, Press to handstand

Thursday: Parkour Sprints, jumps and technical work. Deadlift, tuck planche

Friday: Bench Press, L-hold

Saturday: Parkour

Once a week I will go swimming(in the lake cold water hey) and I will spar and train martial arts as time and energy allows.

Each lift will go through a 4 week cycle first week is 5's, the second week 3's and the last week singles with the last set allways being for as many reps as possible, the 4th week is a deload.

For the gymnastics I will simple aim to do one minute in each hold and try to reduce the sets to do that, while working on progressions with the press. Right now I am doing back against the wall straddle presses for sets of five. The goal is to get to free standing straddle handstands for sets of 10.

Its a simple program that should allow sufficient recovery and work towards my primary goals.

Here is the logs of my first four workouts.

10/29/09
Parkour routes in the gym 48 inch box jumps, some reactive drills
Deadlift 225x5, 275x5, 305x10
That calculates out as 407 max just 33 pounds under my max before summer not bad for 7 weeks of and limited barbell training for 4 months.

10/30/09
Bench press 135x5 155x5 180x8
Again not far off previous performance

11/02
Parkour technical training, sprints through the tree's barefoot, some random messing about in the gym.
Squat 225x5, 270x5, 290x10
Again strength seems pretty stable.

11/03
Parkour technical trianing skipped climbing due to sprained fingers
Overhead press 95x5, 110x5, 120x8
Foundation is still there all around time to push it further.

11/05

Deadlift 255x3 290x3, 325x10(very excited about that result)

48 box jump 1x

10ft precsion 3x

12 foot running precision x3r3l

1.5 hour parkour intermediate class working on foot work tic tacs and underbars

Opening a Gym

2009-10-05T22:41:00.001-07:00

The blog here has pretty much died and I apologize for that, I have allot of stuff I would like to be writing and plan to come back to the blog soon. At the moment we are in the middle of opening a gym and that is talking all my time and creative capacity. I'll be back not sure how soon.

Rafe

Short Video

2009-08-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

Just shows a Rush through Keller fountain in portland second chance to train there got a chance to catch the route on camera. Was allot of fun. Its nice to see my movement on camera again still have some of the same problems some are better gives me some stuff to work on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsYA9mD-ZVA

Summer Training

2009-07-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

My training has taken a different direction over the summer.

In the first week of June I finished a heavy traditional weight training focus, over the period of that cycle I increased by five rep squat max from 295-355, and my 5 rep deadlift from 355-418, handstand push ups from 1 rep to 5 reps, and finally learned to consistently due explosive wall mantles. I then went to crossfit cert and put up a personal best fran time of 3:38 while doing only 2 crossfit metcons in the previous 2 months, all of this while dropping my weight from 215-205.

I was very happy with the success of that training cycle but was burned out on spending a great deal of time in the gym and felt over reached, my foot was also injured from a climbing fall and some over use issues. I took a week of and composed my next training cycle.

I decided for the summer I wanted to focus on parkour training, with just maintenance on other capacities, and to take a very intuitive and playful approach to training.

So far so good, I have trained mostly by running routes through the tree's at Greenlake Park, the structures at Gasworks park, and the Creek Run at Whatcom falls.

I have continued to want to work on long jumps, cat leaps and wall passes but have been somewhat limited by foot pain. I have then focused mostly on fluid routes, and climbing.

I have overcome allot of fears doing high free climbs, jumps at height, and gainer cliff dives recently.

Lately I feel I am in the stage of trying to forget techniques in my practice and learning to focus entirely on adaptive movement.

My training largely falls into two categories. Intensity training and Creativity or Playfull training. The Intensity training includes my once weekly weight lifting sessions were I do box squats or deadlifts, plus handstand push ups and muscles ups, or sprints and jumps at the track which I try to get in once a week or every other week, and hard parkour sprints or route repeats which again I try to get in once a week. I usually mix a couple of these into a high intensity day so I only have one or two high intensity days per week.

The rest of my training usually another 3-4 days a week is mostly exploratory trying to simply move through inviting environments trying to find out best my body can adapts it movements to the surroundings or the most fun and interesting challenges I can create for myself with the environments around. Its about about learning to be true to my movement muse.

Lately my imagination has simply opened up I find myself seeing so much more potential for movement. I have recovered a beginers mind, the childlike exploration of movement and it has been wonderful.

I haven't focused any of the capacities aside from lifting and the parkour training but have tried to take what opportunities came up, to carry, throw, catch, wrestle, stick fight etc in playful way. Having a dog has been great for that. I am going away for a two week parkour trip and then have a some filming coming up after that but after that I look forward to expanding my practice in late summer to incorporate a broader range of primal movement patterns especially combatative training the itch for that training is growing.

Portland Crossfit Clinic

2009-07-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

Taught a really enjoyable Parkour clinic for crossfit portland this weekend. My second for them really good group of athletes got to unveil some stuff I don't normal teach in beginner clinics was very happy with it. You can read a review here. Thanks to everyone who came out. Here is video unfortunately not the highest quality.

http://vimeo.com/5672275

A quick note

2009-07-20T14:31:00.001-07:00

I haven't published anything in a little while because I have been wrestling with broad argument about an evolutionary approach to movement competence.

I am not sure how to publish this and feel like I could easily turn this in doctoral dissertation if I had the time to develop it fully so the question is where to go with the idea at this point how much research do I need to put in before showing its overall outline.

I am going to try to keep some small post going until I know what to do with the monster.

Fear

2009-06-05T02:03:00.000-07:00

It’s four o'clock when we arrive at Gasworks: Tyson, Dane, Brandee, Ceit and I. The sun is shining brightly with a pleasant breeze blowing in off Lake Union. There are 10-15 traceurs there sessioning already. Tyson, Brandee and I start with a game of add-on, as various Traceurs we haven't met before introduce themselves and try out the game. It is beautiful, the movement is great. A really nice route is created to work on, but I am distracted. I want to work towards my goals, not get caught up in just whatever is happening. I go my own way to a series of three jumps that I have been working.

Something is not right. I have done these jumps many times. I have absolute confidence in my ability to do them, and I do do them. But before each attempt there is some hesitancy, something clawing at my heart. It is fear. It is the little demon that pretends it is there to save me from danger but is in fact the cause of almost all my injuries; that hitch, the hesitation in the moment when I need confidence and fluidity that causes the short jump; the missed hand placement, the slip, the kick out in mid air, and through that the separated shoulder, the pulled groin, the jammed ankles, and many, many scrapes and bruises.

I don't know why it is visiting me today. I have cleansed myself of this useless fear so much since I started training that recently it has barely been a memory. But today for some reason it is there riding me as bad as ever. It’s is not the clear and exciting fear that lets one know there are consequences for failure that gets your blood pumping and helps one focus. Rather it’s this clutching unmanning hesitancy like cold fingers wrapping your heart.

I push through. I complete my jumps, but this is easy, they are not difficult jumps.

The real task for me to today is a cat leap. It is twelve feet long off a short step up onto a wall over a sand pit and onto a metal side of structure from the old gasworks. I have done this just once before and once was enough that day, where moisture and ripped skin on my feet limited me. Tyson invites Dane and I over to see how he has created a route of the cat and is able to land it with total control every time. The last time I was here with Tyson he could not make himself do the cat.

Dane and take our time warming up to it. I look at it. I know it’s there, I have done it before, I can see the distance is in my range, I know my legs are strong today, but the fear remains. No rationalization can tame it.

All I can do is face it down. I run, hit my take off, lift into the air, land feet high on the wall. I slip out, I hang from my hands, legs curled up to avoid touching down. Rattled, my climb up is crap. I sit on top of the wall, there is no elation, no cessation of fear, just the same internal struggle. What is going on?

Dane hits it nicely with the confidence of having seen Tyson and I do it. He moves on. I stay. The fear is still there and I have to own it, to overcome it. I pace, practice breathing. I try to enjoy the beautiful sunny day. I am distracted by every single possible thing, but still the obstacle is there in front of me and my fear is there in my chest choking me. I start to run, hesitate, go back, hesitate again. I try to get angry but I can't summon the emotion. It’s pure will that makes me run, pure will that pushes through the moment when the hesitation tries to come. There’s the take off, driving up, flying through the air. My feet hit high again, the catch is good, top out, slide down the other side. Again no feeling of elation, no cessation of fear. Today has become about this. It is no longer about having fun or playing with friends, it is only this. I will face my fear and accomplish the rule of three, I will own this. I stand in front of the jump again, one more time. I will do this and it will be enough for today. I hesitate. I go through the motions. I am distracted. I force myself to focus. I try to really feel my fear, to experience it and to know it that I may overcome it. I chant the incantation against fear from Dune.
I will not fear.
Fear is the mind killer,
The little death that proceeds total obliteration,
I will face my fear, I will let it pass over and through me
I will turn the inner eye and see its path
and where it has gone only I will remain.

I run, I jump, I catch and pull myself over. I am still gripped by fear, but I have won my little battle. Three times was the goal and it is accomplished. I am relieved, but my fear is still there taunting me, sucking the joy from my day. Why it has struck me so hard this day I don't know, but I know this is my battleground now, I have made myself strong in body, I have developed skill there is always more to accomplish but for me it is clear my primary limitation is fear. It is what I must overcome.

I have come to believe in the end fear is why we train. it is the biggest obstacle we will ever face, and knowing your fear, overcoming it bit by bit, is the greatest benefit of our training.

Trip to the Zoo

2009-06-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

On Sunday Beth and I took a trip to the zoo. This is the fourth time we have gone to the zoo this year. It's always a treat for us because we both share a deep fascination with the natural world. This trip was very interesting from a play and movement perspective and also left me somewhat disturbed.

The first notable part of this trip was the Siamangs. The Siamangs are perhaps our favorite exhibit to visit (for other stories of our interactions with the siamangs check out beth's posts over on complex interplay). This day we heard the Siamangs start up their hooting display and ran over to see them. When we got there they were in their outdoor enclosure balancing on ropes and dueting. Just after our arrival they climbed up into the tree which the ropes were attached to and hung balanced on a pair of branches continuing their duet. As a traceur gibbons of which siamangs are the largest variety, are very likely the most impressive of all animals to watch; their movement is close to humans, the things they do are recognizable to me as things I do but so much more graceful, controlled and powerful.
Siamangs live in monogamous male-female pairs. They regularly perform duets utilizing their distinctive vocal sacks composed of deep rhythmic booms, high-pitched screams almost like a horses whinny, and barking noises. During these duets they will also move around a lot, performing amazing aerial displays.

What we got to see was a treat and our first chance to see it.

The two Siamangs scaled the tree, the male booming and barking the female adding yodeling whinnies. They stood on a branch some 20 feet off the ground. The female would swing out on limb a bit above that and back and turn full spins on the limb she was on. Neither movement was extraordinary in difficulty but the height at which it was done and fluidity and complete dynamism in movement was something to behold. The male meanwhile jumped up to another limb and would muscle all the way up to standing on his feet and then cast back out into swing and repeat it over and over. This sequence was again fairly simple by siamang standards but the fluid ease with which the Siamang was able throw itself up on the limb was incredible. Finally the male seemed to calm down and dropped down the tree with a dexterity and confidence that puts every Traceur in the world to shame and walked off into the inner enclosure.

The female then followed him down the tree but instead of following him into the enclosure she put on a display of braciation and rope balancing that was awe inspiring. It was one of the best and most beautiful displays of movement I have ever seen.

As we walked towards in the inner enclosure Beth asked me if the display is about territory maintenance why do they continue it in an environment were there are no other Siamangs nearby, no hoots to respond to, or rivals to maintain your territory from. It might just be hardwired or maybe they don't realize there is nothing to defend their territory from. I don't think either of those are the answer. I think they do it as a form of play to bond with each other and because its fun, in this play the are simply practicing skills that have been important to their species. Just as humans given the chance will sing, dance, and play physically whether there is good reason to or not. I think these siamangs were expressing the same innate need for play for stimulation of the mind and body in primal patterns.

We walked into the inner enclosure and the male was sitting near the window drawing attention from a gaggle of children but not responding much. I tried to gesture at him as I had learned from the female and see if he would play or come over to be groomed. He did not. He did stare me directly in the eyes for awhile and while it is always dangerous to speculate on the meaning of animal facial expressions, especially with no more then an amateur education in animal behavior, I couldn't help but get the feeling it was a rather disapproving stare. Where the female had seemed to want my attention, the male seemed to be saying something less friendly with his stare. Not really aggressive but more along the lines of "I see what you're trying to do there with your gestures and I am not amused." Either I got the gesture wrong or I was gesturing something inappropriate was the feeling I got. Maybe grooming is not something males do for each other.

The next interesting encounter was the Snow Leopard. The Snow Leopards are notoriously shy and hard to see. We have been lucky to catch them three times this year and once one of them was even moving about the enclosure. This blew all of that away. Sunday when we got there there were three people leaning into the window of the enclosure. The male snow leopard was walking up and passed right past the glass. I jumped up, standing on a fence poll, and watched him. He flopped down and my elevated position attracted his attention. He looked me straight in the eyes. I had just recently read that direct eye contact is not a threat display in domestic cats as it is in dogs, and that cats enjoy it if you look at them and blink. Again, one has to be cautious about interpreting wild animal behavior, but I did not experience his direct gaze as threatening; I remembered that tidbit and blinked at him and he blinked right back. It was a rather astonishing moment, a powerful experience of connection with an extraordinary animal.

The cat then paced his cage and grabbed a large bone that had been left in his enclosure. He tossed the bone into the air and chased it down the slope, executing a series of movements that is hard to describe aside from saying it was astonishingly acrobatic. He didn't continue this for very long but it was still a beautiful example of animal play. He did continue to pace the front of his cage and looked me in the eyes a couple more times, one with an open mouth that seemed like a smile to me. Very very cool.

We stopped by the Galagos in the night exhibit and watched them jumping about. Talk about animals that can move! They were able to jump from one branch to another that were distances probably ten times their body size. Forget cat leaps, these were Galago leaps.

The final note of the day though was the Gorillas which showed both the best and worst of the Zoo.

There are two Gorilla troops at Woodland park Zoo. One was sleeping so we drifted past them. The second group was up and about; this group contains a baby and is the focus of a great deal of attention. The baby was playing, climbing trees swinging sticks around, pounding her chest to display and play fighting with her sister -- aside from the chest display all forms of play we see in humans as well, so close to what we do it is almost eerie. Incredibly cute and inspiring play. At the same time this was happening something else that was very disturbing was occurring. The infant's mother was repeatedly vomiting and then re-consuming her own vomit. This happened 10 times or so before I couldn't bear to watch it anymore and we moved on. We have also seen this group consume their own feces. However this for some reason was far more disturbing. A quick Google search reveals that regurgitation and reingestion is well-known problem in captive primates. There seems to be some suggestion that providing more fibrous additions to diets will help alleviate this, but I wonder if it is in part stress induced.

Once again I am not an ethologist and my speculations are just that, but this got me speculating indeed. One of my long term interests is domestication: how do we take a wild animal and turn it into a domestic one? As it turns out this is primarily a process of selecting for juvenile traits of submissiveness and openness to strangers. You can adopt almost any baby mammal and expect it to bond with you and become tame. This is far far more difficult with adult wild animals, often impossible. Strangers are viewed as threats. Many wild species are extremely intolerant of strangers in their territory. Wolves, lions, hyenas, chimpanzees, etc., are just among the few animals which have been shown to kill interlopers and even seek out and kill members of neighboring groups. The process of domestication is one of lowering this agression, increasing the ability to trust and be friendly towards strangers and to deal with increased social stimulation. My dog will happily greet every single person he meets. Most wolves would not show the same behavior; they are either shy or aggressive towards strangers in general. It occurs to me that the more human like a wild animal is the more difficulty it will have living in a zoo.

A Komodo dragon likely does not experience the gaze and interactions of thousands of peoples as much more of a stimulus than the rocks in it is cage. For a Gorilla whose social life and intelligence and even facial expressions are so close to ourselves, I can only imagine the stress this causes. Thinking about the stress that large crowds can cause for many humans, now multiply that many times for a gorilla with more wild mental architecture. It makes this type of pathological behavior understandable.

Now I still believe Zoos provide a valuable service. Humans need the chance to excercise our biophilia and humans that have that chance are for more likely to be concerned about the natural world which is something human animals and everything else needs. There is a great deal of value to this education and connection with wildlife for both humans and the natural world, but seeing things like this makes you think about how we treat these incredible intelligent and closely related animals. How can we provide the benefits of the experience of seeing this amazing animals while minimizing there stress as much as possible?

A playfull companion

2009-06-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

Beth and I are both dog people we both grew up in families with dogs and the first day we really spent with each other our desire to have a dog was one of the first things we talked about. As we have moved through our twenties we have always looked for a space we could have a dog and finally two months ago Beth and I decided it was time.

Besides the simple joy off having a companion animal another member of the family. Having a dog was important to us because I have been fascinated with Canids my whole life and this is opportunity to observe their behavior up close and personal. Equally important I had devoted my life to primal play and movement and a dog is one of the best companions one of the best inspirations for this one can have.

We took our time searching through Petfinder and visiting the local human societies met some good dogs but wanted to make sure the dog we got was right for us. We were looking for a dog that would show a strong attachment to us would be good play companion to run, jump and wrestle with for me but could still be safe and respectfull around other people. We meet Jackson after a trip all the way up to cle elum to meet the dogs housed by WAMAL or the washington malamute association a malamute and northern breed rescue organization.

Jackson came up to us immediately and greeted us as if we were family. In a sense he choose us.

We played in the yard and went on a walk and right away there was a connection. We left that day saying I think we found our dog. We had to make sure our fences were up to keeping a athletic malamute in and get all the neccesary dog owning accoutrements.

