Thursday, July 2, 2009

Changes from the beginning

Well, I've been practicing and training for 1 and 3/4 years now off and on, which really isn't very long, but I'm starting to notice changes in my own views.  At first, I was pretty much like any random person who had seen the "crazy videos" on youtube and thought that parkour was flipping and jumping over rooftops.  The first videos I saw about 2 years ago included 3run's evolution, team ryouko's vid, and oleg's russian climbing.  I was immediately hooked and lured into thinking yeah, I want to do that, and be able to jump off roofs and flip off walls like that matrix shiz.  I went through this phase for probably the whole first year of training, just wanting to do this and that, do a backflip off the highest thing possible.  Lately, I've come to realize that that kind of training is detrimental until you have a strong enough base conditioning to handle it with control, and let's face it, anyone, even someone who's trained maybe once or twice, possibly never, can jump off some huge wall or flip off a roof.   That is just a matter of stupidity.  Big stunts like that are cool looking at first, but as you get further along, you realize doing a backflip off something round 12 ft. isn't anywhere near as hard (you can pretty much fall backwards and do a backflip from that type of height) as a standing fulltwist, or something with more technical difficulty.  
Also, lately I've gotten a little more involved in the online communities (APK & 3Run forums) and this has helped me get some opinions and thoughts of other members.  After I made my very first video, comments were generally very positive, but many suggested I cut down the size of drops as well as work on form.  At that time, my mindset was pretty much I can do this, who cares how it looks.  After some time looking through the forums, watching many videos, I began to notice even though many members used smaller drops, they had extremely good form, and very technically difficult tricks.  This really caught my attention and their ways of training seemed so much better than what I had been doing.  So about 6 months ago, I started to ease up on training huge drops everyday and went back to basic fronts and backs working on form and recently, I have been experimenting with new tricks like corks, backfulls, btwists, gainers, etc.  In terms of pure parkour training, I had been training single movements like a huge vault to drop and things of that nature.  Now I've moved out of that a little onto more flow style training, and trying to get movements to a second nature type of feeling.  Well it's late, so these are my thoughts for the day
-peace out

Training summary for the day
Thursday July 2nd (Gym day)
Floor
-Handstand walk 10 meters
-Backwards handstand walk 10 meters
-R/O to rebound x5
-R/O back x5
-Standing back full x2 one landed
Tumble track
-Front 360 x2 only one landed 
-Front 540 x6 four landed
Conditioning
50 v-ups
40 pushups (20 regular 20 wide)
10 clap pushups
leg cross holds (2 minutes)
press handstand attempts x2