Charles' Parkour Training Blog

I fear I’m becoming jaded.

It seems no matter what I say or how hard I try, I cannot keep up with this widespread societal belief that parkour is extremist, requires superhuman physical strength, and is overwhelmingly dangerous. Talk is cheap and no matter how I act to calm your worries, the chances you, the disbeliever, will actually come out to see us training are very slim. Perhaps this article will help.

Typically when people ask me who can do parkour, I respond by saying that everyone can do parkour, whether you are 5 or 65! Many people think that’s a joke.

It’s not.

Meet Mauro, Rochester Parkour‘s resident Senior Citizen!

We first met Mauro over a year and half ago when he was randomly in Manhattan Square Park talking to the skateboarders. In no time, he saw us doing what we were doing and ventured his way over. After that day, Mauro was a regular non-participating member of Rochester Parkour. Soon, though, we got him moving and active again.

Parkour doesn’t need to be about jumping huge distances, balancing on rails, or climbing up walls. Sometimes, parkour is simply movement in any way and you can be creative with what you do. With the elderly in mind, their physical barriers and limitations are a lot greater and more complicated than the rest of us. This post is going to be just one in a series, as there is a lot more I want to talk about such as health concerns, limitations, and special population exercise. For now, though, I want to give a general outline as to how to tackle training the elderly.

1. Know the trainee! – What kind of personality does he or she have? What is their background and where are they coming from? As part of this, you should know what specific limitations the trainee has, as they are more likely and more numerous in the elderly. This is imperative if you are accepting money from the said trainee or if you have accepted implied liability. I recommend no one take on elderly clients unless you have extensive knowledge with special populations and exercise science.

Personality traits are key in developing a routine that the trainee can follow. Are they quick thinkers, slow learners, confused, or task-oriented? Finding the right routine to match the personality is one key to a successful and fun program.

2. Keep it simple – I can’t emphasize this enough. Sometimes I lose myself in the world of highly athletic people and I forget that it’s not necessarily normal to do handstands, jump on rails, and flip whenever. With some populations, even the basics are too demanding mentally and physically and need to tailored down. Make sure the goals and the progressions are easily attainable and clearly described. Steady progression keeps motivation high.

3. Avoid any and all impact – Even low jumps can destroy the joints of an elderly trainee. Under no circumstances should you allow the trainee to jump from height or land on straight limbs. Proper conditioning through such means as squats and low impact dynamic exercises is a great way to get an elderly trainee mobile and keep them independent for longer! Teach them how to use their joints to load and absorb forces and ensure they have a complete understanding of what is good technique and what is dangerous and damaging.

In this same sense, always move slow and correct technique the instant it is lost. There is always room later to increase speed when appropriate.

4. Fun, fun, fun! – Parkour is crazy and silly. It doesn’t need to be all about seriousness and I can assure you, Mauro loves being out there and active with kids a third of his age or less. Encourage trying new things and fun challenges. Do things that are silly and wacky. Parkour is play and so many of us lose the simple ability to play as we grow old. Rediscovering this mindset is one of the most effective ways at increasing your overall enjoyment in life.

Last week I videotaped a couple of exercises I taught to Mauro. He’s pretty proud of them and I’m proud of him! Keep up the good work!

Parkour for the Elderly – Part 1 from Charles Moreland on Vimeo.

Parkour for the Elderly – Part 2 from Charles Moreland on Vimeo.

We live in a society that accelerates toward red lights.

I’m sure you’ve seen this, or done it yourself. It seems more and more I notice the cars next to me in traffic uselessly accelerating toward something that will inevitably force them to slam on the brakes, when they could just coast and arrive at the same point in space and time without the risk or the waste. I couldn’t say as to the cause behind this strange, irrational behavior, as I’m sure it is the product of a collection of different factors. However,  I do feel like a lot of this stems from our obsession with time and our displeasure with interims, a topic I wrote about several weeks ago.