Three weeks ago Sunday we picked Jackson up and took him home. The adjustment hasn't always been easy malamutes were not breed to be easy companions dogs they were breed to haul freight in the winter and be able to survive on their own devices during summer. It is a job to convince him he needs to respect the authority of family, he marked in in the house twice early on, growled at roomates etc but we understood this was part of the bargain in getting a more primal less domesticated companion. With firm training he has come leaps and bounds already. He has become very consistent with Sit, Stay, down and heels very well unless he is in super stimulating enviroment. We have even been able to start off lead training and count on him to stay close on hikes and adventures in the woods. Soon we will start working with him on weight pull and once he is obedient off lead we will work on agility basically the goal is to train him as primaly as I train myself.

Already I have been pushed to run and walk much more consistently both elements of my practice that are sometimes under emphasized. He motivates me to get up and train in mountains were I can let him off lead to roam and show us up with agile leaps and scrambles and incredible speed. Its real joy having him around to play with.

During his first week with us our roommate ended up dog sitting an older lab mix named Loki. So they had to adjust to each other. Watching this process was fascinating.

When we first introduced them they spent a good fifteen minutes walking around each other in circles marking and scratching the ground. A very literally pissing contest. Later in the evening the got into a couple of scraps resulting in small cuts for each, We were very worried about their ability to cohabitate at that point. However on the second day after avoiding each other all morning in the early afternoon Jackson approached Loki and play bowed and moved forward to start play, Loki responded agressively lunging and barking, jackson scampered away bowing and barking playfully, this continued for a minute or so as we watched ready to jump in if actually came to fighting, finally the stood shoulder to shoulder ears pricked and aware jackson picked up his foreleg and wrapped it around Lokis rolling into him him in tripping motion. For the next 20 minutes the wrestled, jaw spared, and chased each other around the living room. This was some great intense primal play but with serious undertone, even though this was play it was clear it was also a safe way for the two to test each others strength and see which would be dominant. It was hard to tell who won that first round, Loki mounted jackson several times, while Jackson pinned and got a complete throat hold on Loki Several times.

As testament to the power of play after this episode the two got along fine except for few tiffs here and there.

There is question in canine studies as to whether domestic dogs have the same strongly hierarchically dominance structures as wolves their closest relatives. The answer in the relationship between Jackson and Loki seems to be no, Jackson the younger dog seemed to be the initiator of play which is characteristic of submissive wolves. However jackson showed dominance in other ways in stealing and possessing toys, in defending his bed and his posture and carriage. Loki did not accept a complete submissive role either he would posture dominance pee with his leg raised and react aggressively if jackson tried to push him out when he was getting attention still they got along and spent much of their time together playing and Jackson seems sad that Loki is no longer around.

Humans and dogs have been companions in work play and life for the last between 15,000 and 100,000 years its feels awesome to join that tradition. I think Jackson agrees.

A deeper look a Evolutionary Fitness

2009-05-04T23:49:00.000-07:00

There is big movement in fitness towards evolutionary fitness, the words natural, primal, paleo come up over and over in the latest fitness programs. MovNat is very much in this realm, Crossfit defines functional as something related to what a "natural" human might due, Art Devany has evolutionary fitness, Loren Cordain talks about the paleo diet. I think this is positive trend I believe that evolutionary science offers a more powerful understanding of human fitness then current approaches to sports science, or sports medicine just as evolutionary theory has enriched so many other fields of human learning. The problem is that most people don't understand evolution well, the cross over from evolutionary scientist to athletics coach is not high so we often end up with over simplified and static views of human evolution and what it implies for our how we should live.
Here is an example I ran across recently
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGXep32_qiI
This is the common appeal to the archetypal paleo man we are lead to believe we are really the same as underneath the modern lifestyle and should try to live like.
There are two problems with this one there is no archetypal paleo man, evolution is process of constant change of adapting to changing contexts with what is available and we are never optimally designed for anything there are costs and benefits to every thing and there is a tremendous amount of individual variation finally we are not cavemen in modern clothing evolution did not stop 10,000 years ago.
Paleo proponents tell us that humans lived one way for 2 millions years from the origin of our genus straight up until the advent of agriculture, at which point we stopped evolving and have never been able to catch up to that change, we are thought to be a sort of square peg trying to fit in round hole and our health problems are the result of this mismatch.
While there is some truth here there is allot of facts here that simply don't add up. Lets take a breif and neccesarily approximate overveiw of 2 millions years of human subsistence habits. Homo habilis the first member of our genus was small bodied with a brain half the size of ours, he most likely got the meat in his diet as scavenger not a hunter and almost certainly didn't have the use of fire meaning his diet must have been significantly different from that of his descendants 10,000 years ago just before the advent of agriculture. The best evidence indicates that European Neanderthals between 600,000 and 35,000 years ago seem to have been specialist big game hunters who ambushed their prey using jabbing spears, isotope ratios in their bones indicate a diet compose of 50-80 percent animal flesh, their skeletons show evidence of injury rates similar to modern rodeo rider s, and they were probably the most robust and powerfully built humans of all time with muscle attachment sites significant larger then the strongest modern athletes.
The first modern humans who invaded Europe from africa were relatively Gracile and slim and quickly became more robustly built but no were nearly as strongly built as neanderthals, as opposed to ambushing big game with jabbing spears they developed a subsistence strategy based around the atlatl a form of spear thrower. When the big game died of europeans became smaller and more gracile as they shifted to small game and other resources as their primary subsistence.

Even among modern hunter foragers we see these patterns of different subsistence strategies and the bodies changing to meet them.

Kung san practice persistence hunting which involves walking and running for hours on end, not surprisingly the resemble modern endurance athletes .

Compare the build of this New Guinea forager whose people really on hunting pigs, and cassowary in dense jungles were the can't simple run their prey to exhaustion

So which paleo man are supposed to train like the runner of desert or the sprinter/acrobat of the jungle?

Of course this too simplifies the matter far to much the fact is we that most modern populations are not adapted to be either. Adaptive human evolution did not stop 10,000 years ago in fact the lastest evidence indicates it has infact been accelerating.
http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/accel.pnas.smallpdf.pdf

Certain population developed the ability to drink milk. These people often ended up being some of the tallest most athletic populations on earth.

Maybe drinking milk and living like the Nuba is better path to optimal fitness. With long periods or relative rest walking or standing watching cattle, interupted by brief periods devoted to wrestling or dancing for fun, or fighting of cattle raiders, predators or rampaging elephants with all to real consequences. They are certainly powerful athletic and vital people.

What if you body can't digest milk perhaps the long lived okinawans make a better model for a healthy life, lots of rice, lots of vegetables, lots of soy, no milk very little meat, lots of lower power output activity pulling weeds in the fields, tilling, sowing, harvesting, carrying loads.

Those of you familar with the paleo prescription will notice this does not accord with it. Grains are the enemy the cause of our obesity our diabetes, and chronic low level stress is bad for our bodies.

How do you explain the Okinawans
perhaps just as we know Nuba have specific genetic adaptions to a dairy based diet maybe okinawans have one for a grain in fact we know they do.

We are not all the same, what is healthiest for the Nuba may not be for the Okinawan the milk that grows the Nuba strong and healthy may cause horrible gastrointestinal destress and allergenic responses in the Okinawan. The rice that is the stable of life for the Okinawan may cause insulin responses in the Nuba that drive him towards obesity and diabetes.

The thesis that the cause of obesity and related metabolic diseases are caused by a mismatch between modern environments and those were are genetically adapted to is not necessarily wrong It is just allot more complicated then modern and paleo. There are common threads that unite the Nuba, Okinawan, the !Kung and the Papuan.

1. Tradition:
All of they cultures cited above are what are called traditional cultures. What is important about that distinction for us is that they majority of their lifestyle has been stable for thousands of years they have had time to adapt to their specific diet and lifestyle. When removed from their cultural contexts and exposed to modern diets and sedentary lifestyles, hunter foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, even traditional rice farmers, they suffer the same health problems we do in fact they usually suffer worse the more different their traditional diet and lifestyle from the modern west the worse they suffer.
2. Movement
In every traditional culture regular at least somewhat vigrous movement is a neccesity. The leisurely walking interspered with high power actitivities of the nuba maybe very different from the constant labor of the okinawan, and again different from the persistance hunts of the !Kung, but none spend hours everday sitting at a desk or behind the wheel of car. The movement the experience is also based around natural movements, the amount and degree the intensity the focus maybe different but all traditional peoples spend a great deal of time walking, and occasionally at least have run, jump, swim, move on all fours, lift carry, throw, catch, balance and defend themselves. Treadmills and natulius machines are not part of anyones evolutionary heritage and will not develop the type of fitness seen among these people.
3. They Eat Food Not food products
Credit to Frank Forencich for the phrase. Some of us can thrive on dairy laden diets some on grain based diets, nobody has the genetics to enjoy optimal health on pop tarts, twinkies, margarine, and hot pockets. Food is perishable, food comes from animals, and plants, the fewer steps it took to get from that source to you in all likilihood the healthier it is, the more proceesed and chemically laden, the worse it is for you.
4. They Play.
This applies not just to traditional cultures but to mammals in general, all immature mammals play and their play clearly specifically prepares them to for the neccesities of their adult life. Kittens stalk, pounce and wrestle, puppies play chase and tug of war as well as wrestle stalk and pounce, horse foals race and chase, the neck wrestle and jump and kick all skills the will need to avoid predators and establish their place in the herd.

Not only do the young mammals do this but when rested and fed adult engage in this behavior to, wolf packs play epic games of tag and wrestling, polar bear males in the spring engage in friendly sparring with the same rivals the will fight in deadly earnest when the breeding season comes.

Same for humans every traditional culture allows significant unstructured childhood play and has specific playful games and activities that adults engage in as well, dancing is universal, the Nuba are famous for their wrestling, the Masai for jumping games, the Surma stick fighting, my favorite description of tradititional culture play comes from Colin turnbulls forest people chroniciling the lives of the Mbuti Pygmy where children and youths climb saplings untill the bend to the ground and then jump off, and were everybody gets involved in games of a form of crack the wip were a big strong male will swing a liana vine in circle while agile youths run at the end of the vine and practice releasing and flipping out of it . Australian Aborgines will stop at interesting tree's or rocks in the desert and practice jumps, flips and climbing on these rare elements of terrain in their life.

If you watch western childern in the rare unstructured play they are allowed you will see them practicing primal, vital, movement skills, the will climb, the will jump from one point to another, the will run and play tag, they will wrestle and sparr. However in our culture how often are the told don't climb on that stop horse playing, your going to get hurt. We are not just movement deprived, calorie stuffed but nutrient starved, we are play deprived. We do not grow up with nearly the physical skills we should because we aren't given the time or oppurtonity for physical play. No wonder so many find themselves absolutely enthralled by activities like parkour, tricking, rock climbing etc.

So here is my very simple perscripition for a basic evolutionary approach to fitness.

Eat food not food products, take every opportunity to move and be active, take a playful and joyous approach to training, and understand the traditions you come from and what makes you the individual you are, understand that what is best for the next persons fitness might not be for yours. Find the training and diet patterns that make you happy and healthy, don't get to caught up in whatever the latest trend is, know yourself.

2009-05-03T23:08:00.000-07:00

David James whose blog natural roots is something anyone interested in more primal approaches to training should check out asked me in the comments of my last post why my current approach to training. Why am I focusing on parkour as opposed to more general practice or martial arts, and why follow a conditioning approach in other training to assist with the parkour.

It is a good question and there allot of factors involved in that decision. Part of it comes down to circumstance I have moved to a big city from a small town to focus on developing our local parkour non profit to build classes and get the discipline out to more people and to work at a crossfit, it is in sense a responsibility to develop myself in this areas related to the work I am doing to be better able to teach others. Furthermore I moved away from my martial arts school the amazing natural parks near my house in bellingham I haven't had time to find a new school or areas equall to those I had in bellingham for training the rull range of movement so this is partly the path of least resistance.

Moving towards this type of training was concious choice when I came down here because of the circumstances plus the chance to train with all of the good traceurs and crossfitters I would be working with.

My long term goals are unchanged but because my level is sufficient in combatives the more varied lifting, carrying and throwing elements, and swimming it made sense to focus on this phase of specialization. I spoke with Erwan about this at some length when I was training with him in Corsica, the novice athlete needs a general program covering all of the basic's of natural movement however for the advanced athlete is often not possible to make significant gains without taking time to focus on a specific aspect for awhile that is what I am doing now focusing on my terrestrial locomotive abilities(parkour) and orienting my other training around assisting with that.

My current training

2009-04-22T23:33:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to alert anyone that was interested that I am keeping a log of my current training here
http://www.performancemenu.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4152. I want to use the naturalathletics blog for more thoughtfull or in depth posts but wanted to have day to day log to cover this experiment I am doing with trying to build a more traditional strength and conditioning program around helping ey improve specifically in my locomotive abilities IE parkour. My long term goal is the still broad movement competence across the entire spectrum of natural vital movements but with my defensive training having to be cut way back due to scheduling and needing to find a new school it felt like a good time to focus on single element the parkour and try to build everything else around it to develop my abilities with clear goal focused program. Love to hear anyones thoughts.

Perfect day

2009-04-02T00:51:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I headed up to Bellingham to spend some time with friends and family. First on the agenda: training with Dane, my first parkour training partner...

The weather is beautiful, so we decide to make the trip down to Larrabee State Park, an amazing area of beautiful old forests and a rocky beach with formations of Chuckanut sandstone carved into fantastic shapes for climbing by wind and rain.

We park at the south end of the park at the Clayton Beach parking lot, warm up there, then take off into the woods. Dane is one of the few training partners I feel confident doing 100% runs with, so we simply go, running along fallen logs, vaulting rails along the trail. Then, deeper into the woods, running downslope, leaping up and over a fallen tree and taking a large gap across a creek--too much fun; had to do it twice, taking the even bigger thirteen foot or so gap on the way back, this one over a waterfall. Downslope again, slipping sliding to the lower creek bed, two step tic tac off a fallen log across the stream and continue on upslope, which ends with a chest high rock--vault on top, keep running. Upslope again, boulders strewn across, pull on them to gain leverage, a vault here, a jump there, finish the slope, wait for Dane to catch up. More slope ahead, dirt trail, fallen logs, boulders; perfect.

Time for a race, a no holds barred race, inspired by Teghead--a traceur from the UK. We're off, both go for the pull on the arms, hands in the face, spinning--Dane's getting in front, I dive for his leg, pull him around, clinched up almost falling down slope, I have to avoid the log, break, he's spinning--shove--I am in the clear, put that rock between him and me, almost there--aha, top of the slope. So fun, but so tiring.

Catch our breath, say we'll do it again next time. Downslope toward the beach, jump the creek, vault through a tree growing sideways across the path. Another race, this time down the railroad tracks: who can get from where we are to a tree 50 yards ahead without falling? Dane's balance is better; he's pulling away. Ha ha lost his balance. Still need to finish to win, focus, go slow, I almost fall, catch my balance, finish. Glad we're not doing that again. Now running down the railroad tracks, bouncing on and off to the end. There's our target; a beautiful granite slab 50 feet high. We can free climb it, but the blood is pumping too fast, having to much fun to go slow. We play around on the lower areas, wall passing up to cracks, traverses, dynos, mantles, over and over.

My arms are getting baked, time to move on. We decide to head all the way down to Larrabee at the other end of the beach. We run back on the beach, vault the fence, drop down on the concrete wall, run down, slide the rails, running on the trails, detour to scramble up a rock quickly and then back down. Out to the rock point, climbing down, gotta wall pass to crack. The wall is rounded, kick off one side--right, then hit the left just right, reach for the ledge, pull up, grab the next, up and over and down the side, lazy down off the rocks. Underhand traversal route used to be hard--not today; race through it, loving the climbing...It's been too long.

We catch our breath, looking out down the beach. There is a point sticking out 800 yards away as a crow flies, maybe a mile overland, rocky beach the whole way. Is our training only for sprints I ask myself? This what I have needed to do, a real run. "Lets go here to there," I say, "No stops." We're off, moving smooth at first, scrambling over the rocks, hugging faces, ocean inches away. Quick traverses, spinning around obstacles, up and through holes in the rock, vaulting up to boulders, balancing on driftwood, a quarter of the way...Tired. Dane passes me, he isn't slowing down. Quads burning, no more power moves, I'm struggling just to run. Watching my feet, gotta keep running, but have to stay safe, every foot placement has to be secure, 100% focus. Dane is out of sight. I round the bend; he is climbing the last face, the last cove is between me and him, just small rocks and then the end. I want to slow to a walk so bad--doesn't matter, have to finish--watching every foot placement, every foot placement, slippery rocks in the stream, can they be trusted, jump, jump, I guess so. We are almost done, roots hanging from the slope, traverse and ascend, I pull myself over the final lip. There's Dane looking out at the water. I lay down. He wins this round.

Rest for a few minutes. I need to do this more, way more. I'm happy that I finished the task.

More climbing, the tide is going out. Spurts of energy; sprint then rest, sprint then rest. We come to one of our most difficult areas, a series of six tic tacs in a row on large rocks. So tired already. The goal is one step per rock. I first try two steps on the first two; on the third, I don't make it to the fourth. Gotta slow my mind down and speed my feet up. Breathe. One more attempt the other way. Fail. I almost get it on the way back; I have only done it twice before, but I know that I can. Dane is done and has moved on. Breathe deep, run, I get the first jump, not as fast as before but foot placements are good; push off is strong, second to third no problem. The fourth is the big issue on the way back, with the most potential to fall. Foot lands solid. I take off from here; it's down hill, tac, tac, done. Fist pump! Way back? I got it, it's time to move on.

Next area: three huge boulders in a circle. Jump from one wall, run across the second, push off, land on the third and run up, then turn around, drop down the third, run up the second--do it right and you can land a crane on the first one. Both of us are flying today. We discover another run-up to single tac off the second boulder, across a bigger gap to the third, and a way to run up all the way to vault the second rock as well. Done with that, we drop down into a little underhang climbing area. We've never been able to really move here; every time before I would just look at it and think about the day I could climb like that. Today we both make three moves for the first time, entering into it with a lay back, hands on big jug. Swing a bit, reach out to under cling, scoot feet around and bring the hand from the jug to the under cling. Now the big move. Tighten up on the under cling, explode sideways to catch a crack, both of us catch, neither holds; have to come back another day.

