Parkour is a sport where you will get from one point to another as efficiently as possible. It involves more flips and creative expression, and good strength, as well as conditioning workouts, should enhance your abilities in parkour. If you want to move smoothly during your parkour training, knowing how you can increase your stamina is the key to keeping up with the tricks and techniques you will be doing in the field.
1. Devise a Good Parkour Workout: A Great Start
For you to devise a good parkour workout, it is best to keep ATSP in mind (Attributes, Traits, Skills, and Proficiency). To make it simple, you will be breaking down parkour into its component skills. These skills will cover precisions, climb-ups, vaults, side flips, hurdles, and other movements that you want to add to your movement.
Most of the time, it means that choosing an exercise that looks the same as your movement in parkour would be effective. It is also a great idea to focus on explosive movements with a relatively light added resistance of about up to 70 percent of the body weight, or just bodyweight.
Most exercises that you would need to do is bodyweight move and can be done with a weight vest added to your body.
2. Condition Yourself With the Right Exercises
As I’ve mentioned above, you should train with your own body weight. Nothing else will train you to move and push your body in the environment than working with it from the get-go. The following is a routine that you can follow for your conditioning exercise, and make sure to do it twice each workout session.
- Ten squats
- Ten leg lifts on your back
- Ten pull-ups
- Ten pushups
Make sure that you aim for improvement above everything else. If you are able to do it, consistently increase the number of repetitions and/or sessions little by little. Remember that you should take a day or two off every week so that you can give your muscles some time to rebuild.
3. Run As Often As You Could
Your running time should be at least seven to ten miles or 11 to 16 kilometers each week. Running is a huge factor when it comes to parkour training, and you should be able to run long distances. Squeezing in some sprints once in a while when your running will also be a huge help.
Now, if you are not fond of running, there are other cardio exercises that you can do and help with your stamina. Boxing and swimming would be a great alternative to running, whereas yoga will be able to tone your muscles which are needed.
Running should also be included when it comes to your parkour workout. Parkour training usually revolves around perfecting your jumps and moves at a single spot, but endurance is still very important when it comes to this sport.
When you get tired from plenty of leaps across different gaps, there is a bigger chance of accidents happening. If you run regularly, you can improve your cardio as well as cement good form to improve your hip stabilization, core strength, and moreover long distances.
Plenty of amazing things can happen aside from increasing your stamina when you run regularly, as there are plenty of reasons why you should include running in your parkour workout.
4. Warm-up and Stretch Your Body Properly
As you may know, parkour can be a dangerous sport, and when you are not conditioned properly, the risk of getting hurt is higher. Make sure to stretch properly before you start your parkour training. If you do not warm up before you stretch, you can lose about up to 30 percent of your muscle’s strength and power.
Stretching property can prevent any injury or strain from happening. Be sure not to miss any part of your body; your arms, back, neck, and shoulders are just as important as the other parts of your body. When you have an injury, it is best not to stretch without a physical therapist or to do parkour in the first place.
5. Watching Your Diet: Make Sure to Eat Healthily
It is best to have a high-carb diet when you are training for parkour. Also, you can have a non-calorie restrictive diet that will provide you with the highest energy levels for intense sports, just like parkour. Raw till four is another most popular high car, low-fat diet, and one of the best out of all the diets out there.
If you are traceurs, whole and unprocessed food is the best way to go. The main source of calories that you should have is through fruits. It may sound crazy to society, but it has been taught that fruits and veggies are just snacks.
Make sure that you eat plenty of high-calorie fruits with vegetables and plenty of greens. Cooked rice, potatoes, and gluten-free pasta would be the perfect dinner for traceurs. If you want to eat animal products, it is best to consume eggs, fish, and meats. You can also eat soy equivalents for vegetarians, and vegans are also highly necessary since they provide protein and other vital nutrients.
Drink plenty of water, and you should drink at least eight cups per day. Plenty of traceurs consume at least a gallon per day when they are training.
Remove any high-fat sodium processed goods so that you can have a healthy weight and muscle to fat ratio. It is an important factor for succeeding in parkour training. It will be much easier to lift up to 180 pounds of streamlined muscle over a wall than 220 pounds of not so streamlined fat.
Drinking a lot of water can make you pee a lot, but it will be worth it. Doing this will be healthier, and your body will transform into a well-oiled machine. Remember to keep chugging water every after workout sessions.
Parkour training can be hard on your body, so you would need to hydrate your body so that you can stay in the top form.
6. Cardio Training: When You Want to Keep Up
As you can see, there are not many traceurs walking or poking along at a slow jog. So, if you want to keep up, it is best that you build your cardio capabilities. There are different ways how you can do the proper cardio training for parkour training.
