Transcript
My name’s Ann Kaczka, I’ve been practicing parkour since 2007. My first day of training was with David Belle in 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.
So how do you strength train for parkour. There’s a really big debate amongst the global parkour community of whether you should stick with just body-weight exercises or if you should enhance your training using additional weights in a cross-fit gym, things like that, as well. I say whatever works best for you works best for you, and you should continue on your path.
I know that when I first started training I really wasn’t capable of doing things like pull-ups and push-ups, and I had to generally progress just to master those moves. If you find that doing those movements doesn’t progress you as much as it once did when you first began training, you could certainly try adding on additional weights, things like that. If you wanted to squat, dead lift, I know that that has worked for me in increasing my jump as well as stabilizing my landing. Doing upper body exercises with a lot of weights generally isn’t as functional or as useful in parkour training, but if you wanted to try something like adding weights to your pull-ups and dips, things like that, it might certainly help. If you don’t have access to a cross-fit gym, then pick up a big rock, pick up a log, pick up a person; obviously within reason, you want to build-up to this like I said. But you don’t have to access a $400 a month gym in order to enhance your training using weights.
