Transcript
My name is Ann Kaczka, I’ve been practicing Parkour since 2007. My first day training was with David Belle at the New Yorker festival. And since then I’ve trained solo in Thailand, climbing trees on the streets of London and Paris. And now I’m back in New York City. And today I’m here to talk to you about Parkour.
Warming up as well as stretching for parkour is absolutely something that you should not ignore, you should definitely warm up before every training session, so that your body isn’t cold when you start training. If you warm up properly before every training session then you’ll find you won’t be getting as many stretch or strain injuries. Again goes along with starting small and repetition. When you are warming up, I would try to stay away from static stretching because your muscles are cold if you, you know, just walk off the streets and you haven’t done any physical activity that day. So try to get warming up in a very dynamic manner, so you’re not going to be doing jumps or anything like that but just do small displacement and movements to warm your body up. When warming up, some activities that you’ll do are light jogs, you can do quantum pedal movement, which is moving out on fours, there are tones of variations of quantum pedal movement that you can also do to activate all the muscles in your body. After every training session, a couple of hours later, you should generally have a stretching session, the importance of stretching is paramount in parkour because you need to maintain flexibility in order to do all of the movements. Every time that you exercise, you are doing damage to your muscles and the muscles rebuild stronger, so you don’t want your muscles to be rebuilt shorter. You want to have long knee muscles and be able to carry up to movement and you have to have flexibility to do so.