Some things that you can do are sprints, stair climbs, hills sprints, mountain climbers, burpees, and dynamic jumping such as both up and down. You can also include some interval training to ensure that you are successful in cardio training.
7. Core Bodyweight Training: Great for Tackling Obstacles
Parkour is known as moving your body through different spaces. Whatever obstacles or routes you are facing, you need to be strong enough to make sure that you can huck your own body through the air and pull yourself up and over obstacles.
There are different exercises that you can include in your training, such as pull-ups, dips, situps, pushups, lunges, and squats. Some of these exercises will be discussed later on in this article. When you have mastered the basic movements, you can increase your speed and power through a full range of motion.
It will give you the chance to perform parkour perfectly without having to worry about getting tired on the course.
8. Endurance Training: Ready To Go the Distance
Skilled traceurs will not stop and catch their breath during a run, so you will want to include some endurance training in your routines. Longer runs or workouts will help your body go the distance, as it will be pushing your limits by doing a bit of your training while completely gassed and ready to drop.
There are plenty of methods that you can do when it comes to endurance training. There is one way to be sure yours applies to your parkour is to focus on training the moves and sequences.
9. Strength Training: Key Factor in Increasing Stamina in Parkour
Plenty of powerful moves that are included in the parkour training demands extra strength, which you will likely develop during most bodyweight workouts. You can hit strength training by using barbells for some added resistance that can really increase your strength.
Training will include programs that focus on big muscle groups and full-body movements such as squats, clean-and-press, military press, and deadlift. There are at least plenty of types of strength training exercises and routines that trainers recommend, but you may have to experiment to find what is the best exercise for you.
10. Agility Training: Number One Factor to Increase Stamina
Now, not everyone has a background in gymnastics, so you don’t have to feel bad when you throw a twisting backflip off a wall right off the bat. However, you may want to pick up some tumbling moves and consider attending a course or workshop on some basic gymnastic or acrobatic moves.
Also, you will need to work on your speed and precision, which can be increased through plyometric exercises, dynamic sprinting-jumping combinations, as well as a method like the agility leader. Running is also a great way to increase your agility.
11. Broad Jump: Same as Vertical Jump
Doing broad jumps is like doing vertical jumps that you can see in the gym. The only difference is you are launching yourself forward with broad jumps, so it is a horizontal jump. When you do this exercise, it increases the role of your hips and ankles at the same time decreasing the importance of the knees.
Broad jumps will make an excellent tool when you are training your hips without access to a heavy barbell. With this movement, you can jump across any gaps when you are practicing parkour outdoors. You will also have a better transfer to running speed since you have a more horizontal orientation.
You can do broad jumps more challenging by adding a weighted vest or by swinging a medicine ball up as you jump. This movement is similar to a kettlebell swing that will help you highlight that movement, making it so powerful.
You can measure your progress by placing cones and markers to know how far you can jump each time you do this. Another thing that you can do is give yourself a target, such as a small towel that you can land on. It can help you train your accuracy for precisions and build self-confidence in a safe environment.
It can also make the exercise more fun and engaging by incorporating a ‘cognitive’ element.
12. Skipping: Great High-Value Movement
By performing skipping, it can provide incredibly high-value movement for your parkour workout. It will improve your ankle stiffness that translates directly to better running speed. When you have contractions in the calf, it can play a minimal role in plantarflexion while you are running, which can strengthen your tendons.
The important factor that you should have when it comes to increasing your stamina is rhythm, which some athletes tend to forget. When you practice skipping, you are also training for the rhythm of your body when doing parkour.
When you have a great rhythm, their steps will make sure your good foot is planted just in time to make the jump for your tricks and techniques.
13. Bounding: A Great Tool for Increasing Stamina
For you to run faster and jump from one leg to another is called bounding. It is another great tool that you can add to your exercises to increase your stamina better. Bounding is a popular exercise where it involves leaping from foot to foot to cover as much distance as possible.
It is also the perfect exercise for a parkour workout and works a little like shock training with Verkhoshansky depth jump. It is also like training the myotatic stretch response and explosively returning your energy as soon as you come in contact with the ground.
The main difference is that you will be doing this on a single leg as you do when you are running or jumping in parkour. It can translate to potentially huge gains in your running speed and leaping ability. You can add cones to your exercises to show where the feet should be placed.
You can experiment with consecutive hops in different patterns as well. Aside from that, you can dart from side to side will also help improve your hip and ankle stability, injury prevention, and direction changing.
When you are doing bounding, make sure that you progress slowly, avoid any injuries, and be careful. It is a highly-plyometric movement with a great impact that will leave your ego elsewhere.