Now we come to a big rock wall, and run to the top. Behind is a cat leap, maybe ten feet rock to rock. But the cat is to a sloped rock and the catch is to a sloped crack; the fall not far but uneven rocks, not something to fall to. We try to spot but we both know its going to be hard to do much. Dane goes first, over jumps, still catches. My turn, standing there thinking, "Really, cat to that? Dane's crazy," but I know I can. Standing? Running? Don't want to bounce off. One step, I still over jump. Hands land, bounce, shit, reach out, catch solid. Adrenaline pumps.

We're moving on, tide going out. Sandy beach now. We find some rocks--big rocks--the biggest one we can move. It looks like a shark head, maybe some 200 pounds. Full squat, bear hug, lift and carry. Dane's turn; it doesn't come off the ground--a point for me. We find some rocks, throw them, press them, carry them. Dane finds a big one, clean and press. Damn, that looks heavy. My turn. I press, get stuck in the middle, can't finish; bring it back down, split jerk, full overhead, unstable, bail out from under it.

Onwards, almost to the end. We come to a big sloped wall. Amazing horizontal wall run; my feet slip when I try to hug it too close. Next time, even though I know this, am telling myself 'Lean out, lean out.' It's damn scary, but it works. Every foot placement is solid and I'm running. High drop to the ledge after the wall run is awesome. Dane is climbing. Climb up 70 feet off the ground. We look out. So beautiful: San Juan island in the west, tip of the snow-capped Cascades in the south. Finally, we make it to Clayton Beach for big kongs over a massive rock into the sand to finish the day, climb up the last rock and watch the sunset.

I'll be sore for a week.

Perfect day.

A day in the life of a Hunter forager

2009-03-24T23:47:00.000-07:00

Here is a fascinating article about the physical activity patterns of a couple modern hunter forager tribes something that should be of interest to anyone who believes in an evolutionary approach to fitness.

"Ten thousand years ago sounds like a long time, but in terms of how long the human genus has existed (2.5 million years), 10,000 years is a blink of the eye on an evolutionary time scale. The lifestyle of today's hunter-gatherers still holds invaluable clues to the exercise and dietary patterns that are built into our genes. The idea that cross training has value could have been figured out much earlier had we taken notice of clues from hunter-gatherers.

Few modern people have ever experienced what it is like to "run with the hunt". One notable exception is Dr. Kim Hill, an anthropologist at Arizona State, who has spent 30 years living with and studying the Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay and the Hiwi foragers of Southwestern Venezuela. His description below represents a rare glimpse into the activity that would have been required of us all, were it not for the Agricultural Revolution.

"The Ache hunted every day of the year if it didn't rain...GPS data I collected ... suggests that about 10 km per day is probably closer to their average distance covered during search. They might cover another 1-2 km per day in very rapid pursuit. Sometimes pursuits can be extremely strenuous and last more than an hour. Ache hunters often take an easy day after any particularly difficult day, and rainfall forces them to take a day or two a week with only an hour or two of exercise. Basically they do moderate days most of the time, and sometimes really hard days usually followed by a very easy day. The difficulty of the terrain is really what killed me (ducking under low branches and vines about once every 20 seconds all day long, and climbing over fallen trees, moving through tangled thorns etc.) I was often drenched in sweat within an hour of leaving camp, and usually didn't return for 7-9 hours wi th not more than 30 minutes rest during the day."

"The Hiwi on the other hand only hunted about 2-3 days a week and often told me they wouldn't go out on a particular day because they were 'tired'. They would stay home and work on tools, etc. Their travel was not as strenuous as among the Ache (they often canoed to the hunt site), and their pursuits were usually shorter. But the Hiwi sometimes did amazing long distance walks that would have really hurt the Ache. They would walk to visit another village maybe 80-100 km away and then stay for only an hour or two before returning. This often included walking all night long as well as during the day. When I hunted with Machiguenga, Yora, Yanomamo Indians in the 1980s, my focal man days were much, much easier than with the Ache. And virtually all these groups take an easy day after a particularly difficult one."

"While hunter gatherers are generally in good physical condition if they haven't yet been exposed to modern diseases and diets that come soon after permanent outside contact, I would not want to exaggerate their abilities. They are what you would expect if you took a genetic cross section of humans and put them in lifetime physical training at moderate to hard levels. Most hunting is search time not pursuit, thus a good deal of aerobic long distance travel is often involved (over rough terrain and carrying loads if the hunt is successful). I used to train for marathons as a grad student and could run at a 6:00 per mile pace for 10 miles, but the Ache would run me into the ground following peccary tracks through dense bush for a couple of hours. I did the 100 yd in 10.2 in high school (I was a fast pass catcher on my football team), and some Ache men can sprint as fast as me."

"But hunter-gatherers do not generally compare to world class athletes, who are probably genetically very gifted and then undergo even more rigorous and specialized training than any forager. So the bottom lines is foragers are often in good shape and they look it. They sprint, jog, climb, carry, jump, etc all day long but are not specialists and do not compare to Olympic athletes in modern societies."

Dr. Hill tells us part of the story, but not everything. Today, women are just as likely as men to be found at the gym lifting weights, or running or riding their bikes. In stark contrast, hunter-gatherer women almost never participated in hunting large animals. Does this mean that women did no hard aerobic work? Absolutely not! Women routinely gathered food every two or three days. The fruits of their labors just didn't include plant foods, but also small animals such as tortoises, small reptiles, shellfish, insects, bird eggs and small mammals. They spent many hours walking to sources of food, water and wood. Sometimes they would help carrying butchered game back to camp. Their foraging often involved strenuous digging, climbing, and then hauling heavy loads back to camp while carrying infants and young children. Other common activities, some physically taxing, included tool making, shelter construction, childcare, butchering, food preparation, and visiting. Dances were a major recreation for hunter-gatherers, and could take place several nights a week and often last for hours. So, the overall activity of women, like men, was cyclic with days of intense physical exertion (both aerobic and resistive) alternated with days of rest and light activity.

What hunter-gatherers had to do in their day-to-day activities is turning out to be good for modern day athletes. When the famous track coach Bill Bowerman advocated the easy/hard concept back in the 60's, it was thought to be both brilliant and revolutionary. Using his system of easy/hard, athletes recovered more easily from hard workouts, and their chances of getting injured were reduced. Ironically, coach Bowerman's revolutionary training strategy was as old as humanity itself.

Similarly, weight training combined with swimming was a stunning innovation at Doc Counsilman's world famous swim program in the 1960's. Now, it is a rare world class endurance coach who doesn't advocate cross training to improve performance, increase strength, and reduce injury incidence.

For humans living before the Agricultural Revolution, energy input (food) and energy expenditure (exercise) were directly linked. If Stone Age people wanted to eat, they had to hunt, gather, forage or fish. In the modern world, we have totally obliterated the evolutionary link between exercise and food. When we eat more energy than we expend, we gain weight and our health suffers. Two thirds of all Americans are either overweight or obese. Forty million American have type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S."

The hard day/light day training system makes a lot of sense to me, it's something I have played around with a lot.

Aside from the athleticism of these people the things that struck me were how difficult simply moving through their environment is, and how large of a portion of their fitness demands and exercise came from doing just that. I think when many people talk about how our ancestors had to walk, run and jump and climb they forget how difficult the terrain they were moving through was. Running on flat land all the time, training climbing with nothing more then pull ups or muscle ups. To me this is not a fully developed approach to evolutionary fitness. This is why I think so many people are finding themselves attracted to parkour and finding tremendous athletic benefits in that training.

I think a locomotive practice like parkour is a very logical base for broad general fitness. The picture I get from that essay as well as the other research I have done on hunter forager activity patterns indicates to me that while the demands on lifting, carrying, throwing, and defending skills were likely intense they were not nearly as omnipresent as the need to get from here to there over complex terrain.

I think it makes sense to train the way the lived to focus on locomotive skills first, both by finding more and more complex movement problems and by working on stamina and speed over simpler movement problems. Basically, the type of training you see in parkour but with more emphasis on stamina and speed as well. In crossfit they have a pyramid of fitness with nutrition on the bottom followed by met-con and then gymnastics. I think from an evolutionary perspective the latter two categories are both really part of the broader category of locomotor ability and to me the traditional systems of metabolic or monostructural training, and artistic gymnastics are missing something because they are not rooted in that basic evolutionary understanding. I think for optimum human fitness it is important to be fast or enduring not just on flat ground but over complex terrain, and to show motor control, dexterity and co-ordination not just on a simple apparatus divorced from any natural function but on increasingly complex terrain grounded by the basic fundamental aim of being able to get from here to there as effectively as possible.

Parkour class in Ferndale, WA

2009-03-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

April 11, Saturday
Gym Star Sports
1420 Pacific Place, Ste D
Ferndale, WA
360-384-3861

Anyone and everyone is invited to this class being supported by the PNWPA (Pacific Northwest Parkour Association) and taught by Rafe Kelley* and Dane Vennewitz, two veteran traceurs of the Pacific Northwest.

It is a fundamental class, covering all the basics: running, jumping, vaulting, climbing, rolling, and swinging.

If you have ever wondered about parkour but were too intimidated to try it on your own, this is a great opportunity to explore in a gym under trained supervision, or if you're just interested in getting a fantastic workout in a fun, non-treadmill sort of way.

It is worth the drive from Vancouver, BC, or Sedro-Woolley, WA.

*(Rafe's wife is writing this which is why Rafe is referred to in the third person)

A walk in the woods

2008-12-11T15:50:00.000-08:00

Today I took a walk in the woods, I did not train, I did not condition, I didn't warm up or warm down, I had no direction no intention no method behind me I simple set of into the woods of Ravenna park in Seattle, I walked and enjoyed the rare December sunshine. Eventually as walked a find little places I simple had to climb in jump around on or otherwise move through, I also found fascination in the sand in the creeks, in what was under stones, in the stark beauty of of the maples trees naked of all their summer plummage. I found two amazing yew trees with limbs grown in the ground and found myself vaulting, climbing, and swinging myself through them, I wasn't doing anything impressive anything that would attract much attention a sampler but I found so much joy in the small simple displacements I practiced there was no planning just ideas occuring and being tried moving and seeing what happened. I fell lay on the ground and enjoyed the feel of the needles under my back I got up and kept moving, when I lost interest I moved on I found a slope with vine maples growing on it just at height were you could vault them moving up or down hill I didn't think to myself ohI will kong that and then lazy. I was simply attracted to them and moved towards them and over them. I hopped up on fences and balanced down the rails I stopped and stared at pools and beautiful tree's. When I emerged from the woods an hour later I was sweating, my muscles felt well worked and my mind was deeply peaceful. I can hardly remember the last time I spent an hour so free of thought, so completely moved by my senses. It was exactly as I spent much of my childhood simply go into the woods and explore and allow myself to simply be moved by the world around me. It was perfect.

I don't advise people to train like this all the time method is important conditioning is important a good warm up and warm down are important but some times you have to forget these things forget the idea of the discipline and remember the simple childlike inspiration of movement that fuels our discipline just go outside and play forget the method forget the names just have fun. If your tired or listless in your training if your plateued sometimes is best to just take a walk in the woods.

The joy of running

2008-10-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

I just came back from a wonderful training session, a simple mile run with about 30 obstacles taken over the course of it and nothing repeated. After that I did a series of fifteen tornado style clean and presses with a heavy log. The log weighs 300 plus pounds but since you just lift one end per time it's about as difficult as doing a clean and jerks with 135 barbell. Immediately following the clean and presses I ran up a 30 meter, extremely steep slope with roots sticking out to pull your self up by 3 times in a row all as fast as possible. After resting for a few minutes, I went to a nice concrete wall and worked did five singles of explosive muscles ups. Normally I would do five in a row but due to the left over moisture on the wall and my shoes from yesterday's rain I couldn't maintain form for more then one at a time. I wasn't happy with my flick ups or the dip after the transition so I added ten flick ups and dips after the muscle ups. I finished the training by working on my front through vault or kash vault doing ten repetitions focusing on keep my hands in contact with obstacle until my legs came through. The whole training took me about an hour and worked continuous running jumping and vaulting endurance, followed by anaerobic endurance, then upper body strength and climb up technique, and finally a specific vault technique that I am playing with. It was clean and focused and productive training, and above all it was highly enjoyable. The sun was shining, the weather crisp with fiery leaves mixed with beautiful green needles to create a spectacular forest tapestry.

The best part perhaps of the day was walking out of the park and seeing a 4 year old girl vaulting on to a rock, spinning across it, running to a group of small trees, climbing through them, and then climbing over a log, all the while talking to herself about a bear. Somehow it just warms the heart to see humans, well, actually being human, not bound to computer or TV screens or told not to express their natural desire for movement by authorities.

After training I was left thinking about the rarity of continuous runs within the parkour community. How often do you go to a jam and see people simple running for minute after minute? How many people train routes that last a mile or more or even as far as hundred meters? In my experience not often, and that has been predominately how I trained in the past as well. The truth is that I was one of those kids who hated to run continuously. I played soccer and basketball and ultimate frisbee and would play for hours on end racking up miles of running I am sure; but ask me to run a mile by itself and I would gas myself by sprinting too fast at first, my technique would break down and I would find the experience hateful. Two things have changed: one is that I have focused on developing good technique, I have learned to land ball of the foot first with my foot under my center of gravity to run with very little tension with good posture and fluid action and that makes a huge difference. The other is that I have trained in ways that hurt a lot. Compared to those hill repeats or the clean and presses, simple running at an even pace is simply meditative. Of course the funny thing is that learning to deal with the pain of those high intensity trainings has made lower intensity stuff feel relaxed. I have learned even to find pleasure in the experience of my legs screaming, of lungs pushed to the limit, of pushing myself till I am light headed.

So go for a run, if for you it isn't fun, consider working on your technique or doing some really not fun training like hill sprint repeats.

PNWPA Weekly Parkour Classes Starting Saturday the 16th

2008-08-12T22:40:00.001-07:00

We just reached an agreement to teach parkour classes through Northwest Crossfit in seattle. The classes will be taught by myself and Tyson Cecka at first though we will training up other traceurs to help us teach as well. Its something we have been meaning to do for a long time and I am really excited about the prospects. I think having regular classes will allow us to develop a community of practioners in seattle that are safer, stronger, more skilled and more tightly knit I can't wait to get it started. Our first class offerings are on wendesday and thursday at 7:30-9:00 and sunday from 12:00-1:30 the price is the same as for the crossfit classes at North West Crossfit but you get an extra half hour of training for every class.
For more information check out. www.nwcrossfit.com

Crossfit Portland Clinic

2008-08-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

I taught a Parkour clinic for crossfit portland over the weekend of the 28th of july. It was truly a blast. The owners of the Gym were extremely supportive and positive everyone who came had a great attitude and took to the discipline extremely well. You can see the video here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8BEF4ElNEs, and some pictures and a write up I really appreciated from from Xi Xia about the clinic as well here. http://www.crossfitportland.com/archives/345.

Changes

2008-08-12T22:30:00.000-07:00

This is one of my general updates. I have had many people send me emails concerning this blog and I am glad people have been interested in it. I wish I was able to write in it more consistently and I am thankful for the patience of anyone who is still watching this blog for my occasional writing spurts.

When I started this blog it was to chronicle my journey into training in Methode Naturelle. Over time I have included posts about my Parkour, Muay Thai and Jujitsu training, which though all of their elements are found in Methode Naturelle I also train for the particular focus and philosophy of those disciplines. Since I started the blog, I have been introduced by Erwan Le Corre to his updated version of Methode Naturelle, MOVNAT, which is something I have become very passionate about. I am working with Erwan on developing the MOVNAT website which will hopefully be out in early Fall. We want to make sure that when MOVNAT is revealed it is released with a full complement of information that will prevent misunderstandings and allow people to begin productive personal practices within the method. I can't tell you how excited I am about this project but because we need to make sure everything is revealed at the right time I will not be writing any more articles pertaining to MN training on this weblog.

Since I started writing this blog I have also realized that being a gymnastics coach was not what I truly wanted to do; that my true love was MOVNAT as well as parkour and martial arts. I have sincee started focusing on coaching these disciplines as much as possible. Since I am now involved in these full time, I am needing to develop a more professional website. So look for a personal website soon with examples of my work, rates, events I have done, etc. This blog will be part of that and I will hopefully continue most of it much as before. Right now any writing I do will be about my parkour or martial arts training and projects.

So that's the news about MOVNAT and my projects. As far as training this has been a extremely productive period for me. I am stronger, fitter, leaner and technically better across the entire range of natural movements I train than I have ever been. I focused a great deal on developing lifting and climbing strength from March through July, as well as improving my flow in parkour and my overall Muay Thai game. I went from a 295 deadlift to a 385 deadlift, from 275 on the back squat to 315, from 135 to 185 on the clean and jerk, 125-145 on the overhead press, 35 pound weighted pull-up max to 85 pounds, and 35 pound weighted dip to max to 71 pounds. I was finally able to develop an explosive symmetrical climb up on good walls and a consistent asymmetrical climb up on almost any wall. I was able to get a strict muscle up on rings, and a press to handstand (on the rings). My vertical leap went from 26 inches to 30 and my max wall pass went from 12 to 13 feet. I was able to overcome my fear of vault to precisions on railings and really overall improve my ability to connect different movements together in parkour. I also made major progress in doing running precisions and long cat leaps just recently; I had known I was capable of them for months but had been unable to overcome the fear of doing them until now. In Muay Thai I have gone from an athlete with a descent jab to being able to fight off my jab or off other strategies. I can control the front pocket with jabs and crosses, deliver strong roundhouses to legs, both on their own and as parts of combos. I can work a strong plum or double neck Thai clinch. Finally the moves I am particularly fond of and that I have recently become adept at are head kicks, flying knees, and superman punches. I am particularly fond of using quick and precise head kicks when an opponent tries to disengage, and using my flying knees to bust through people's guards or track down a retreating opponent. Most importantly I have developed good footwork, the ability to use my movement, play angles, and use the opponent's rhythm against him. It's really been a great year of training so far, I can't wait to see what the rest of the year holds.

