Parkour has been making its name in the world of sports for quite a time now, and you may be one of those who have been interested in getting into parkour. You may hesitate at first since this sport is undeniably risky, but you can master this in no time with the right skills. Here, I will talk about the skills you need for parkour and why you need them before taking on the ultimate parkour journey.
Body Strength As A Starting Point
The first thing that a budding traceur need is a physically fit body. This requirement is not just for the newbies but also applies to the professionals in this sport.
There are many basic skills a traceur needs to attain, but body strength is an obvious one. Having enough body strength to do tricks will impact your parkour training, and you should put a good amount of effort into it.
Your body needs to have balanced skills in all parts, which means that during workouts, your legs, arms, core, and whole-body should be trained religiously. This training will help you master basic parkour jumps and improve your overall performance.
It will also help you keep your body strong enough to endure the precision jumps that you will surely do. In body strength, this will include primarily muscle strength to lift or hold objects for a period.
Though parkour does not involve lifting objects, the power one can get with muscle strength can allow you to do tricks that require power without getting tired.
If you started in a state where you do not have enough body strength, do not worry because parkour, like any sport, discriminates against no one. You can achieve this if you train properly, like doing weights and calisthenics.
The Must-Have Endurance Ready For High-Impact Activities
Endurance is defined as the ability to withstand strenuous activity that is related to your cardiovascular health. This is very important since parkour involves high-impact training that would require good cardiovascular fitness.
This will also include the ability of a muscle to sustain repeated contractions against a resistance for a lengthy period called muscular endurance.
With muscular endurance, you can perform tricks like never before. You can also sustain a longer period of training and exercise to improve your performance.
Doing exercises like running will improve how your body will deal with oxygen or build up your endurance. If you have good endurance, this means that you will not easily tire when doing parkour. Of course, this will be a good trait because you will progress in your training quickly.
Good Mobility: A Combination of Flexibility and Pliability For Safe Landing
Aside from body strength and endurance, good flexibility and mobility are also a must. When you train, and you have limited mobility, you will certainly progress slowly and get frustrated. To avoid this, developing this should be on top of your list.
Not having enough range of motion in your joints will prevent you from learning new moves and avoid injuring yourself. A little range of motion will prevent you from generating enough power to jump and vault in your arms and legs. It will also prevent you from safely landing.
Without good flexibility, you will have trouble doing other parkour stunts that include landing safely. This is why it is important to have a good range of motion when performing parkour. The best way to develop this is by mobility training that increases motions your body can perform. Some of these mobility training exercises are the hip opener, ankle mobility, and the likes.
Agility workouts also enable our bodies to learn how to maintain proper body positioning. While moving fast, sensitive areas such as the lower back, shoulders, and ankles are protected with good agility training.
Speed and Acceleration For Good Momentum To Shift Activities
Transitioning from one stunt to another is also important in any sport, and speed and acceleration are the top skills you have to enhance to do this. It will be easier to do many tricks in parkour with more forward momentum if you have both.
Since parkour involves many upward movements like vaulting, climbing, and flipping, having a good speed to allow you to accelerate and generate the force needed to perform such is crucial. If you combine this with mobility and agility, you will control your body even at high speed and still stop or land safely.
Parkour speed runs, of course, require physical requirements and good movement skills to maneuver along with obstacles, different angles, inclinations, and terrains. Again, this is more than possible with proper exercises, especially jumping ropes or a regular sprint.
Maintaining Right Eating Habits For The Ideal Body Composition
A physically fit body is easily achieved if you maintain the right eating habits. The right habits are essential for the ideal body composition for an athlete like a traceur. Depending on the sport you are in, body composition will also vary.
The ideal composition for almost any physical sport is a low-fat body with good lean muscle mass for sufficient speed, agility, and power. Although sports will also require fat for additional energy reserve, this should only be limited to essential fat.
It will be a big advantage for sports that require good flexibility, like parkour, to have a low-fat body composition. One challenge in parkour is to maintain or minimize weight changes to demonstrate good aerial stunts, lift, and flip.
A constantly changing weight will be a challenge since it will require another round of training or getting used to the new mass you have that can hinder your parkour progress. To avoid this from happening, following a good meal plan will help.
For parkour, energy-boosting food is essential. These are lean meat, healthy fats, and carbohydrates. Eating the right amount will promote a good muscle-to-fat ratio ideal for sufficient energy to perform training actively.
So, remember that you need to maintain the right eating habits to avoid future disasters in your training. This will be critical to achieving what you desire.
Balance and Stability Is The Key
Physical and mental health goes together, especially in parkour. It would help if you had good cognitive functioning, keen sense perception, and good thinking skills to be an effective traceur.
Balance is very important in parkour. It will prevent you from slipping and stumbling because your body can maintain its position easily the way it should be. It will be easier to make moves and stunts for smoother progress.
With balance, you can maintain stable movements too in parkour, and there are many exercises you can do to improve your balance, like using a simple rail walk.
If you fail to achieve balance, it will be hard to do parkour. So make sure that you put all your best into this skill to unlock all the potentials you have.
Kinesthesia For Efficient Environmental Perception
The ability to sense the body’s location, movement, and action are called kinesthesia. This is more than balance but includes almost all senses in the body. There are many receptors in proprioception or kinesthesia like the skin, muscles, joints, eyes, and others that enable you to do so.