14. Pistol Squats: Great for Leg Strength
Doing pistol squats can improve your single-leg strength, mobility, stability, and balance. All of the things that you need when it comes to parkour workout. Training on each side of your leg is important to help you clear any gaps that are within your course.
Interestingly enough, athletes tend to be better at balancing their non-dominant leg, which makes sense seeing as you can balance on that leg to support yourself while using the other leg for a more dextrous movement such as kicking.
Balancing both of your legs independently is a quick way to improve your balance for crossing different beams and ledges on the parkour course you are doing.
15. Kettlebell Swings: A Strong Option
Kettlebell swings are the most healthy option, especially when you use a slightly more squat-like motion. Now, squatting kettle swing is a real thing, and it can develop more ground-reaction force than a regular swing. Trust me, it is not ‘wrong,’ and it won’t hurt you.
You can add the Overspeed kettlebell swing technique by swinging the weight back down towards you more forcefully. Then, absorb that momentum to return it back to the air. It will make the movement a lot more plyometric without adding high impacts on your joints.
16. Climb-Ups: Great for Wall Climbs
Climb-ups is a movement that involves climbing up onto the top of walls. You can run up the wall, catch the top with both hands, and pull yourself up and over. There are different progressions that you can do for this movement, with the easiest or ugliest being the ‘struggle up’ and the most impressive being the level five climb up.
Level five involves pushing both of your hands to pop up and onto your feet. The climb-ups look just like a kong vault. Progressions can involve moving the legs to one side and essentially side-vaulting at the top of the movement.
For those who are familiar with their calisthenics, you can identify this move as ‘essentially a muscle-up,’ which it kind of is. Muscle-ups can help you with this movement, but they are also actual climb-ups. It also represents a fun alternative to the regular muscle ups or explosive pull-ups that anyone can use when it comes to parkour training.
17. Tactical Pull-Up: Another Variation of Pull-Ups
Another pull-up variation that works great with parkour is the tactical pull-up. It is a pull-up performed with the thumb on top of the bar. All you have to remember is a pull-up that uses a pronated or overhand grip.
You will be grabbing the bar in the same way that you might grab a ledge, pipe, or windowsill. Practicing this exercise will prepare you for climb-ups, make sure you will get the optimal activation of your muscles, and toughen your grip for different movement patterns in parkour training.
18. Rope Climbs and Dips: Great to Throw Around in Your Exercise
It is best to add some rope climbs to your exercises as it can help with your parkour training. It is like climbing a vertical pipe or lamppost and will toughen up your grip as well. Tough hands can be a huge asset when it comes to parkour since you will be climbing walls all day.
Maintaining an L-Sit position during your climb is recommended to engage your core, and adding a weight vest can level up the difficulty.
Doing weighted dips on gymnastic rings can build up that pushing strength. Here, you will be breaking the movement down into its constituents and strengthening your chest as well as your triceps with isolated repetitions.
19. Cartwheels: Great for Body Awareness
It is crucial for a traceur for trying to land a jump in a balanced position which is great for body awareness. There are a few people who spend time upside down or rapidly rotating, but it has a lot of benefits for cognition, explosive strength, agility, and so much more.
Cartwheel is also another option that is easy and fun to do. Whether it is ugly or unstraight, it is best to do them anyways. It will also serve as a brilliant first progression that you can get you toward more impressive aerial skills just like aerial or side flip.
20. Ground Kong: Also Known as Frogger
Ground Kong is also known as a forward ape in Animal Flow or Frogger in GMB. The movement will include placing both your hands on the ground in front of you and then jumping your legs through, leading into a deep squat before leaning forward. Then, repeat the movement again.
This movement is great when it comes to mobility movement for developing a deeper squat. The Ground Kong is also great to use in conditioning your chest and shoulders, which is great for increasing your stamina.
21. Hollow Body Rocks: Part of Core Training
When it comes to parkour, core training is very critical as it is fundamental to all athletic performances. You would need a strong and stiff core to produce force from your limbs. Hollow body rocks will need you to push or swing your body so that it will bend and contort your body rather than forcing through the limbs and to the target.
Think of this move as like hitting someone with a plank of wood versus hitting someone with a bendy branch, and both have a nail at the end. Both will hurt, but the latter is faster and more impactful than the other.
Final Thoughts
The best thing to keep in mind when it comes to increasing your stamina is to design your parkour workout that is specific to your body or parkour training your want to do. Make sure that you focus more on mobility and movement training. You may also want to focus more on the athletic movements that build explosiveness and stiffness. If you want to know some interesting facts about parkour, here’s an article that I have written.