Most recently I have been focusing on swimming and running for endurance and speed and climbing for endurance technique and hand strength. We shall see how I improve there.

If anyone was wondering I never made it to Brazil. I had a visa problem but I am going to Corsica in September to work on the MOVNAT website and train with Erwan. Crossing my fingers that nothing crazy happens like last time.

Parkour Generation Seminar

2008-05-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

This weekend I had the privilege of attending a parkour seminar put on by Parkour Generations
and Parkour Horizons in Columbus Ohio.

Parkour Generations is considered the premier organization of traceurs in the world at the moment and they were the first to really focus on teaching parkour and have managed to go from teaching a few indoor classes to teaching regular indoor outdoor classes for hundreds of students as well as now teaching for schools at every level and working with the various goverment agencies as well. They have recently created a colaboration with the Yamakasi which is group compromising some of the founders of Parkour/L'art Du Deplacement.

Parkour Horizons is group of basically college students who have been forced by circumstance to become one of the most organized scenes in the USA in order to try and get acceptance at their university I think the most any of them have trained is a couple of years but they their dedication and commitment in getting this event to happen was amazing huge props to them.

The Motive for the event was to try and convince Ohio state University to allow parkour to be practiced on Campus. The whole story of what the Parkour Horizons guys have gone through try to get permission to practice on campus is another post in it is own right but the upshot was that after a meeting with Dan and Forest the campus authorities significantly softened there stance and while parkour is not officially allowed there is hope it soon will be.

When they weren't working on getting parkour allowed on the campus the PK GEN and PK Horizons guys managed to put on the biggest parkour event in US history with over 150 traceurs in attendance on saturday being taught by five of PK gens best. Day one was an informal trainng at hocking hills state park at an amazing series of caves, waterfalls and boulders which I unfortunately had to miss out on which kills me as a big supporter of natural environment training. Day two was another informal training session, held at huge wooden playground structure which provided all kinds of fun. The last two days were formal sessions lead by all the PK gen crew at Batelle riverfront park.

Coming over from the UK were Dan Edwardes and Forest veterans with over five years of training experience and extensive athletic backgrounds and a great deal of coaching experience, Stephane and Johann Vigroux and Kazuma each with around ten years of experience and members of the second generations in parkour/l'art du deplacement part of the second group that david belle formed which was called les traceurs from which all the practitioners of the discipline now take their name.

With the details laid out this was mostly a personal experience for me, I most often go to parkour events these days a leader a coach looking to help others it was strange in way to be there completely not thinking about helping other people with training only to test myself to try and survive the conditioning to train with guys at a similar level.

The first day I was there Kazuma and Johan came with the guys while stephane ran a girls clinic and Dan and Forest meet with the Ohio state university higher ups to take about the future of parkour on campus.

We were take to the largest wooden playground I have ever seen, with lots of areas to climb, jump and vault. Kazuma lead us through a warm up starting with a long jog mixing in, side ways running, backwards, sprinting and quadrupedal. After the jog we did series of warm up movements involving low stances, slow movement and isometric holds. The warm up was tiring but not exhausting and we were already to play afterwords. Kazuma and Johann were interviewed by a local paper while the rest of us started messing about. The moments that stuck out for me the most were working with Jereme sanders on a Saut du Chat to Precision then SDC to clear on a set of wooden rails while tyson and levi worked the same obstacle as a double SDC. Working a SDC to Saut Du Bras with Duncan Germain and a few of his freinds, and playing tag with everybody at the end of the day. The most interesting moment though came walking to and from lunch were I ended up talking to Kazuma quite a bit. We talked about his training with David being dedicated to parkour his own training but the biggest spur to our conversation was seeing a gap between two culverts the gap was approximately 13 feet with a slight drop on each side. I saw it and asked Kaz if he thought it was possible he said yes my curiosity satisified we kept going on our way to lunch. On the way back Kaz and I were talking again when we passed it and he was telling me about how David's way of training was very hard very much about confronting yourself, if you said you could do the jump you had to do it now not later if it was in you, you had to do it. He asked me if I wanted to try the jump and started running back towards it. Then we looked at it I decided I did not feel I could make the gap to the top of the culvert but could make a gap to the side of it on a concrete about 2 feet sticking out from the side of the culvert. I made my decision and jumped actually cleared the concrete block and landed in the grass behind it. Then we waited while Kazuma prepared himself mentally for whatever reason he seemed to be having some trouble getting himself in the right state for the jump. So we watched and waited and the part of me longed to try the more difficult jump. Finally Kaz was ready and jumped and made it with ease but the landing was not perfect so he went back and did it five more times each time landing cleanly on the ball of the foot and running out. Several of us measured out the distance between the two culverts on the side walk and practiced the jump to see if we had the distance. I had it I knew Kazuma encouraged me again to do the jump he said he knew I had the distance, but in my mind I could not imagine. I could not imagine it so I didn't try it. So thats what Kazuma and I talked about as we walked back to the playground how to overcome fear and when to know it should be respected.

The next day we started at 10:00 am with somewhere over a hundred traceurs in attendance for the first full session. Forest and Dan took turns running us threw a warm up of grueling intensity. I won't bother to explain all the movements we did you can see variations in many videos of PKGEN events of those who have been influenced by their teaching. Broadly I would say the managed to work out a group of over a hundred in confined space stressing every muscle and joint complex and forcing all of us to the point of muscular failure and beyond on exercise after exercise. I would like to think I take my physical training very seriously that I do not train for skill alone but for fundamental underlying capacity but I am am not sure I did particular well when measured against the standard of their warm up.

After our "warm up" we were divided into groups based on experience my group was for those with 2.5 years or more. There were twenty or so of us, including a group of guys I would feel I came to know and really enjoy training with over the weekend, Tyson of course was already a good friend and training partner, Duncan Germain from north carolina I had meet while in Lisses were he was shooting his pilgrimage project. I Jereme Sanders from Texas and Levi Meuenberg from michigan I had spent time with the day before. Travis Noble from michigan, mike kipup friedman and Max BNP Calder, and Mark Toorock founder of APK. There were many other good traceurs in the group some whose names I didn't get or who I didn't get a chance to train much with but that was the group I spent the most time with.

Kazuma took our group and immediately just had us run and follow him, we ran vaulted and jumped until we came to high rail which we walked along there was approximately a 12 foot drop one one side, if you fell it would be relatively easy to turn and catch the rail and your feet on the ledge below it but none the less it was bit intimidating and doing it while trying to keep up had my heart beating fast. None the less I made it across moving well with no balance checks. The fear though got in me the next big challenge was 7 or so foot precision to a rail with again about a 12 foot drop behind it. I could make the distance easily could swing a leg out to give me more control even but I was still recovering from the fear of the high rail walk, and simply did not feel up to it. Of the 20 or so of us in the three year group only 6 or so tried the jump as far as I could tell and only three were able to stick it if I remember that. Before going to ohio I had been concentrating allot on making sure that when I did a jump it came from within I truly wanted to do it for myself and knew internally I could do it. I think that is an incredible important thing to know so many of my injuries in parkour have come because I felt pressured to do something before I felt ready and have hesitated because of fear to late. The next step though for me is learning to let go. Know your fear don't try to force it but learn how to let it go.

When everyone was satisfied with that jump, we headed of again at a run doing with some vaults, drops and jumps nothing to challenging until we can to a tree just on the other side of rail. Here we worked on sdc to precision into a tree branch. Again I found myself having an excessive fear response. The distance from the rail to the tree branch was not as far as the two rails I had done the day before and I had done much much bigger SDC to precisions in the gym but somehow the idea I was going to land on tree branch was freaking me out. Still this was something I wanted to do I took my time took a look at it and went for it. Weird thing happened in the air though a branch above my head distracted me and reached up to grab it instead of concentrating on me feet landing. I landed in the tree safely but with perhaps less dignity then I would have prefered. Second try same result why did I feel the need to seize the higher branch with my hands as opposed to simply landing on my feet. Levi stopped me at that point and told me I should think about taking over further away from the obstacle do get more of dive into the SDC. I was frustrated because I knew this the problem was mental I explained I didn't feel I was lacking power to get into the movement. Still the tip was useful sometimes knowing something and remembering it in the key moment are two different things. On my third try I took only a couple steps and made sure to get a good take of and made it into onto the branch with good control I did it three more times and was satisfied.

After Kazuma's clinic we broke for lunch, after lunch we started with a clinic from stephane on physical sensitivity and foot placement Stephane makes the least amount of noise moving I have ever heard it is eerie and his physical grace is simply something else.

Then Forest put us through a clinic on rail balancing which was another brutal conditioning segment in it own right.

Lastly we worked with Dan on vaulting combinations.

That night we had viewing of Julie angel's videos and a question and answer. The question that meant the most to me was again how know when to respect your fear and how to know when to push through it. The answer the gave did not at the time satisfy me the said simply there comes a time when you need to let go. That when you look a jump one that can perhaps take your life if you mess up there comes a time when you just have to decide that you are going do it that you know you can do it and you just have turn the switch to let go. The big question of course is knowing when it is right to turn that switch that is why the other concept that came up over and over again in the Q&A is so important that is concept of sensitivity parkour is not just a physical discipline its not just the movement you see it is very powerfull way to develop a true sense of yourself to know your limits to face your fears and as you progress in it phyisically it becomes imperative to be sensistive to yourself to know when you need to train and when your body needs rest, to know when your fear is something you need to move past and when it something you have respect.

The next day a slightly smaller but still tremendous crowd showed up. Those of us in the experienced group started with forest who ran us through a workout designed to kill our legs, we ran hill sprints, and did a variety of jumping exercise to the point of legs cramping and being barely able to continue. After a few more short clinics Dan lead us all on giant course this was my favorite part by far, my fear from the day before disapeared and I was able to do everything we were challenged to do and felt total comfortable moving fast and in control. I did two cat leaps I am not sure I would have thought myself capable of in another situation, big precisions good vault combinations it was fun.

We ended the day with ab work with dan, stretching with forest and breathing work with Kazuma and then everybody was shaking hands talking asking final question cementing freindships. It was a great weekend.

April clinic day two video

2008-04-26T00:55:00.001-07:00

Tim from Oregon edited together a nice sampler of some of the training we did last sunday check it out here.
http://www.vimeo.com/937820

Crazy Weekend

2008-04-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

I just want to say thanks to everyone who came out to the clinics we hosted this weekend. This Saturday we had two clinics one for kids and one for a adults we had 25 kids with two coaches at the kids clinic and 40 adults with 3 coaches at the adult clinic. It was our first kids clinic and our largest every adult parkour gathering of any kind in the state. Thats an incredible turnout for a discipline that less then ten people were involved with in this state just 3 years ago. Though to be fair we had guys from Vancouver BC and Oregon up as well and both of those scenes are a little older then the Washington scene. Still it was an amazing day it could hardly have gone better. A few things weren't covered as much as I would have liked and somethings ended up much more covered then I expected but thats is my idea of good coaching going with the flow finding what is working for people and focusing it.

We started our kids clinic with warm up games and then basically just built and rebuilt obstacle courses all day long letting them have adapt to them while giving pointers whenever possible we had two groups one of older kids one younger, with the older group we were able to slow down and do some more technical teaching but the energy level of younger kids made that approach not really possible with them, which is not necessarily a bad thing as kids learn very well through the simple process of being asked to do something and just getting helpful hints as the play with it.

Both the kids and their parents were hugely excited about the event and we are sure to be having them again soon. Everybody wants to see outdoor events as well and on that were just waiting for insurance.

With the adults we started with a variation of the Parkour generations warm up which is difficult and distinctive calisthenics warm up using variations of squatting and pressing movements that hit allot a much wider variety of muscles and is much more demanding them most such warm ups. Everyone did suprisingly well at surviving this so good job guys. Then we built a number of obstacles and just asked people to move through them with minimal technique coaching the idea being before we started giving them specific ideas about how to utilize technique to get them to see how their bod naturally responds to obstacles. That took us threw the first hour, then next hour we spent teaching clinics on running, jumping and vaulting, I taught running and managed I think to make this perhaps least exciting clinic interesting and to help people with their running technique which i think is generally much under emphasised in parkour. From what I could see of it Tyson's Vaulting clinic and Danes Jumping Clinic went very well and the traceurs present clearly enjoyed them and improved through them. Next we did clinics what we call wall work, and bar work. Wall work being all of the types of interaction we have with vertical or close to vertical walls to high to vault, so tic tacs, wall runs, wall passes and top outs, bar work being, under bars dives through bars swinging techniques and similar techniques.
After a short break we were back at it with 10 minutes of quadrupedal movement and climbing not so much teaching technique as getting people an experience of working hard using this type of movement.

Finally we built more obstacle courses and focused on training the ability to transition smoothly from one movement to the next and finally an hour of free time.

Five hours passed amazingly quickly and very few people seemed to lose energy until the very end the level that was demonstrated was impressive and as we moved towards free time many traceurs were able to innovate new and effective or simply beautiful movements through the spaces we provided.

The next day we had three locals plus dane and I join the seven from oregon and the four from BC for a out door session at whatcom falls park. I lead an hour long mn training session which was very well received and everybody showed strength and endurance. We did not swim or do self defense training but we hit every other capacity. Finally we hit a couple of areas up for more technical parkour style practice for a couple of hours before finally calling it good on an amazing weekend.

You can view pictures of the weekends clinics http://flickr.com/photos/undaunted/
and http://www.oregonparkour.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=994
We will have more pictures and video up later.

Headed to Brazil

2008-04-14T11:14:00.000-07:00

Hey every body I apologize it has been so long since my last update, life has had away of making it difficult for me to take the time to post. My wife and I have been in the process of moving a house and that has taken allot of my energy and I have been training very hard, as well as working more and doing work for our non profit the pacfic northwest parkour association. Still I have news that I felt very worth taking the time to post. On the 24th of april I am leaving for brazil to Spend two weeks training in MN with Erwan Le Corre. While I am there I will have the chance to compete as a white belt in the Bahia Brazilian Jujitsu competition it will by my first jujitsu competition and first organized competive event since I played soccer as 10 year old. I am little intimidated of course but mostly excited I wanted to compete when I first trained in BJJ but never felt comfortable enough with my level before my school closed. Now I am training in a much better school and doing fairly well so I think I am ready to compete... in brazil though is perhaps a different question, we shall see.

My training with Erwan is is going to be something else as well I have been training very hard as i said above, focusing a great deal on parkour and martial arts and when possible on weight lifting, I have got my personal record on deadlifts up to 345 pounds overhead press at 135, and weighted pull up at 70 pounds. I have always been weak at top outs compared to the rest of my level and I am finally starting to iron out that weakness. My strategy has been simple get as many top outs or muscle ups accomplished over the course of week as possible with out over training, every opportonity I get a do a few just enough to groove the movement but not so much I get tired. Its technique I borrowed from Pavel Tsatsoline called greasing the groove. Also I am focusing allot on transitions between movements feeling that smoothness and relaxation in the transitions is weakness that is very problematic in my movement and makes me much less efficient then I would like to be not mention less graceful and flowing.

Still I know I am not fully prepared for what Erwan has to offer I trained my running and quad endurance up allot over the summer after we last trained but have focused on other things over the winter and regressed on that front. I can recover that level fairly quickly I am sure but I have limited time before my trip and need to focus on BJJ as much as possible. Erwan is of course promising to push my much further then last time I was there, we shall see how far I can push myself.

Last two weeks I intentionally over trained as method of preparation to got to that mental place of making it through my training as almost a survival thing. I trained 30 hours over that two weeks, often training a full hard parkour session with a fully martial arts training then weightlifting when my Jujitsu coach put me through the shark tank drill I hit my limit. The Shark tank is drill were you have to compete a full 3 round 5 minute round match at 100 percent effort except every minute the rotate in a fresh opponent. Luckily my coach called it after two rounds knowing how hard I had been training. I pushed through it and survived it was probably the hardest mental training I have ever done, but I have been achey fatigued and had flue like symptoms all weekend I had to coach a gymnastics meet this weekend and without coffee(which I never drink) I am not sure how I would have made it through. Still I am feeling pretty much better now and in fact it is time for me to go to Jujitsu again. I hope that was interesting to you I will of course update and let you know how things are when I am in brazil hope all is well with anybody who reads this blog.

Rafe

A Day for Play

2008-01-28T22:50:00.000-08:00

A couple weekends ago I had a really wonderful experience helping to shoot a DVD for Frank Forencich, author of the exuberant animal and play as if your life depends on it. Tyson Cecka who is one of my closest freinds in parkour became interested in franks work a while ago and while I didn't initially have as much interest in it when Frank was interested in talking to somebody about parkour training in the woods Tyson passed my number to him. So Frank called me and invited me to a Conference on developing a play retreat in the woods. The conference was great I meet a bunch of amazing people who were all interested in very similar things, rehabilitating people from their state of depressed imobile, distraction, and get them to connect once again with their bodies, their joy, their humanity and the world. The next move Frank proposed was DVD shoot, so Tyson filmed and 60 odd people came from all over to play with Frank for a day in seattle. For beth and I it was our first chance to actually experience Franks Method first hand. I had read some of the games on franks site before and at first glance I found them kind of silly. I figured I love the concept but wasn't sure about his execution. Experiencing the games and the way he coached them was an all together different experience.

I could quickly see the depth of thought and understanding of fitness that he had put into creating the games but also how unique the were in focusing not so much on those underlying physical mechanics but so much more in the experiential roll of moving, playing, interacting and touching other human beings in co-operative setting. There was competitiveness within the games but it was very down tuned by our cultures standard it was amazing the effect these games had. There were people ranging in age from early teens to mid sixties, and from very good atheletes to overweight and inhibited by injury. All were able to interact and play with each other, all got wonderfully intense workouts that suited their physical level. From the least athletic to the most we all managed to be challenged and yet safe at the same time. Frank talks about creating a safe emergecy to train people, just enough stress to promote adaptation but not so much as to flirt with damage. His games turn out to be quite ingenious in doing this, through concepts like intelligent resistance. Through working with partner you can calibrate a desired level of resistance potential much more precisely then with weights(much as love weight training) and you can keep that resistance consistent or inconsistent as desired through an entire range of motion. Of course breaking it down to science of how it works as an exercise almost misses the point, the thing that is so exceptional about franks method is the interactive experience.

