At their best, parkour events can recharge your passion for parkour and give you new connections in the parkour community. At their worst, they can be boring and dangerous.

For the past 30 years, I have been lucky and privileged enough to be involved in several sport activities and some of them at the highest level of competition. I mixed with a lot of sportsmen/women and among them I met just a few athletes.

After the travels in South America that I detailed in my last articles, I headed back to Europe to continue my wanderjhar in Italy.  Since I only had a month in Italy, I was able to cover nearly the same geographic span as in Brazil, but did get to work with 3 organizations of particular note.

I don’t particularly like sharing things when I am in the middle of them. I prefer to work them out myself, get an overview and then share the conclusion when I have learned from it.

But there is a first for everything. I have never been here and I have never lived this day before. I think. And we’re all online prophets now, so why not share it with the whole world and see what comes out of it.

By now you've doubtless marveled at Chris Evans' incredible physique in the film 'Captain America'. I've recently been facinated with how actor Chris Evans managed to bulk up so much and stay so agile for his big role so i found the guy who cracked the whip. To my surprise it turns out it's a former Royal Marine turned personal trainer Simon Waterson, who trained Daniel Craig for both Bond films and Jake Gyllenhaal for 'Prince of Persia', among others. 

Ever since Parkour started becoming widespread there has been a wide selection of videos on YouTube. Some are tutorials, some advertise teams to potential recruiters, there are ideas for conditioning progressions, others are documentaries and some are just plain stupid. However, I think it's fair to say that most are training videos or 'samplers'.

Parkour is full of references to animals and their movements. Core moves of the discipline have names like the cat leap, slide monkey, cat balance, and kong vault (ok, I realise that ‘kong’ isn’t a real animal, but bear with me). Sebastien Foucan once said that we traceurs should try to move like animals through our environments. Stephane Vigroux’s nickname is ‘the Monkey’ (Le Singe). One of the Storm Freerun team goes by the name Spyder, and the title of one of David Belle’s most popular parkour videos was a play on the words Spider-Man.

I’d liked to touch on what I believe is one of the more important aspects of training for athletes. Conditioning. Yes, training your particular sport is equally important!  However, if your body isn’t prepared for the sport, then longevity in the sport is unlikely. You won’t see gains without putting in a little effort! I’ll keep this short, as there is a vast amount of detail that could be introduced and maybe I’ll flesh this out in future posts.