First, let me say that was ridiculously fun! I’ve been wanting to get in to parkour for a while, and was suddenly inspired to look in to it. Turns out that we’re very lucky in the Pacific Northwest in terms of parkour. Not only can we play year-round, but there is a fantastic new parkour non-profit that has started parkour classes in Seattle and working with the parks departments to create permanent parkour parks.

Our class started with some balance practice to warm up, and then about 30 minutes of rolling and more types of quadrapedal movement than I ever thought possible. After the first 30 minutes, it was on to vaulting, where we learned a few basic types of vaults and got lots and lots of practice in. It was interesting to see my dominant side tendencies and the ridiculous amounts of startle that set in when they asked me to switch sides. Another 30 minutes later, we went in to jump practice, and combined vaults with jumps.

Lastly, we headed a block away, and did a final conditioning workout. We had to crawl backwards up the stairs (head facing downward) and then forward back down. That was followed by a bunch of jumping up the stairs and sprinting down, and last, but not least, sprinting BOTH up and down.

A few personal surprises came out of the class. First, even though I have considerably more mobility than I ever had in my life, I need some serious work in terms of developing my flexion so that I can do the quadrapedal movements required for the sport. Second, even though I have quite a bit of upper body strength, I’m definitely not where I should really be to be able to do this. Working on the quadrapedal movements will definitely help.

What was super-cool about it is that the Z-Health S-Phase plyo work definitely fits in well with this. Most of the ground work is all maximal and sub-max plyos. My jumping practice and existing mobility work meant that I wasn’t going to get hurt.

I’m really looking forward to returning to more classes and incorporating much of this in to my S-Phase training.