Exuberant animal workouts are not grunting painful, disciplined affairs, the are fun, more so then you would expect even, the experience of doing them is one of falling very much out of your thinking mind into a state of simply doing and experiencing and the experience while challenging is overwhelmingly one of fun, laughter, and sharing with other people. Its as if you could recapture the simple joy of childhood games again but in way that is completely surprising.

I feel my path, my practice of movement was immensely enriched through this weekend and my mind is buzzing with ways to incorporate elements of franks games into my practice and coaching of MN, parkour, gymnastics martial arts and fitness.

I am also inspired because I see in frank a model for what I would like to achieve in my life to be able to devote myself to making people happier, more connected, more true through movement through play, through practice and discipline. To see the path he has blazed gives me strength to pursue my own.

Training Update Number ?

2008-01-18T13:48:00.000-08:00

Training is going well, I am still primarily training in three different blocks, Martial arts, lifting, and Parkour as opposed to complete MN trainings but I feel good about that for the moment. I had pushed myself close to the edge of exhaustion a couple weeks ago so I took a week of and now I am working my way back up to training as extensively as I want. I do jujitsu once a week and Muay thai twice a week right now and I am looking to add a second Jujitsu class, I am now doing hard conditioning sessions after these classes, mixing dumbell, and kettlebell training with muscles ups and rope climbing, On the weekends and as it suits me I train Parkour. Next week I will start mixing up my weight training with intense short parkour circuits then work towards doing workouts that include all three again so that I will be continuously training at least 9 of the MN capacities in 2-3 hours sections 3-4 days a week.

In my parkour I have been focusing on learning to quiet check out blane latest article for an example of what I am talking about http://blane-parkour.blogspot.com/2008/01/inner-game-of-parkour.html. S
ee it want to do it, know you can do it, do it, no more measure it with your feet, calculate every little thing psych up, etc etc. I have base of experience now to know what I can do the key is listen to my subconscious, and cut the noise, if I feel it I do it, thats what I am working towards anyways. The flipside is if I don't feel it, don't do it and thats just as important cause forcing through that feeling is when I have gotten hurt.

I have been coaching allot doing a free class every saturday for an hour and little clinics for 15 minutes on basics at Jogo gym after their crossfit workouts on saturdays as well.

Martial arts has been my big focus lately and I have been having a great time with it. I seem to improve almost every time I train, I was able to defense myself pretty well when I started just working of my jab and cross, now I have become much better with my front and round kicks and can use them very effectively, then I added the plum or double neck tie clinch and knees out of it, then in the last couple weeks I have become much better defensively using lateral movement and offensively adding flying knee's and Head kicks several times I have been able to drop head kicks right on someones kneck and with control to keep from hurting them at all, which is really a cool feeling. I find that I am able to spar with very empty mind and no fear which apparently is not easy for most people and is a contrast to my experience in parkour were I feel fear as been a huge limiting factor for me. My freind dane suggested that perhaps it is partly that work on overcoming my fear and learning to be in the now in Parkour that is allowing me to excell in martial arts. Perhaps, perhaps there are other reasons as well its very interesting question.

Thats basics news for the moment if I can get myself to write I have several ideas for more article style posts brewing, hope everyones training is going well.

Here is quote on the quiet mind that inspired me.

"The mind must always be in the state of 'flowing,' for when it stops anywhere that means the flow is interrupted and it is this interruption that is injurious to the well-being of the mind. In the case of the swordsman, it means death. When the swordsman stands against his opponent, he is not to think of the opponent, nor of himself, nor of his enemy's sword movements. He just stands there with his sword which, forgetful of all technique, is ready only to follow the dictates of the subconscious. The man has effaced himself as the wielder of the sword. When he strikes, it is not the man but the sword in the hand of the man's subconscious that strikes."

Takuan Soho.

MN the begining

2007-12-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

For me Methode Naturelle training became my guiding training philosophy june of this year when I went to train with Erwan Le Corre in france. Erwan and I had formed a internet friendship through our discussions on parkour.net and he had talked to me allot about methode naturelle training, which fascinated me. Within the parkour world we often talked about usefulness and training to be able to deal with emergency situations, but the more I thought about it the less sense the common practice of parkour made to me as far as utility. What good is being able to run down a mugger if you can not defend yourself from him or protect someone else? What good is climbing into a burning building if you don’t have the strength to carry a person out? This was Erwan opinion... rant perhaps might be a better term and his answer lay in the forefather of parkour, Le Methode Naturelle, and I was fascinated to learn more about it. I had been doing my own little MN type trainings for a couple months prior to going to france, adding climbing trees, picking up, carrying and through rocks and logs and elements of martial arts practice, but experiencing the training Erwan would be something altogether more powerful and complete.

Beth and I meet Erwan in City of Nice along the French Mediterranean. There he was staying and working as an independent salesman for the summer so he could spend his winter in Brazil working on his MN project and school. Erwan met us at the train station.

After Erwan showed us to our hotel we were forced to find shelter from an unexpected downpour that blew in of the Mediterranean. So we took a seat in a little french Cafe on the boardwalk, drank tea and talked till the weather broke. The talk quickly turned to our passions for movement and the desire we shared to develop the full capacity of the body and mind not as specialized athlete but like a wild animal, both of us felt that modern human beings had lead themselves to a very sad and domesticated state. Parkour and MN is inspiring because it offers us a window out of the cage we have built for ourselves. Its always strange to meet someone in real life after communicating with them soley through the net. Erwan is less polite, and even more passionate in real life, he is also allot funnier, he is one of the few people I have meet capable of out talking me. One might say he has tendency to rant but what he has to say is fascinating and its worth taking the time to listen.

Anyways after tea we headed down to the beach for our first training together. The training was spontaneous and unplanned just moving down the beach getting warm looking at what seemed interesting much like I see parkour generally practiced, we found an interesting wall that was sloped in and then rounded out creating a difficult catch for the rail on top, and did a vareity of other passe muraille, jumps and quadrupedal movement the most interesting part of the training though was when Erwan found a long metal pole like one might fly a flag from lying on the ground. He picked it up and pressed it over head and practiced throwing it, when we was done he invited me to follow up and soon we had devised many different ways of training with this tool. Throwing and catching, lifting overhead, moving down on its length so we had to fight against the leverage and finally having one person sit on it while the other two lifted it to chest height or even overhead. This training was both productive and really enjoyable, I have found myself going back to similar games in my own training and in working with other athletes over and over again.

The next days training began at sometime around the crack of noon. A hard task master Erwan maybe but luckily his sense of appropriate timing was similar to ours. Erwan took us to down to park just over the Beach. We started straight out with quadrupedal movement, previously I had never focused on training for QM for any kind of endurance, and as Erwan showed us various varieties my abdominals and shoulders were soon screaming to stand up. I couldn't believe how fast I became exhausted. I was worried about what the rest of the day held in store if I could barely make it through this warm up. Beth in contrast seemed to be moving free and easy, and of course for Erwan this was child’s play.

Finally after what seemed like 20 minutes but was probably less than five Erwan took us across the streets to train sprint intervals, first we ran up hill and jogged back down for 5 repetitions then we switched. The sprinting was relief after the quadrupedal and here I felt keeping up with erwan was no problem. After sprinting Erwan had us jump up on the backs of a couple park benches and do squats, as we fell of repeatedly trying to get through our reps, Erwan helpfully pointed out how difficult balancing was after even just a small amount of hard training, after a variety of other balance exercises Erwan had us running up a hill which he explained was 3 miles to the top and took him about 20 minutes to run, which combined with swimming in the ocean he would do intervals of for 3 hours! After the sprints, and quadrupedal and the balancing Beth and I were struggling just to keep running as Erwan told us this story.
Beth dropped back early on and said to go ahead and keep up our pace, but soon enough my pace was to slow for Erwan to so he jetted ahead while I struggled to keep my legs moving. About half a mile ahead Erwan had stopped and was working on a jump. When I reached him I stopped to catch my breath, but Erwan scolded me quickly the work must be continuous in a MN training session. So I kept moving around working on a Saut Du Chat until Beth joined us. We jogged more easily down to the beach after that, were leathery old men and topless ladies watched us in bemusement as we worked running and standing precisions, drops, and a Saut Du Bras once again without ever fully stopping. When Erwan was satisfied with our work there we headed back up to some tree's Erwan had seen for climbing practice.
There we muscled up, lached, and climbed in any variety of ways. At one point an attractive young woman stopped to ask what we were doing and Erwan stopped completely I might add to explain it to here in great depth. French flirting aside, by the time Erwan finished his conversation, our forearms were pumped and our imaginations dry as far as those tree's were concerned so Erwan lead us to our final training spot. A boulder strewn rocky beach, home to exactly no sun bathers. There we grabbed some good size rocks and worked on lifting them overhead. Then we switched to a smaller rocks and practiced passing them back and forth which again is surprisingly entertaining if somewhat scary. For the grand finale of the workout, we were to swim in the ocean.

The area we were to swim from was abutted by boulders all around and slick as snot with Algae and the surf was while not heavy neither was it calm. Erwan who was a former triathlete and very good swimmer took off into the waves and I followed, focused on finishing the workout. Beth was intimidated by the size of the waves the rocks and slick jetty, and decided to opt out. When Erwan saw her approaching the water he started back to make sure she was safe. I followed Erwans path out into the ocean at least to the point were he turned not particular far but not easy swiming in the swells. About the time I felt an intense sting on my shoulder followed by a burning sensation. Apparently I had hit a jelly fish in the water. I have never really swum in the ocean much and I was already intimidated by the surf, but being stung by the jellyfish definitely antied up the adrenaline level. I was worried my arm might shut down. As it turned out it was just a light burn and I was easily able to get back to shore where we treated the burn which did no more then buzz lightly for the rest of the day. After that we showered, dressed, and found a cool rock for picnic.

The next day Erwan offered to take us out of Nice into the country for some training in a natural environment, it ended up being quite the trip. To start with Erwan drives like a French man, or as we would say in the U.S. a psychopathic maniac. Of course he maintains we drive like drugged up sheep and are more dangerous because it so easy here. We'll Viva la difference I say and hopefully next time I train with Erwan someone else drives. This was all made worse by gnarly traffic and it took us an hour longer then it should have to make it out to the creek where we were planning to train. After a quick lunch Erwan said he was very tired from the sales the night before and wanted a nap before we started training. So while Erwan slept Beth and I explored the creek. Running up and down creeks has been a favorite activity since I was a kid and something I have done a fair bit as part of my parkour training, so I had a good time and stopped to catch several toads on the way. When we got back Erwan had decided that this area was not as good as he remembered for a full MN training and we should go to the nearest town to train instead.

Ciele the town we went train in was an amazingly beautiful town complete with a castle on a rock thrusting up from the side of the rather sheer cliff upon which the town perched.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2307/2099703283_7f26874c93.jpg?v=0

Beth decided she was still tired from the day before and wanted to take pictures of the town instead, so she skipped training and took some pictures instead.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9527742@N03/sets/72157603524772787/

We all wandered down in to the town and Erwan I worked on doing precision jumps. Erwan and I had similar distance but his control was much better, as Erwan would say over and over, "You do not lack of strength, you lack of control." There was a particular large precision perhaps seven or more feet with a three-foot rise from the start to the finish. Erwan did this and wanted to see me do it. I did it and craned stepped the landing. He said this was fine, a good technique for a longer precision, but that he knew the distance was easy for me I needed to have the control and the confidence to land it on both feet. “It is good to see the easiest route but you need also to push yourself to do what scares you.”

Just asking me to do it was enough motivation and I found the jump really wasn't as hard as it had looked. I still find myself looking at stuff and knowing that infact it is well in my range but the distance seems very large to me. We continued to explore the little square in which we found the jump. The square had some nice small wall passes, a couple of vaults, and various different gaps to jump. As we played around Erwan kept noticing the excessive tension I carried in my movement. He had me do lots of mental and physical exercises to force me to relax and not have so much tension before I jumped. It must have looked strange, us running around pretending our arms were limp spaghetti while bent over like a chimp in this beautiful medieval French town. I never quite mastered it to his satisfaction but I did improve at least. Then we worked on learning to breathe under control while practicing top outs. Previously I had held my breath during the movement. Again Erwan was pointing out my excess of tension.

It’s something that has always bugged me seeing my movement. I am capable of high speeds and big movements but my movement looks jagged and tense; my movement lacks beauty to my eyes. Still something I continue to work on is to move with ease and grace as opposed to jagged tension.

After that I had Erwan critique my running form and surprisingly he found no faults with it. Now if I could only apply it for longer periods of time at higher intensities I might earn some respect.

After that we started heading back, stopping once for a large wall pass that presented itself, maybe 12 feet or so, but very grippy and slightly slanted. We both got it in a couple of attempts and headed back to Nice for dinner and for Beth to catch a train to italy.

The next day was to be my last in Nice and the only one with just Erwan and I, so as you might expect it ended up being quite intense.

Our training on that last day started down by one of the few sandy beaches in Nice. First we simply ran for 10-15 minutes, nice and relaxed pace, not difficult at all. After the running warm up Erwan had a course of perhaps 80 meters including a running precision, a saut du brasand a vault to a drop. Erwan started sprinting through it and soon enough sweat huffing and just focusing on keeping up. The running precision was in the range where it was not difficult to make the distance but very difficult to land it with control and it required a lot of speed to make at all. The Saut Du Bras was very safe and easy but the take of was from round rail and when you’re tired getting yourself to approach with good speed and take off something like that is difficult. Erwan would do the drop by jumping on top and dropping off the landing into a squat and running out. The drop was maybe six feet and with my history of knee problems that was not a good idea so I vaulted and landed and rolled. We did sprints through this with just jogging to recover for a 15 minutes. I was just barely keeping pace, barely on the level of able to continuing and doing it safely. After this course we were very tired or at least I was and Erwan who was worried about sunstroke decided we should take a short break before continuing .

After our break we went swimming. Erwan pointed out a buoy well out into the bay and asked if I could swim to it. I honestly answered that I was not sure. Still he said we would go and see, if I felt tired we would just come back. So out we went and though I experienced some fatigue I made it with relative ease. From there we practiced sprinting from buoy to buoy, or swimming without coming up for air, or swimming on our backs arms raised as if carrying someone. I was very very tired by the time we made it back to shore, but no rest for the wicked, and we jogged back to the circuit area for quadurepedal movement training. This was by far the most brutal part of the training. We moved around on all fours, trotting, cantering, stretching to go under rails, and moving crab walk style for at least 15 minutes, it was brutal. Every muscle ached, my palms were bruised, and I could barely breathe and it was hot, really hot for me coming from the northwest. Every time Erwan took us underneath the rails I could barely keep from scraping my belly on the ground. Finally Erwan stood up and lead me, to series of boulders to run and bound across. After this Erwan let us slow down to a walk and we headed over to some tree's to practice muscle ups. Three was my max, but Erwan eventually busted out 20 muscles up mostly symmetrically out of an l-hold on a rail. I was shocked. I still can't come close.

After our climbing training, we finally took the chance to train our defensive capacity. We started with kick boxing but after taking a few of Erwans kicks I decided I needed my legs to function when I went to Lisses and would prefer to just box. My leg work at the time was not great and Erwan was a formerly a national level Karetaka. We boxed using open hands to the face and fists to the body, and this proved a much more even match and was quite enjoyable. After some time of practicing boxing Erwan wanted to wrestle since he knew I had a grappling background. As he had the advantage in kicking so I had the advantage in grappling. We did some ground work at first but because the sand was very gritty it was rather painful so we stuck to working on throws. Erwan was able to throw me once, but other then that I was very much in control, which felt rather nice after being outdone at every turn before that. On one part of one capacity at least I was more developed! When we had exhausted our desire for wrestling and our skin was to torn up from the sand, we called it a day. Somewhere of over two hours of continuous and very strenuous training excepting one break. It was great.

After a break and more food, we headed up to an area with some good walls and rails for some technical parkour work. Erwan and I talked a lot about the concept of efficiency and how over any appreciable distance being good at running and choosing safe options over obstacles is going to be more efficient then the spectacular stuff you tend to see in parkour videos.

My wall pass and vaulting techniques were all approved of. The key for me is not primarily the techniques at this point but developing the capacities to employ them with effectiveness, grace, efficiency, endurance, speed, strength, etc. That was the main lesson of training with Erwan. Sure work that little technical thing 50 times in a row sometimes, but more often focus on the full capacity; vault and continue running, climb and don't stop. Challenge yourself across all your physical dimensions so that when you’re tired, injured, scared, you can still use all that technical skill. Once you have great capacity skill is much easier to develop and its pursuit is safer and more fruitful. Too often we look for the shortcut; if my technique is perfect then I won’t have to be strong, or fit or courageous. But this is not so. If you are strong, fit and courageous then technique can make you great but without those capacities it’s incomplete.

Great Self Defense Blog

2007-12-09T15:03:00.000-08:00

I ran across this blog searching about martial arts and self defense, this guy is not only offers some of the most profound insights about the true nature of violence and self defense that I have read he is also just a really really good writer.

http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/

Training is continuing well. I am still working on my france update which is turning into a much longer post then I had expected. Hopefully I'll get some more updates in soon.

Training update

2007-11-16T21:49:00.000-08:00

Its been over a month since my last update sorry, about that, for a majority of that time my training has been disturbed and my mental state has been medicore at best, last couple of weeks things have started to look up, I am continuing to train in the fight club, and Jogo Gym/Crossfit Bellingham is open so I have training there allot focusing on developing my lifting capacity. My complete natural method sessions have been coming only ever couple of weeks, the parkour scene here is growing really fast and that has demanded my attention. I have been trying to add in other capacities when I train parkour as well. For instance at one recent session I was working on various vaults and hurdles when I saw a nice moderately heavy log laying nearby. I picked it up and practiced getting over the hurdles while carrying the log it was amazing how much of challenge that was, something to practice for sure.