What I find more interesting is that this behavior is not localized, but intrudes into other facets of life – parkour training, for instance. This past Summer, as the college students rolled away from Rochester, the high school scene moved in. This was a welcome change and it was great to see such a boom come from a demographic we never purposefully targeted.

Teaching high schoolers and teaching college students/adults is not all that different, however, it wasn’t until I started teaching high schoolers that I began to realize this behavior in almost all of my beginning students. It’s not that it wasn’t there before, or that college students don’t possess it, the behavior was just amplified in the high schoolers and made it easier to pin point in others.

The problem most beginners experience is a simple disconnect between the beginning and the end; That is, a complete misunderstanding of the space in-between – the journey between those two points in time. For whatever reason (they vary quite a deal), beginners have some meaningful and unique view of what it means to be a traceur and work their asses off to get there as quickly as possible. In my high schoolers, for instance, they all seemed to have an overwhelming drive to attain as many skills as fast as possible, a behavior I call “check-list syndrome,” in the parkour realm.

The enthusiasm these beginners have is a good thing, and should be encouraged. However, there is nothing meaningful in check-list syndrome. Skills are learned and acquired and checked off as if they were tasks in your daily to-do. Meaning is stripped in favor of the ability to fabricate movement or abilities they see in their idols. The check-list mentality is almost always exacerbated into a traceur’s race against time – the goal is no longer the experience, but the ability to say, “I can do this and I learned it in this amount of time.”

The addition of time into training quickly becomes a detriment to overall progress and development. Training, then, becomes a race; a war to win no matter how many lives are sacrificed; And sacrifice is truly present. Overuse injuries are some of the most common among traceurs and come about so quickly. More and more I see men and women training themselves not to failure, but to injury. It is a behavior as irrational as accelerating a car towards a red light. Inevitably, you will slam on the brakes.

The drive for development is important to realize and acknowledge. We would not be who we are or do what we do without it, but it is a force that can so easily be taken too far – so far, in fact, that progress is completely halted or reversed. In another realm, a client of mine recently discovered this as her drive to lose weight transformed into an obsession. It lingered and festered and rather quickly her enthusiasm overshadowed her judgement. She began to lower calorie intake further than what was prescribed and began weighing herself everyday, focusing all that attention on the number that appeared on the screen, not the overall goal. What was once a healthy decline evolved into a plateau. A complete and opposite reaction, and one that requires a lot of effort to reverse.

I’m positive this concept is not new, nor is the problem. I could easily relate this back to the children’s story of the tortoise and the hare: constant speed versus fractured acceleration. It is important to focus some time and attention on developing the understanding of what progress is and what form it takes. The end or completion of a goal is surely important, but will never be above the external, but directly related lessons and experiences gained during the progression.

There are no good, rational reasons to speed directly at a red light. In this same sense, there are no good, rational reasons to speed through your training as quickly as possible to become the “best” traceur in as little time as possible. I assure you, you will find yourself there, and potentially at the same time as you would have through fractured acceleration. Calm and patience are one of the more prominent, distinguishable characteristics between true traceurs and traceurs suffering from check-list syndrome. Don’t risk your health and your joy in movement simply to acquire skills or arrive at a destination as quickly as possible, only to find yourself in a cast, in therapy, or worse later.

Do not speed toward red lights – your training is not a race. It is an experience.

Here at Rochester Parkour we do a lot of different things during our training. Some days we straight up condition, some days we kick back and focus on short and simple challenges, and some days we play games. Okay, okay…every day we play games. We traceurs can be so simple minded and can make fun out of anything. One of our favorite games is a simple one you can find traceurs from all over the world playing: Add-on.

Add-on is very simple: you create a line in one area and the person in front makes the first move. After that, each consecutive person performs that same move, and the last person “adds on” one. In theory this could continue forever, but typically it will end in a very logical way.

Here’s a quick edit of our short circuit yesterday:

Add-on With Rochester Parkour from Charles Moreland on Vimeo.

I will edit this post later with raw videos from everyone’s run that I caught on camera. It’s great to see everyone’s progress so far this Summer.

Keep up the good work guys!