Beginning Training

Firstly, age does have a bearing on your Parkour training. The body is still developing throughout most of your teenage years so it is a good idea to steer clear of the elements of Parkour that put your body under extreme stresses until the age of 15 or 16. Before this age, the best way to improve your Parkour ability and to prepare your body for Parkour later in life is to concentrate on your fitness, general agility and control of movements.
For these things, activities like climbing, the less aggressive martial arts and sports in general are all good, the first two for agility and control, the latter for fitness in general. Gymnastics is also useful, although competitive gymnastics risks exposing younger participants to damaging stresses.
You can also work on the technique aspects of Parkour before this age, just be careful to keep heavy landings to a minimum.

The best way to begin to practice Parkour is to first take some time to learn about Parkour. A lot of the understanding will come through practice but to know what you should be practicing you need to have some idea of what Parkour is in the first place.
Parkour is movement, pure and simple. It is what movement should be like without all the rules imposed upon it by human society.

The chances are that if you've heard of Parkour then you have seen some examples of Parkour in action.
If you spend a bit of time watching some of the better Parkour videos that are out there you should have some idea of new ways to move and that will be a good start, but it is also a good idea to familiarise yourself with examples of people that are less proficient, just so you can start to recognise the differences between someone who is comfortable moving naturally and someone who is still in the process of learning new ways to move.
From videos you can gain some idea of what you are aiming for when you practice Parkour. You can also observe people in real life, but you get a better variety of skills and abilities by searching for videos online.

Anyway, to begin to practice Parkour yourself you need to get out into the real world and try it. The best environment to take your first steps in is usually a normal training session. It?s likely there will be a range of abilities there and someone will always be happy to give you advice on how to improve or what to start on.
It is a good idea to train with people in their regular training area, as they should have a good idea of exactly which places are best to learn on.
It is also a good idea to stick to outdoor training for the first few months of training for various reasons. Firstly, it means that you will have a better chance of getting used to the various materials and surfaces that exist. Parkour is designed to be a practical discipline and there are few padded surfaces or crash mats outdoors where you might want to use Parkour.

Secondly, it means that you won?t be neglecting the mental aspects of Parkour. A vital element of Parkour is learning to cope with and overcome fear, and training outdoors with hard surfaces will give you the opportunity to learn methods of coping with fear while the consequences are still relatively minor. If you train indoors in padded environments then your physical capability may increase faster but the fear element will be reduced. The fear element will always return at some point, and it is much more dangerous to be learning to cope with the fear during more advanced or risky movements than it is to learn to cope with fear during the basic techniques.
Additionally, there is a danger that learning movements indoors could lead to you learning bad technique. Outdoors, if you do something badly you will know about it because it will very likely hurt. If you want to learn it you will therefore have to keep practicing it and seeking to improve. Indoors, however, you can do a technique badly and feel fine, and so you won?t necessarily know if you need to improve the technique further or not. The longer you spend with bad technique the harder it will be to correct it.

The most basic thing you can try is a jump, either running or standing.
Everyone can run and jump, but as it forms the basis of a lot of other movements it is worth spending a few training sessions sorting out the basic principles. A common mistake with running jumps is taking longer strides just before the jump in order to get the footing correct for take off, whereas this actually makes it harder to jump a distance. If you need to adjust your footing it is better to take smaller steps rather than larger ones, since it is easier to adjust things when you have more individual applications of force, as each individual ?push? needs to adjust things less.

Standing, two-footed jumps are less natural but are also a very useful technique to learn because unlike running jumps they are a symmetrical jump where both sides of the body act equally. There are many movements in Parkour that involve both sides of the body acting together and it is a good idea to get used to acting with both sides at the same time.

After jumps, vaults are the easiest and most useful things to learn. They usually involve less physical effort than simply jumping an obstacle, but require a higher level of bodily control, since you are using your arms to control your movement as well as your legs.

There are several forms of vaults that are useful to know but you can find out all about these from training with more experienced people, watching videos or reading other articles. I?m not going to go into much detail about individual techniques here as there are plenty of other resources dealing with that.

Article written by Dave aka Fearess
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