Another great session I had since my last update was last months MN training session. I had six traceurs come out with me and train down at clayton beach, We ran down the beach barefoot running along driftwood logs and rock to gain momentum, then we came to a more rocky area and things got more interesting I have probably mentioned it before but I find moving over areas like this especially interesting because of the way you constantly have adapt in different ways using all four limbs, some movements are like vaults, some like quadrupedal, but there is this constant adaption that is just wonderful. Doing it barefoot is doubly interesting. After that we practiced lifting and carrying rocks and then carrying each other with the person being carried playing dead and having to be picked up of the ground then squatted 5 times then carried down the beach making sure to overcome obstacles on the way. This proved extremely interesting and challenging a great example of why its necessary to train capacities like lifting not just in the most scientific way like a clean and jerk but also in the original and natural ways we would need them. Picking a limp human body of the ground required not just strength but also cleverness or technique, and mobility. After that we played a game of sharks and minnows a form of tag were the minnows are chased down by the sharks until only one remains. The way we played it you had to move on all fours and to capture a minnow you had to stop his forward progress completely, we did this on sandy slope and it was huge blast. We took a short break after that then worked on climbing and wall passing on a wonderful rock face. Finally we took a run down the other side of the beach which is more talus running, all in all a wonderful session you can read a full write up of it by another participant here. http://washingtonparkour.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1951

Lately my schedule has been jujitsu and weight lifting tuesday thursday, Muay Thai/Kick Boxing wednesday, and Parkour on saturdays. The goal is to add parkour sessions before my Martial arts classes and try to do them in such a way I can run from my parkour training to MA class to Weightlifting. As my energy/recovery allows I would like to add weekly outdoor MN sessions on sunday.

This tuesday was the first day I was able to train everything(excepting swimming) in a single day in long while. I started out at the rec center track by measuring some track and feild numbers for project I am doing, I ran the 40 yard dash in 4.88 seconds, standing long jumped 10 feet and running long jumped 17. I would like to see those numbers change to 4.6, 11 and 20 in the next few months, after that Dane and I went to attempt a difficult 12 foot wall pass we had recently discovered but been unable to achieve. We were each able to do it once but not again, next time we will have to get in the requisite three times. I went to jujitsu from there where we worked on uchimata or leg sweep hip throws, and worked on submissions from the guard specifically a arm bar, to triangle to omoplata series of transitions, I struggled with it cause I tried to train the sequence on both sides which my coach told me was bad idea at end of the class. But when we rolled after class I was able to get my uchimata off as well as getting an arm bar from mount and almost rolling an omoplata out of second arm bar attempt. I was pretty happy with my progress. After that I did a 3 sets of seven rep work out featuring 225 deadlift, 95 overhead press, 95 squat and 18 pounded weight pull ups. I was cranking through the deadlifts and snatchs but had difficulty completing the reps of presses and pull ups which is always the pattern for me lower body strength develops easily upper body not so much. I feel like working this type of training will really help to even that out, I will be doing variations of heavy presses and pulls in all my workouts now.

Thats the update for now, big training weekend coming up will try to put an update on that up as soon as possible and will be working on my long delayed post on my training in france soon too.

Three principles of good Practice

2007-10-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

Playful, Methodical, and Fundamental. I believe these three principles are the basis of an effective long term training practice whether it is for Methode Naturelle, Parkour, Martial arts, or really most any discipline of human movement. Why these three things? Well first let us say that play is the most natural human method of developing the body. Play is a universal among higher animals, it hones the bodies attributes and capacities. Specific animals play in very specific ways because those types of play have proven effective over evolutionary time in developing the abilities that allowed that species to survive. We would be foolish to forget this evolutionary history. On top of that there is the simple matter of happiness. I think one could postulate that the pursuit of happiness is one of the core goals of a human being, generally if it does not make you happy you will lose motivation to do it. Play is fun by definition, and having fun makes you happy. So for example, lately in training people I have been trying to use games that develop the capacities I am looking for, whether it be tag, or sharks and minnows, or capture the flag. There's lots of ways to make space for playfulness in our training which will not only make it more fun but also more effective.

A dedicated training practice needs to be methodical too. Play will get you much farther then you might think, but to progress truly far in any discipline requires developing a taste for working hard with in it, being committed to it both physical and mentally, and approaching it with a plan. In this sense you're not just doing your practice because of the joy it brings in the moment but because it gives you a long term sense of accomplishment and self, it's worthwhile to you behind being just play, it's something you are willing to work on. Work can be a dirty word in our culture but the distinction between work, play and even art is much less distinct in many traditional cultures. Play is often seen as the work of children, and adults are expected to get the same joy out of their work. So yes, work on what you love to do, even when it is hard, even when you're sore, and when it's cold and wet. In the long run this brings you a deeper level of joy and happiness than just focusing on the now. In my practice I see the methodical element in things like forcing myself to keep a high pace while chaining movements, in setting up courses and starting to time myself over them, in going into my martial arts school and drilling the core movements whenever I can, even if can't get into a class or get any sparring in.

Finally it should be fundamental. Which is to say it should have a primary focus and goal and the training should be aimed to achieve that goal and the practioner should often ask how well they are going about achieving that goal. For instance in parkour I see many people who are very proficient at many movements and can do many wonderful and technical things on a single obstacle, but when asked to run through a course of more then a handful of obstacles, they lose there wind, their co-ordination, and their technique. To me the core of parkour is the ability to move continuously through your environment, overcoming obstacles in the most effective way as you approach them. Some traceurs talk about training inefficiently to become efficient. I say sure this can be good part of the playful side of your training, but if you're not making the practice of efficient movement through your environment a regular part of your training to me you're not really doing parkour. It's sort of like saying you're playing basketball to improve at football. I feel the same way about martial arts; the core of martial arts to me is the capacity of defense. If you are not regularly engaging in training that challenges you to defend yourself in an alive way (see Matt Thornton's blog), then you are not really training martial arts, you are training martial art inspired movement. I am not saying the martial artist should seek out street fights, but if you have never faced an opponent who is actually trying to hit you, ask yourself what chance you will have of applying your skills when the context becomes alive.

In MN the goal is to develop the complete original movement capacities of the human being, so both of the above examples are elements you must seek in a real MN practice, and beyond that you must be able to lift carry and throw and do all these things in a chain and even mixed together. The way you train these things to should reflect your goals, so your lifting training is not just to be able to lift barbells, though this is good training. To train lifting in a fundamental way as a capacity one needs to lift a wide variety of the types of things one might need to lift in life, things that are not so conveniently balanced or easy to grip as a barbell or dumbbell or kettlebell. Things like uneven rough rocks, mossy logs, sandbags, other human beings, furniture, dragging things by ropes, or pushing things along the ground. One could go through all ten capacities and show examples of the type of training that arises from applying the concept of fundamental training to the guiding principles of MN, but I think the above examples are sufficient to understand the concept.

So if you're interested in MN, or are doing parkour, or martial arts, or tricking, take a second to ask yourself why am I training, what are my goals, am I training in a way that is playful and enjoyable, is it sufficiently methodical and basic, and am I really training for the capacity I actually want to develop.

Whatcom Falls Park Redux

2007-10-04T13:46:00.000-07:00

I figured sense I am putting out videos I would put this video back up for the blog since my orginal hosting disapeared it has only been available from various not very good streams other people put up. So I uploaded to the best streaming site I could find. Here it is

http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=1227712651

Quick Video post

2007-09-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

I finished up a couple video projects this weekend cause I have been lazy and not out doing training(much needed recovery time actually). Both of these videos are just parkour videos. Erwan has asked me to wait on producing any MN inspired videos till after the site is up so we can better educate people and I very much agree with were he is coming from.

The first video is just a collection of odds and ends footage I had lying about that didn't fit any to any specific video footage but which I felt was good enough I wanted to use it. So I figured I would make a little sampler I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.brightcove.tv/channel.jsp?channel=1213977674

The second is a video I made back in april that was supposed to part of 5 part series showing the 1st, 7, 14, 21 and 30 days of a month of training every day. As it turned out I never got the footage from the first day back, we filmed the eighth day, missed on the 14 and had to give up the project because my body was getting too beat up. The footage didn't excite me very much so I never put it up and forgot about it, looking back through my footage I saw it and realized it actually had some potential value as video showing a good technical style parkour training session. Its not spectacular in any way. But if you are interested in pure parkour training here it is hope you enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx0uX2DVOOE

One Day with Freinds

2007-09-30T00:31:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to do a little write up of a training session I had last sunday with a very fun and skilled group of traceurs. When I first started parkour Dane and I were of the course essentially the only people in our area doing parkour, so we traveled down to seattle a fair amount to jams that first year but once we were able to start gym jams and get people up here to bellingham for outdoor jams once a month and other things have gotten busier it has been allot harder to find the time to get down to seattle to train. Its been a goal of mine for awhile to start making it down to Seattle more often to train.

For my personal improvement Seattle offers me some less well known and more inspiring urban terrain, the university of washington in particular is sort of paradise in my mind, with a huge variety of physical challenges packed together in one relatively compact and pedestrian only space. Its really wonderful. For Dane and I there is also the draw that Seattle is home to the only other traceurs relatively nearby who are on a similar level to us. Often times the most inspiring training is with group of people who have skill levels similar to your own. There can develop a certain synergy in such groups that doesn't exist when training alone or when training with people of very different level from you. So on sunday I called a group of the more experienced traceurs in seattle and asked them to come and train with dane and I when we came down to the university, most ended up being able to show up, the weather was perfect and a really wonderful session ensued.

One of the interesting things was that while each of us was broadly similar in skill, we all had very distinct strengths, when I first started parkour it seemed it was always clear who the best traceur at any given jam was. Dane was the guy most of us were trying to keep up with at first, when Tyson came up from vancouver he usurped that position a bit(to danes relief and tysons annoyance). Morgan Houghton, and Daetan Huck were both athletes with strong backgrounds in other sports who came in a little after Dane, Tyson and I but who took really quickly to parkour and were soon doing wonderful things skill wise. While that group might be the group usually picked out as the leader of the washington parkour scene skill wise there was another little group of three guys Anton, Eric and Alex who floated in and out of the parkour scene who were physical prodigies in their own right just less strictly interested in the discipline of parkour and more interested in just climbing and playing. Well and Anton and Eric have since moved away but the rest us were able to meet up on Sunday. It was really interesting to have us all training together for the first time, well ever actually for all us, but it had been a long time since more then three of us were at any one session. One thing that became clear almost right away was that nobody really stood out from the group overall, but each of us had distinctive strengths and qualities of movement.

Alex muscular and medium height has not really practiced parkour as usually practiced but is long time discipline of the fine art of "I think I can do that" as he likes to say, he was somewhat lacking on technique for vaults, and saut du bras, but showed exceptional daring, climbing ability and balance. Since he had not been able to train much recently due to work his jumping ability was somewhat down but he still kept up very well even there.

Daetan slightly on the tall side slim and graceful was around for the shortest time receiving word late and having to leave early but while he was there, he showed exceptional jumping ability able to do huge precision and easily passing Odegard one of the highest walls any one in our state has accomplished, on his first try and just general demonstrating a graceful and easy movement.

Dane tall and lean but strongly muscled, was probably the star of that particular day but not by a huge degree. Dane lacks some of the grace of Daetan or Morgan probably because of a lack of flexiblity but his movements always have sense of intuitive ease, his steps rarely seem misplaced, his balance is extraordinary allowing him to accomplish with relative ease challenges Tyson has been working on for weeks. His jumping ability is just behind Daetans and I for pure power, and his overall strength is second only to Tysons combine these qualities with his high confidence in his own movement and ability to know what he can do very quickly and it translates into some really stunning movements. Including some amazing rail work, some very high wall passes, and a double Saut Du Chat vault of daunting proportions that only Tyson had been able to do before.

Morgan shorter and lightly built also had to leave early, but he too showed the qualities that make him impressive, he seems to bounce and float when he moves, very little hesitation few stutter steps and effortless explosive power when he needs it.

Tyson shorter and very muscular, was a little of his game perhaps on certain aspects perhaps because he nursing his ankle and wrist slightly. None the less his extraordinary strength and power expressed themselves in various ways through out the day, from highly technical and difficult little strength challenges, to a huge SDC to clear over the same obstacle as Danes double SDC, a skill which of course no one else has been able or even really come close to doing so far. I guess we have our work cut out for us next time.

For myself I was actually exhausted having worked till 4:00 pm the night before and having trained 6.5 hours combined the previous two days. Some how though I mostly rose to the challenge of the skill level around me and surprised myself.

I was finally able to accomplish a goal that has been burned into my mind for the last two years. At that point I had done parkour for a few months and found a ten foot wall pass very large, I went out to train with Eric and Anton in seattle and they passed odegard this huge wall pass up to crack in an even higher wall. At the time I thought it must have been like 15 feet, the novice mind always exaggerates but Tyson eventually measured it as 12 feet 6 inches which for me still seems quite high. Since that time Tyson was able to get it and then later Daetan got it then Dane, and another kid named Alex l who is a relative novice but possesses incredible jumping ability. I had gone back and tried myself at it three times each time coming closer but never getting it. I knew I had the height because of testing myself on the wall at the gym but did not think I would get it that day considering how tired I was and that I had not been practicing the skill recently. I took one attempt from just two step to rehearse the correct mechanics, then ran at it expecting to just get a feel for if I was going to be close that day. Relaxed run up, nice drop of the hips powerful jump solid push and Bam I realized "my hands on top and I'm not falling!" I was actually just shocked at first it was totally unexpected. The climb up out was bit awkward, and I was not able to get it the again so I will have to go back to get the requisite three times to actually claim it but once is more then nothing once is a start.

After getting Odegard I was all about big walls and did two more 12 or so footers including one from very restricted run up I was very proud of. I also did surprisingly well on allot of climbing challenges, despite sore elbows, and found that symmetrical top outs are now automatic for me in place of the old elbow poppers which used to be my norm, there is still a lack of explosiveness but there getting better, its also much nicer as far as preventing SDB rash. I had some nice jumps really fun SDB work I love SDB's there are just not enough places do do them in bellingham. I also was able for the first time to do the less difficult SDC to precision on the obstacle dane did the double, alex was able to get the SDC precision as well so that was nice. I ended up stopping training earlier then dane alex and tyson cause I could feel I was verging on over training but all in all it was really a wonderful session.

Training and Balance

2007-09-29T15:40:00.000-07:00

The last couple weeks have been interesting for my practice because of having to balance my own goals with those people who I wanted to train with or who wanted to train with me. Over the summer I trained mostly on my own but lately I have had less time to train and more people wanting to train with me so the emphasis has switched. That change has made it more difficult to maintain the focus on overall MN development that I had, which is somewhat worrisome to me. At the same time though the training I have done has been very rewarding on an emotional level if nothing else and I feel like between all the various training demands coming up for me balance will be achieved and eventually I will be able to settle down into more personally focused practice.

Last tuesday I contacted a group that had formed a group on facebook for parkour at Western Washington University, because I had heard about them through a friend. Sure enough they were interested in training so dane and I took a group of 3 of them out along with another newcomer Cat on wednesday to whatcom falls park. We trained for about 2 hours teaching them the basic movements of parkour first, then taking them through a few runs through the woods. At that point the were exhausted and headed home. Dane and Cat stayed long enough to help me lift(backsquat) the heaviest log I have been able to find at the falls(320 pounds) and I practiced pushing it up upright and fliping it over for awhile after the were gone then I worked on my throwing and finally swam. So in the end I was able to train 9 of the ten capacities but the continuity of work was not there because of having to keep a pace others could follow and stopping often to help people with technique. Overall it was allot of fun, but for me it was not the best training. On the other hand part of etre fort por etre utile to me is being able to simply help people in their training so to me it is was very worthwhile.

So for now I will catch my complete training as I can and help people here for a little while once they are comfortable training regularly on their own I will focus on developing the total capacity more fully again.

My Level and My training

2007-09-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

Sorry its been awhile sense my last post. I find the more of my time I devote to training, somehow the less time I have for spending online. Weird how that works. None the less I want to maintain this blog as much as possible during this pivotal time in my training.

This was another of the posts I wanted to start the blog with but which has again taken me awhile to get out. Now that I have covered the ground of what I know about MN training, I want to take a little space to describe how I have been training since getting back from france.

So the idea as we saw before is to train for 40-60 minutes continuously mixing all 10 capacities.

Lets start with an analysis of were I was as an athlete after my return from france. I was 6^2 and 195 pounds. I was between 10-14 percent body fast as far as I can tell though I had/have not had it accurately measured. My vertical leap is was about 27 inches my standing long jump about 10 feet, running long close to 19, I can squat probably double bodyweight overhead press 130 plus pounds(I have only tested my maxes on other human beings so I assume with barbell it would be allot higher), deadlift is probably similar to the squat. My max pull ups was 25 dips at 40, push ups 50 or so. I could muscle up(with bad asymmetrical form) and do about 5 decent pistols on each leg. I could run a mile in 6 minutes or so but had rarely if ever run for more then 20 minutes at a time. I could do all of the useful parkour specific movements relatively well compared to the rest of local parkour scene and could do lots of aesthetics movements most other people couldn't. I could vault stuff as high as my chin, or up to ten feet long at waist height, and wall pass up to near 12 feet.

Its not a level that I was particular proud of there was handful of traceurs in the scene who were clearly better then me and even though I could often keep up with the movements they were able to do, I was more hesitant, more likely to bail and hurt myself and generally took longer to achieve a given movement and just lacked a certain movement quality they seemed to possess. The most notable difference was in upper body strength, despite having relatively good numbers in my upper body strength tests, I just didn't have the overall strength or explosiveness in upper body movements that they possessed.