Most of the time in parkour, you will be touching or gripping on ledges or walls, but there will certainly be a moment that you would not be touching anything if you glide through the air. The so-called air awareness is needed to land when you come back to the ground properly.
This kinesthesia is vital in parkour because you will be aware of your surroundings, either your feet are on the ground or in the air. With proprioception, you can incorporate all physical traits to land safely in a spot and will be able to perceive the environment more than the eyes can see.
Creative Vision For Boundless Parkour Possibilities
When one sees a parkour spot or a training ground, an imaginative vision is also a unique skill to imagine movements that you can do around. Of course, parkour is a sport and an art, and you have to be creative to perfect this art.
You can use this to visualize navigating the spot and practice imaginary lines to display your parkour skills. What’s good about having this is that you can visualize even without seeing the exact spot. Just let your mind run and your bodywork.
Ability To Learn and Unlearn a New Vocabulary
Some terms are unique to parkour, and you can call it the parkour vocabulary. To easily learn parkour, you should be ready to unlearn something and learn what is necessary, like parkour slang that you will encounter from time to time.
You can use it to communicate with other athletes and can develop camaraderie and peer bonds more. You will also be more immersed in parkour culture if you understand these slang terms. If you have a hard time, it is good to learn it by heart and reset your vocabulary.
Confidence and Self-Reliance: If They Can, You Can Too!
The body and mind can be trained, but the inherent values you have might be a challenge. That is why before you try your luck on parkour, you need to possess or break more sweat to develop your self values.
You can never push away the fear in parkour, it is inevitable, but you can overcome it. Remember that this is natural even in professional parkour athletes, so do not let it stop you even before starting.
Being confident is the answer to overpower fear. When you trust yourself, you can strike the fear away and continue during your training. Of course, it might be hard at first but build your confidence, and you will do it.
Remember that you have to go out of your comfort zone because it is the enemy of confidence. Once you dare to step out of it, you can grow more to what you want to become. However, bear in mind that yourself is your competition so that you will still stay grounded.
Determination and Discipline For Success All The Way
Parkour is not just a sport that can benefit you physically but also for your personal growth. By doing parkour, you can develop self-discipline, which is needed not to get distracted easily.
Of course, you can do other things, but once you engage in training, the ability to stay focused on your training is very important. You will get lost if you do not discipline yourself, which will make your progress slow.
When you discipline yourself by being consistent in your training, you will get better at parkour and get the results you dreamt of. Determination will also be the key to overcome challenges that may hinder you along the way.
Ability To Do Lots of Jumping For A Jumpstart
The main thing you will do in parkour is jumping. Most of the training and stunts will involve jumping, leaping, and the likes. So it will be very obvious that this should be one of the first action skills you should enhance.
Jumping up, down, or over will be the key moves you can practice. You can try jumping one step higher at a time, jumping with both or either foot. Once you can navigate yourself effectively, you can move on for more challenging jumps.
Ability To Fearlessly Swing For A Full Body Lift
You will often swing in parkour. You can start from simple underbars in the park and swing yourself, then landing on both feet. Starting with simple swings like this will develop your grip ability, focus, and muscle strength.
Swinging will be useful when you do complicated training sessions that include free-running, precision jumps, and grabbing onto a branch or railings.
Determination To Do Climbing For An Easy Parkour Route
When you climb, it will involve steep vertical walls and ledges that you have to traverse. It is practiced in combination with other action skills since it is the easiest route if in a certain place.
This is also subjective since you will be the one to decide what will be the best routine you can perform suitable for the route you are taking. If you do this often, you will be good for more wall climbing training.
Be careful, though, since you should be very confident in wall climbing to keep injuries at bay.
Ability To Vault To Clear Obstacles
Vaulting involves leaping over obstacles, going over fences with minimal hand touches. You will direct your body up by your hands and lift it by your feet. This is a combination of swing and jump. Hence, doing simple vault routines will prepare you to make complex vaulting.
It is not as difficult as it seems once you master other action skills you need in combination with vaulting. You can practice doing this by starting with a vault about the height of your waist and progress to taller heights.
Ability to Stay Safe Through Rolling Trick
You will also do rolling in parkour, and you should make sure that you perform the safety rolls. This is a must-have in doing parkour because you can utilize this efficiently to avoid further injuries if you do not land properly.
Above all, the parkour roll or safety roll is a skill you should learn. It will lessen the impact of a fall by directing the landing force downwards if done the right way.
Falling Safely: Better To Be Safe Than Sorry
Again, no matter how careful one can be, risks will be associated with any sport like parkour. To reduce the chance of this happening, you have to ensure that you always fall safely.
When this happens to you, you can reduce the impact by staying bent and protecting your head. It might hurt, but you can prepare for it. You can do this by developing your environment perception and instincts so that you can act fast when things go wrong.
Make sure to practice falling and landing with the correct safety techniques. When you know this by heart, you will not be afraid to fall, but, of course, safety will be the top priority.
Conclusion
The skills and right values will lead you to the right track, and parkour will be enjoyable if you ensure you possess these before you start. For me, the most important skill you can possess is the vigor and the confidence to do it. If you have this, you can surely succeed and it will minimize the fear and doubt that is the enemy of your success. Strive harder, after all, it will be you who will take this parkour road.