I also had some background in martial arts with skill level that was certainly more developed then average but I am still unsure just how good I am as martial artist and was certainly not as good back then, I am big and relatively strong and have quick hands so that masks allot of technical problems in my self defense game. Prior to going to france I was very interested in the Le Methode Naturelle and was chatting fairly regularly with Erwan, but I was also strongly influenced by crossfit and had strong attachment to my gymnastics training. Because of this influence I was skeptical of the need for allot of continuous training. I associated endurance with athletes like Marathoners or Triathletes who had scarificed huge amounts of strength and power to develop a specialization in maximum endurance.

Training with Erwan showed me another perspective. Erwan was at similar level to me as far as pure power to apply to jumping running stuff, he was notable better then me at technical and confidence aspects of this type of training, and was much stronger in his upper body then me all of this while maintaining a level of endurance that was absolutely humbling. Fresh we could jump similar distances do similar techniques, but its amazing how fast your strength, power, speed, co-ordination balance etc degrade once your aerobically/anaerobically challenged. Erwan said to me you do not lack of strength you lack of endurance and control. Of course its relative compared to top level gymnast or lifter I am weak as a kitten, compared to most untrained people my control(co-ordination, balance, agility, precision, accuracy) and endurance are relatively good. However for myself its clear that I was over balanced to specific capacities that were developed by my specific history of training in parkour and gymnastics. My training this summer has sought to balance that out, I was willing to sacrifice gains in Parkour to an overall physical development, I wanted to be capable not just of doing some nice looking jumps but over moving in useful and effective way in as many important capacities as possible..

My primary training grounds this summer was whatcom falls park, with trips out to clayton beach or western washington university ever few training sessions.

I trained usually 4-5 days a week, 2-3 hours at time. Sometimes as many as four hours. I usually started my training sessions by warming up walking, running and doing quadrupedal on some log or rails near the playground at the park working on my balance and getting warm with low impact movements. Then I would do some mobility exercises for my joints. Once this warm up was over I would always start by running usually doing laps around a approximately 300 yard field I would do about 5 laps usually followed by one lap of quadrupedal movement. Then I would usually go and do some lifting training influenced specifically by the program in starting strength by mark rippetoe. I would take the logs and rocks I could find and do 2-5 sets of 5-10 reps of squats, overhead presses, deadlifts, and power cleans, occasionally I would include higher reps sets of kettlebell style swings. I would usually mix sets of 5 muscle ups on the bars of swing set into this lifting session. I would usually finish this of by picking up one of heaviest rocks and carrying it on my back for 50-100 yards. Then I would go and run through the park to one of few specific courses with good obstacles closed packed to jump, vault, climb or scramble over. Were I would sprints repeats through them and either jog or sometimes when I wanted to focus more on speed walk to the next one. Usually doing 5 repeations each through 3 different courses in a given session. After this about half the time I would do a session of defense technique work especially if I had someone else to work with, and I would almost always finish a workout with a swim in one of the pools in whatcom creek. I always started these trainings barefoot and bare shirt, I would occasional put my shoes on to go through certain courses were I was worried about puncturing my feet. Towards the end of the summer I figured out I was not training throwing consistently at all and would include target throwing alternating arms and throwing heavy rocks for distance after my lifting sessions. My throwing precision is horrible.

I trained at Clayton beach maybe once a week I would focus on climbing allot and I usually didn't manage to swim. The strength training there was less methodical I would just pick up logs and flip them over usually. I tended to wear my shoes and here and only take them of to run down the sandy beach. The last few times I went barefoot until my feet got too raw then put my shoes on for the rest of my climbing

Training at Western Washington was usually ever couple weeks and was pretty much a specific parkour style technical session, with just running, jumping, climbing, balance an walking. Though compared to prior to MN these sessions were much more focused on continuity of effort. A couple times I met friends here and did Parkour training followed by Defense training. I mostly trained shoes on here.

Once a month I organized gym jams were we trained in the gym, during these I focused allot on getting people to continuous training of the capacities necessary for parkour, once the teaching portion was over I would usually focus on a few big explosive movements and some acrobatics cause I rarely trained this things outside that specific context.

Since I started training at WCFC I am still adjusting to the new workload and I have only managed on or two MN or parkour training sessions a week mostly this has been parkour focused because old traceur freinds are coming back to town to go to school and they want to train with me. In week or two I will need to start training Crossfit extensively for while for job I am working towards. Somewhere in their I will manage to find time for at least a couple MN sessions a week. MN remains my overall focus its just been hard to be able to train all the capacities in the MN style recently with various demands on my time.

Since I have had changes in my training its good time to look back and see were I am what has improved what still needs work.

Walking: Haven't worked much on improving this quality didn't even think much about it until recently when I started thinking that most of our ancestors probably spent much of their waking hours waking and that it is probably the most simple basic keystone of our fitness. Its a goal to do more hiking to develop this capacity.

Running: I can run much better then before, the movement is easier I can do it for much longer, I can recover quicker from sprints, hills or obstacles, prior to the summer 20 minutes of running seemed like a long time now I regularly run continuously mixing in vaults and scrambles for 30 minutes at a time. I am not sure if my speed has improved over short distances and I have no way to determine if it has but I will working on testing that more now.

Jumping: My standing and vertical jumps have not changed much at all over the summer so far as I can tell partly this has been due to focusing on other things, partly due to avoiding to much jumping as my knee still needs to recover completely for chondromalacia (the biomechanics are good now but the damage will take 18-24 months to heal completely). However I am able to use my jumping ability more effectively and confidently then before whether doing, gap jumps, vaults or wall runs all my movements seem more clean and effective.

Quadrupedal Movement: I had not trained this much before going to france and frankly Erwan killed me with this stuff. My endurance is know much better and I feel more comfortable on all fours and am able to use it more smoothly in my parkour. I notice that scrambling up steep slopes this ability to move quickly to all fours and use my arms powerfully makes improves my ability to get up the hills allot.

Climbing: I have not focused on climbing as much as I would have like, my climbing strength numbers have not improved at all, I can do 3 good rings muscle ups now just like before the summer. I am little closer to doing clean bar muscle ups. My wall top outs are signicantly improved that was technical improvement learning out to pop on to my wrists on the way up and then get my transfer my elbow over symmetrical. My overally rock climbing ability has improved allot though. One of my recent sessions was with a couple of the most skilled traceurs in washington bouldering in the rain at Clayton beach, both of those guys are significantly stronger in their upper bodies then me and both have been rock climbing for much longer then I have. I was not able to exactly keep up with them on the rocks but I was much closer then I thought I would be and was really amazed at some of the stuff I was able to do. So not as improved as I would like but the overal capacity is definitely moving in the right direction.

Balancing: Next to running endurance this has been the biggest improvement. I feel way more stable on top of narrow rails then in the past, just a huge change in my ability to stay on balance moving around on narrow rails, logs and the like.

Swimming: I feel much more confident as swimmer, my strokes are more efficient my ability to hold my breath is much improved but my endurance as swimmer still needs allot of work. Because I almost always trained every other capacity before swimming it rarely took me long to be fully exhausted in the water. I think this resulted in minimal gains in swimming endurance. I was always worried about chafing if I swam before doing something else guess thats just another resistance i need to develop to fully maximize my training. I haven't swum for a couple weeks now for various reasons and with the weather turning colder its imperative that I get back out there if I am going to be able to adapt to the changing seasons.

Lifting: Not sure here, did a fair amount of lifting training but without being able to measure my maxes its hard to tell how much I have improved. I have improved somewhat I am sure, but I combination of more methodical barbell type training with heavier weights, plus natural type lifting in my MN sessions (not specifically aiming for squats or deadlifts or whatever just picking stuff up and moving it around) will be a more effective way to train this.

Throwing: My throwing is more accurate and somewhat more powerful but I neglected this capacity to much and its big weakness for me.

Self Defense: Been focusing on this allot recently and it has definitely had results, nothing really to measure it against, but I have better defense, am able to get my punches of better, have much better legs and have even improved my bottom game in jujitsu a bit. Its awesome to really be training this fully again.

So that little analysis of how I trained over the summer and the results it gained. I feel fitter and healthier overall though the last month I have been adjusting to mixing in the new self defense training and old aches and pains have popped back up, this week I have been taking it easy to let my body adjust. After I have finished my crossfit training, I will look to measure more specifically some benchmarks for my training and then plan my training to improve them. Upper body strength is going to be a big goal for a while.

West Coast Fight Club

2007-08-27T21:44:00.000-07:00

One of the vital capacities of the human body that has always fascinated me has been the defense capacity, as child I chose martial arts classes over team sports, as I teen I came just short of competing when my school shut down, and since then I have been in no mans land wanting to find a school but leery of the lack of real training offered by many schools and by the cost of the whole affair. I have achieved at least a second or third level, in tang so do, aikido, Kung fu, and Jujitsu but have not got beyond that in any of them because of schools shutting down or in the case of Kung fur after I realized the had no intention of teaching me self defense. Since my last school shut down when I was 16. I have gotten in a few structured trainings here and there, and I have trained as I could on my own or with whoever was willing to train with me and maintained some skill there, but nothing like that developed by those with actual quality instruction.

My goal has been for a long time to continue my education in jujitsu though only style I trained that I learned great deal from and furthermore to learn Muay Thai a style that I find highly practical for my body type, and beautiful in its brutal simplicity. A new school recently opened here in Bellingham called West Coast Fight Club they are part of the straight blast gym family and many of the martial artist I knew and was wanting to train with had told me they were starting to train out of WCFC. They happen to specialize in you guessed it jujitsu and Muay thai aiming to produce competitive MMA fighters, personally I would love to have bit of judo and weapons defense thrown in for good measure but the Muay Thai/Jujitsu combination is a perfect start for me.

Beth and I went in to check the gym out on friday immediately liked the vibe, went back on saturday to work with a couple of the advanced students who were kind enough to spend some time introducing us to the gym during their open mat time spent about 2 hours between grappling and stand up training. The consensus was that my jujitsu basics were strong I just need some technique work to be able to pull submissions cleanly. My stand up game was also commented as having strong basics but its going to require allot more adapting the last teaching I received taught me a boxing style stance that is very structural susceptible to muay thai kicks and I will have to retrain my stance completely, my jab and cross are solid and my front kicks are good but I have been training my roundhouse kicks and hooks incorrectly and will need to retrain them extensively.

Tony the Muay Thai coach came in after on saturday after we had been training jujitsu for awhile and was kind enough to test out my skills right away with a little low intensity but open sparring. I have found many teachers to be very leery of sparring with their students I think the enjoy the mystique of invincibility this practice seems to create but I think its bullshit. Tony's approach seems way better to me first of all he was able to teach me a huge amount in short time and second he immediately earned my respect because I felt the potential power of his kicks and their accuracy and noted his timing and realized that he could have easily destroyed me with very few kicks had the fight been all out. Despite my relatively basic skills that is not an experience I have had before even when training with martial artists who have been training for years longer then me.

Today I came in for half the Muay Thai class and stuck around for another hour and half working on Muay thai basics. 50 round houses on each leg on the heavy bag readjusting my technique and conditioning my shins(need to work up to 300 then 1000). 50 front kicks of the lead and back foot, 50 hooks on each side and 100 jab cross combinations on speed bag. My knee's had little ache again so I avoided grappling. Tomorrow, jujitsu, Muay Thai, and MMA training are on the docket I will see what I am up for I haven't trained a full MN workout since Thursday just bits here and there so I need to get back on that. I really want to develop my MA skill a great deal but not while sacrificing other capacities I am just signed up for 3 days a week right now. I would like to get to the point I can still do short MN sessions even on those days with longer more in depth sessions on my off days. I would like to do an MN session that proceed my classes and go right from one training right into the other.

Anyways I am very excited this is something I have desired for a very long time.

Another beautiful training

2007-08-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

Today was a beautiful sunny day and I was supposed to meet up with friend to train but he canceled so I got out a bit later then I wanted to, not to be deterred I just packed what I needed for work and heading out for the day for beautiful natural style session. I left the house at 12:40, I arrived at the Clayton beach parking lot 12:54. Lately I have been training too much in shoes and I was determined to do as much training as possible barefoot today, which was a bit of a challenge as much of the terrain at Clayton is a little harsher then what I normally run on at Whatcom. I walked down the trail at first, getting use to the feeling of being barefoot, then found a nice log and lifted it and carried it overhead for a while balancing on some logs in the process. Then I warmed up with some uphill quadrupedal movement and finally some martial arts drills. Finally with a full sweat broken, I ran down into the woods to do a series of jumps and vaults stopping a few times to repeat jumps but not resting or breaking from a running pace. The pebbly ground definitely took some getting used to but by the end of the day my technique seemed to have smoothed it out.

After running through the jumps and vaults in the woods, I went back up to the trail and ran down doing one quadrupedal scramble to run along a high ridge. Then I stopped to practice a couple planches and some climbing in one of our favorite trees, a bit more running, then I came to another tree, did a couple more planches, some dynos, and various climbing and swinging movements around it. Finally a short sprint to one of my favorite rock faces for a difficult run/climb that I had never tried barefoot before. I fell the first three times but was just able to do it on my last try again, no breaking from the running pace. Scrambled over the top of the rock climbed and dropped into the sand on the other side. I ran back and picked up my bag where I had left it to do the climb. I checked the time, 1:34, plenty of time for more training. I headed off down the beach, for another course. I like running in the sand, using driftwood logs to speed up whenever possible. Some nice precision jumping sequences and vaults, none very high level but just difficult enough when aerobically stressed and trying to keep pace. I ran out of sandy beach and clambered along some boulders for a while enjoying the seemingly indefinable mix of running, jumping, quadrupeding, and vaulting that is so characteristic of navigating that type of environment. With my feet starting to get sore and my knee twinging just slightly, I decided to walk back along the beach, and was soon feeling in better shape so I stopped twice, once to climb up another rock field, and another time to do quadrupedal sprints up a sandy slope.

After the sprints I walked over and tried to do some climbing. It's incredible how hard rock climbing is when you are even slightly aerobically/anaerobically stressed. Another indication in my mind of just how important chaining is. I gave myself quite a bit of relative rest (just walking about eating berries) and then got back to climbing, climbed until my arms were totally pumped and then climbed some more which was still to be honest not very long at all. It took me all that time to complete a simple sit start traverse I can normally do easily but after all the other training it was very difficult. It felt beautiful when I got it though. I need to do more climbing.

When I could not climb anymore I stopped to eat some blackberries and salal berries then went and found some heavy logs which I was just able to deadlift on one one end then press that side up over my head, then walked my hands up and pushed it over. I flipped two logs twice a piece, they were both of a weight where it was near maximal work to get even one end over my head. Then I grabbed a more reasonable sized log and did 10 overhead presses and 10 overhead squats. I guess the weight of that log must have been only 50 pounds or so but that is actually 20 pounds heavier then I had been able to overhead squat before. The OHS is one of the most difficult exercises for me so I was very happy with that. Then I dead lifted a nice heavy rock, maybe 120 pounds, 7 times, then I worked on shot put and discus style throwing and finally target throwing using small rocks training both sides equally for about 40 throws.

I finished my day with a swim in the Puget sound which was exceptionally clear and very beautiful today. I could see schools of fish in the water with me and there was a gentle current I could drift along in. I swam for awhile but fairly gentle. I know I need to work on swimming endurance but today did not seem like the day for it. After swimming I laid on a rock and dried off, then meditated for 10 minutes or so. Then I headed out and off to work. It was a wonderful session overall; I was able to train all 10 capacities though my defense training was very cursory, but that was ok because my previous training I had spent an hour just on defense training. I was barefoot the whole time except when I slipped into my shoes at the very end to pick some harder to reach berries.

Thoughts on Le Methode Naturelle

2007-08-16T22:20:00.000-07:00

This is the post I intended to open this blog with a statement about what I know about the Methode Naturelle as my training in Methode Naturelle is going to be the focus of this blog. Up until this spring my primary training focus had been parkour dating back to march of 2005, before that it was gymnastics though with substantially less dedication, and before that it was basketball and before that martial arts. I am now at the point that I can say that the Methode Naturelle has superseded parkour in my training as parkour superseded gymnastics, for me it is more primal more vital more complete like when I started training parkour I have the feeling of how in the world did I miss this before. Why didn't I ever follow through on my desire to mix parkour training and self defense and why did I yearn for barbells, kettlebells etc when I had so many rocks and logs available to me, what possessed me to waste beautiful sunny days inside training crossfit?

So I am at the point were wish to dedicate my training to the Methode Naturelle and I wish to also help other people follow the same or a similar path. The complication though is that my understanding of the Methode Naturelle is still very incomplete I hesitate to call my training Methode Naturelle, I think of it rather as Methode Naturelle inspired. Imagine for instance you wanted dedicate your life to Muay Thai training but had only had a four-day seminar on it to base your training on. I do think that the Methode Naturelle is bit easier to explore on your own, the principles are relatively simple though the degree of depth possible is seemingly limitless. So the purpose of this post is to explore what I do infact now about the Methode Naturelle.

I traveled to Nice in June to train with Erwan Le Corre known as Hebertiste on www.parkour.net and who has been training in the Methode Naturelle extensively for 2 years reading all the literature available on it (unfortunately only in French) and who hopes to grow it once again into the thriving school of physical culture it was prior to world war 2, furthermore he previously trained under Don Jean Haberey for 7 years in a training known as “combat vital” which was itself quite possible derived from the Methode Naturelle and certainly had similarities to it, Erwan has also trained with some the original Lisses traceurs whose discipline was inspired by Methode Naturelle training as taught to them by Raymond Belle.

When I went to train with Erwan I had already been chatting with him about the Methode Naturelle for months and my training was already moving in that direction, and I was intending to move even more in that direction. The idea of training to have the essential capacities of our hunter forager ancestors had appealed to me ever since I started parkour. It was my goal to eventually open a school teaching what I saw as the original warrior arts. Its hard to know how much of my thoughts and methods are a natural evolution of my own training and how much was influenced by my conversations with Erwan but it would be hard to overstate just much my training with him effected my perspective and training.

In the four days I trained with Erwan we did two relatively complete Methode Naturelle sessions and two more parkour style technical sessions, we also had many long conversations on the subject of the Methode Naturelle and related issues, I was able to take a brief look through some of the books on the method he had, though I was pretty much limited to interpreting the pictures, Erwan also showed me a draft he had written describing the core principles of MN. This is what I know as far as it goes

The aim of the Methode Naturelle is to develop a complete and healthy human being physically, mentally and morally through the training of the vital natural capacities of the human species that were necessary for our survival as hunter foragers. Georges Hebert the founder of the Methode Naturelle was a French soldier who served in Africa and was inspired by the natural athleticism of the natives he encountered there. The motto of the Methode Naturelle is etre forte pour etre utile meaning be strong to be useful. The training of the Methode Naturelle is not to reach an aesthetic goal or to win an athletic competition it is to prepare the individual to be a strong useful person capable of helping him or herself and the others around them in wide variety of situations.

The vital movement capacities of the Methode Naturelle are to walk, run, jump, climb, quadruped, balance, swim, lift, carry, throw and defend.

A Methode Naturelle training session should be between 20 and 60 minutes and include as many of the natural capacities as possible (generally). The ideal conditions for Methode Naturelle training are in a natural environment with as much of the body exposed to the elements as possible while maintaining modesty. Which is not to say you cannot train the Methode Naturelle in the city or a gym or with shoes on only that this training is not the ideal.

Training should be daily or close to it.

A Methode Naturelle session maybe natural or methodically which is to say one might simple start moving through there environment looking for ways to practice all of the natural capacities for a given time period or one might instead plan out specific route hitting specific capacities or even build a specific course to train each capacity. The obstacle courses seen throughout the world in military training are derived from this last method.

Training each of the ten capacities alone is not sufficient one must be able to chain them together. That is to train one capacity directly after the training of another capacity so that there is no rest between them. so the body is forced to learn to adapt to moving easily between different capacities. This can be very challenging; each capacity has specific physiological demands, which must shift when moving to a different capacity. Furthermore one should be able to mix capacities to be able to run, swim and balance while carrying for instance, or defend yourself while balancing, or swimming, or while climbing this of course adds yet another layer of challenge.

The Methode Naturelle aims to develop a generalized physical capacity not specializations. That is to say to it is the belief of the Methode Naturelle that the athlete who is able to run fast, but also far, to lift very heavy weights but also to climb, to defend himself but also to swim is more useful then the athlete who is peerless at any one of these activities but incompetent or even just less competent at the others. The Methode Naturelle is expressly non competitive because competitive sport is seen as not useful, friendly games are fine but the expression of excess that is modern sport is contrary to the goal of usefulness both in the aim to win at all costs and in the requirement for excessive specialization. The Methode Naturelle athlete, will never run with speed of the sprinter nor the endurance of the marathoner, he or she will never develop the upper body strength of the gymnast or the fighting mastery of the martial artist, he chooses instead, to be as good as he or she can at all of these things and more because he or she never knows what capacity will be called on, for him or her to be useful. According to the Methode Naturelle the generalist is the most useful athlete.

It seems to me very easy to adapt the Methode Naturelle towards developing specific attributes. I am not sure how Hebert approached this, however Erwan talked about seeking to always train the areas were you are weakest. I think this applies both to a specific capacity and also the duration, volume intensity of the training, so one might need to work on their overall running capacity or might specifically need more endurance, or more speed. This can be adjusted by including shorter or longer periods of relative rest (walking, balancing etc) the key is not to stop moving or rest completely. A Methode Naturelle session composed of lots of relative rest, and many short high intensity movements will develop strength, speed, and power, one were the pace is relatively constant and as hard as possible for the given session will develop cardio respiratory endurance, and stamina. My impression is that the later style of training is considered the more basic and important. The amount of relative rest and intensity of work is just one of the many ways in which you can vary your stimuli to develop a broad overall capacity. For instance perhaps one is very strong but lacking in accuracy and wishes to work on the throwing capacity, for this individual finding the heaviest rock he or she could and throwing it would be much less beneficial then finding rock that was much lighter and casting it at a challenging target. In the Methode Naturelle one should always adapt ones training in such a way as to strengthen your weaknesses.

One of the things Erwan often said about the Methode Naturelle was it was not a conditioning program like Crossfit, or RKC or similar functional fitness programs. The Methode Naturelle is an entire method for the development of the human animal. In modern athletics we often dichotomize practice vs. conditioning, one develops technique the other develops physical attributes. This dichotomy is false though, doing precision jumps will develop strength, power, and stamina for jumping as well as correct technique, while doing dead lifts or squats will not only increase the strength of the legs but also will develop a specific lifting skill. I believe this dichotomy arises because of specialization, for instance sprinting is to specific a physical capacity to develop the entire ability of the human being so in order to be the best sprinter one must also lift, and jump and do various other drills but when one trains for a complete physical adaptation the distinction between skill and condition disappears almost completely, when your goal is simply an overall adaptation does it matter if your ability to climb is more due to finger strength or more due to correct technique? If one continues to train correctly both skill and condition should advance together.

That said the Methode Naturelle does focus it’s training in way that I believe could be seen as conditioning first and skill secondary. One of the major epiphanies I had in my training before the Methode Naturelle was that skill could only take you as far as your physical conditioning would allow, no matter how much one worked on their long jump technique for instance they will never jump far if their legs are not strong and quick, likewise no matter how efficient ones running stride they will win no marathons if they are fat and posses a poor vo2 max. In the Methode Naturelle this understanding is expressed in the idea of fundamental training vs. technical training, the fundamental training is the training that is consistently challenging, were the body is always pushed so that as many as possible of its natural capacities are developed at the same time. In addition to this training some technical training is done to improve specific techniques. A good explanation of the difference would be to look at what one might see as a parkour training. Say a traceur came to a course of three obstacles a fundamental type of training would be to move through them at a appropriately challenging pace, and to simple repeat this until the body becomes tired or you’re ready to move on to the next capacity, the way in which one overcame the obstacles would be relatively unimportant as long as the goal was accomplished and the work was continuous. By contrast in a technical session, one might experiment with various methods of overcoming the obstacles and then work on refining the method that seemed most useful. Lots of rest would be taken in between turns to allow reflection on the movement and to make sure sufficient energy was available to make each attempt technically better then the preceding attempts. Now both methods are useful and will have both conditioning and skill building effects, but the fundamental training is the training that will have the broadest overall effect.

Unfortunately in my experience most traceurs train mostly in the technical method and little if at all using the fundamental training method thus the constant admonishment to condition more from experienced traceurs. The idea amongst traceurs always seems to be if one can just improve their technique they will be able to overcome this or that obstacle in x, y or z manner. What I have seen consistently though is that the athlete with a highly developed overall physical capacity will need very little time to learn the skill of the athlete who focuses on technique. Traceurs often seem obsessed with developing the saut du chat technique for instance and there are constantly questions on how to do it. I train gymnasts though and they will do this technique very well with absolutely no training at all simply when given an obstacle to overcome were this is an appropriate technique. In short fundamental training proceeds technical training in importance.

That then is the sum of the principles of the Methode Naturelle that I currently understand and that are the root of my current training. I will leave my thoughts at that for now next I will go over how all of that is actually being translated into my training. Until next time thanks for reading my novels.

General Update

2007-08-14T22:03:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to write down some thoughts on my trainings for awhile but life has been very hectic; Beth and I were married on Saturday, and signed the papers on a lot by Whatcom Falls today, so it's been difficult to find time to update. So I will try to go quickly over some of the recent events. I also have some some updates brewing in my head about the theory of training.

July 27th-29th

My second Natural Method-influenced training weekend for the washington parkour scene, with the first day being gym training starting with 45 minutes of continuous running, jumping (and vaulting), climbing, then 45 minutes of martial arts drills, then 1 hour of open training. 20 traceurs showed up for this.

The second day then was a trip to Whatcom Falls for 1 hour of continuous training, hitting all of the natural method capacities except swimming and defense. Then we did some more specific parkour and conditioning drills, then self defense and finally swimming, and then a little more parkour and finally more defense training later that day using foam covered bats. We had 5 traceurs for this.

The third day was a relaxed session at Clayton Beach training all the natural method capacities except swimming but with lots of breaks, lots of games and much picking of berries. We had 6 traceurs for this.

I was dissapointed by the fact so many showed up for the gym but missed the rest of the weekend because I follow the natural method philosophy in seeing the best training as that done outdoors and preferably in natural enviroments. I open the gym up because I know people appreciate it but it is incomprehensible to me that a traceur would prefer to train indoors on a beautiful sunny July day. Still I think that it was less an issue of the gym being more attractive and more people having schedule conflicts the other days. My desires to be outside aside, the gym was a great deal of fun. It's easy to continually arrange new challenges there and you can of course do much more ambitious and difficult things without getting hurt than is usually possible outside. Great fun was had by all.

The smaller number of athletes on Saturday allowed me to push the pace harder and we were able to do an hour of training at running pace for all but a few minutes which I was happy to see. After that we did a set where 5 of us did a relay through a course where we vaulted a picnic table, ran along a log, vaulted a second table and then carried a fellow trainie on our shoulder for 20 yards, all of this as fast as we could. Because of the periods of complete rest it was not exactly natural method style training but I think the extra explosiveness this allowed makes it a very worthwhile form of training. It reminded in intensity and overall body burn out of the crossfit workouts I used to do, only more focused on actual utility capacities. The martial arts was primarily working on jab/cross hook combinations. Swimming at the falls is always wonderful. Afterwards we ran around on the rocks on the other side of the bend from the falls and then stopped and gathered a great deal of trash which made me feel good in the sense that I enjoyed doing a good thing with friends of a like mind.

Sunday was excellent. We did lots of sparring in the soft sand at Clayton Beach and it was so much fun and such good training.

On Thursday the 2nd we had another very notable session. Beth and I went down to Clayton Beach around 7:00 pm. The light was incredible and the whole session seemed tinged with this sort of perfect golden beauty. We warmed up and did some punching and kicking drills at the Clayton Beach trail head then ran continuously down to the beach looping in and out of the woods to places where there were various jumps or climbs I wanted to do. When we got to the beach I was able to smoothly do one of the more difficult wall pass type maneuvers in my repertoire without stopping or hesitating almost as well as I have ever done it. After clambering to the top of the rock wall, I ran across the boulder and jumped down in the sand on the other side and took the two padded bats I had carried in my backpack out and Beth and I sparred with them for a good fifteen minute then we did some light free unarmed free sparring including all ranges but gentle. It was beautiful and enjoyable. Then we concentrated on some climbing training, then went to a sand slope to play some quadrupedal games of king of the hill and tag. Finally we ran all the way back carrying our bats in hand. I so enjoy mixing defense and parkour type trainings it's becoming as inconceivable to me that I once focused solely on parkour as it was that I once didn't train parkour at all. Though I know little about it, I feel certain that the natural method is definitely the heart of the training path I want to take and what I think is the optimal training for the human being.

On Saturday the 11th the day of the wedding we did a training after the the party died down in the mid-evening as the light dimmed, running up a creek I had played in extensively as a child but had not been to since the discovery of parkour. It was a treat to be back in that same environment behaving much as I had as child only with more purpose. We also saw a beaver from about 4 feet away which was very cool.

Today the 15th was another notable day of training. It was the first day I had included urban training in session that managed to touch on all the natural method capacities, though continuity was lacking. Beth and I went to Western and did technical parkour type training for an hour to start. This training was I believe much in the way we practiced in lisses, a mix of short courses at good speed, and repetitions of focused work on more difficult movements though I still can not sustain the type of volume that is customary there. I felt very confident and found many of my parkour capacities increased despite a lack of specific recent training which is very encouraging. It's very nice to feel how light and easy it is to move as my body has become stronger, more agile and sensitive since I started training in the natural method style. Still I was able to detect many subtle mistakes of landings and movements that were only sustainable due to the use of shoes. It's amazing how much barefoot training teaches you about sensitivity focus and awareness. After the parkour training we drove to the falls and did defense training for another hour starting with flinch response, then working on footwork as a sort of dance in a relaxed stance moving forward, backward, sideways and circling on both sides in both leads switching which partner led the dance. Then we worked on jabs, first the technique then with movement repeating the dance pattern, then we worked on stop or front kicks followed by doing them again with movement in the dancing pattern, then we free sparred open handed gently for 20 minutes or so. Finally I walked down to a swimming hole carrying the biggest rock I could find, and 10 minutes of swimming laps. All in all a very nice session.

Scenario training

2007-07-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

Today Beth and I went to Whatcom Falls for a training session. First we did some balance training and then some lifting and I then I decided to try out a concept that had been brewing in my head for awhile, a sort of concept training session. This type of training is something that David Belle mentions prominently in his descriptions of how he developed parkour, but something few people seem to include in their training regular. That is to imagine a scenario that would force you to move efficiently through your environment and then play it out.

The concept that has been brewing in my head for a long time was to carry out the main movements one might use in a paleolithic era big game hunt in a logical sequence. So we started by picking up a couple of likely sticks (throwing clubs in our little scenario) and then ran, starting at a medium pace one might use on while following a clear trail. We mixed in a few jumps, vaults, and a wall pass along our way (throwing the sticks up first). Then as we approached the area where I had decided the imaginary animal would be, we slowed to a walk, moving as quietly as possible, then slowly dropping down into a crouch, and then moving on three limbs, then four limbs, creeping along behind a fallen log. Then finally we belly-crawled underneath the log and through underbrush, going extremely slow in order to make no noise, until finally we had a clear shot of our quarry, in this case a kindly tree. Exploding of the ground we threw our sticks at the tree, then took off running, chasing the now injured imaginary prey. We followed a long course through the woods including a variety of obstacles, forcing us to jump, vault, scramble and climb. We went fast at first then slowed down and ran in spurts as I believe a hunter forager would in seeking to exhaust his prey and in having to keep track of the trail. After perhaps a 20 minute run like this we arrived at the area were I had decided the prey would collapse, and picked up the logs that would serve as the proxy of its carcass and carried them back to our imaginary campground, making sure to pass places where we had to scramble up hill and balance on logs on our way. Finally we arrived at our our finishing spot and dropped the logs.

That probably took an hour or so but I had still felt the need to put more work into a few capacities and so we set up a station to work more on throwing precision and power. After 20 throws on each side I decided to set up a course made up of 4 stones which had to be dodged around, a table to vault, and a straight away for sprinting with Beth at the end to be carried back. I repeated this sequence 5 times resting for 30 seconds between each round. Beth did 2 rounds carrying me(which is obviously more difficult) and called it good. I had a little more in the tank so I picked up the heaviest stone I could find and practiced balancing while carrying it around the logs outside the lower parking lot playground. Finally I headed over to one of the swimming holes and jumped in, swam a lap and climbed out, and repeated that sequence 6 times. On the first 3 I went over a log in the swimming hole in the last three I swam under the log working on my apnea. Finally we headed home refreshed, energized, and yeah somewhat sore.

It was really an excellent work-out. It forced me to work on my endurance weakness but still hit me hard in strength and speed. It hit all the Natural Method capacities except defense and forced me to approach the whole thing with a different focus. The element of that imaginary scenario made the stealth element much more interesting and made the endurance element easier to bear.

Focus

2007-07-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

Today I went out down to clayton beach with my old training partner Dane. It was the first time just the two of us had got together to train in months. It ended up teaching me a very important lesson though in an unfortunately painful manner.

For the first year of my training I trained almost exclusively as a duo with dane, now I find more and more I am training on my own. This has been a positive thing in allowing more specific direction in my training and also in learning to be confident and focused training alone, however I have notice that I now have a hard time maintaining that same focus when training with other people. I found this particularly difficult today because of a vein of competitiveness between myself and Dane. I have no idea if Dane feels it but he has generally been just a step ahead of me in parkour and so there is always this drive to catch up. Usually this has been a positive thing for me but today I felt it become a negative. I had hoped that my training on my own and his not having trained so much recently would have closed the gap but it did not seem that way. That perception, I believe had as much to do with my mindset, as the reality of our abilities. None the less after struggling on a vault he was doing, I started feeling a little pressure inside and decided to move on, I started running down the beach rock to rock and simply lost my focus I can't remember why exactly, but the next moment I was flat on my face, with two bruised feet, a couple nasty scraps and a hyperextended pinkie finger.

All in all not bad damage for that type of fall, the last time I feel on rocks like that I nearly punctured my chest cavity, still I could easily have broken a hand, wrist, ankle or put out an eye had there been any sticks lying about. All of that offers some rather sobering thinking. The upshot of all of it is I know believe I need train myself to focus better.

I believe focus is paramount in parkour ever single injury I have sustained in parkour has been due to a lack of focus. I would also say it is my biggest weakness and the one that saps my confidence the most. My mind is natural very distractable and idea focused while I think parkour requires a clear focused mind with deep mind body connection. I think I have always bailed at higher rate then my skill, physical capacity and caution should have allowed I can only blame a lack of developed focus and I will now aim to train for focus in a specific and methodical way.

My skill level has grown to the point I am capable of things with a very high level of danger. Losing focus is not an option.

In order to combat this tendency I am going to start a consistent mediation practice focusing on mindfulness mediation, and concentration meditation directed towards mind body connection. More to the specific point of parkour I aim to begin training my parkour much more in the style of lisses on top of the MN type training that has become the heart of my practice.

Thinking back today on the type of training I have seen advocated by the lissois I had an epiphany as to why they train in that way. The theme I always hear in connection to parkour practice in lisses is the value of repetition. You must do it not not once but three times before you can say you have accomplished it, and to truly train you repeat things 25, 50, 100 times, if you miss you start back at zero. I have seen some people who come from sports training backgrounds criticizes this as excessively endurance focused not power and speed oriented enough. I have thought this way myself, but what they do not realize what I did not realize is value of the mental training this provides. I remember when training with Erwan Le Core(hebertiste ) he said to me several times, you do not lack of strength, you lack of control or other variations on the same theme. To train in the way of the lissois I believe is to learn focus, and control. Mental strength is paramount in parkour after a certain point. To be able to do a thing is one thing to know that you can do it 100 times out of 100 in all conditions when you are tired, when it is wet, when you are injured that is a very different thing and a type of strength that an atheletic trainer might not notice but that may save your life as traceur.