A Slow Day

After testing my camera earlier in the day I decided to make the most of the dry weather and head out for a bit of training, gathering a few clips along the way.

This is the result, a nice relaxing slow motion video:

Slow motion test

I've just bought a new (to me, but an old model) camera to play around with high speed shots which is lacking in my main HD video camera so just had to test it out with a couple of jumps:

Parkourversary

As of yesterday it's now been a year that I've been doing parkour! I had a good training session last night mainly repeating movements from previous sessions during the week to reinforce the confidence to do them and increase my comfort of each technique through repetition.

Now moving in to year two which I hope will be just as much fun and productive in my progression!

Year One

Well, my first year of doing parkour is nearly over now so I decided to put together a video with a few clips to mark my progress:

2011 resolutions

A bit late in the month already but I figure it's time to list my goals for the coming year in my training, Though not strictly new years resolutions as all because of a continual aim to be training, setting targets for the year still feels a fine thing to do and formalising certain tasks seems something definitely worth doing to perhaps remind myself if I feel unmotivated later in the way.

The main thing is to continue that which I've been back working on since my wrist has started healing, my shockingly weak upper body. A good metric for this I feel can be press ups and so I've restarted the 100pushups routine, modifying it to allow my standard training to continue so it will be spread across many more weeks than the program
suggests but progress will be sure. This leads to my first important quantifiable target for some point this year:

• 100 pushups in one set

This will be a reasonable tough goal, starting the year at around a maximum of around 35, but with the right training attitude it should be no problem at all.

The next goal, muscle ups, is one which can also easily be quantified by number of repetitions, but for these the first target is being able to complete one clean muscle up. Right now I'm able to do one muscle up from hanging, though by using a single arm first followed by the other. Through improving my technique I know this can be improved already with my current strength but after my upper body starts to be in a less embarrassingly weak state I aim to perform a clean muscle up from hanging, and then on to multiple repetitions. My goals for the end of this year, and I hope to arrange a session to perform this with others, include one which is not within one set but within one session at the same bar regardless of time taken:

• multiple clean muscle ups (both arms simultaneously) in one set
• 100 muscle ups in one session

I'm under no illusions, I know this is a huge undertaking coming from a level of being barely able to perform one muscle up but with breaks between sets of one or two I can see this as a possibility in a session below two hours and am aiming for a lower time if possible.

Other general goals:

• standing precision jump distance improvement
• cat pass precision
• cat pass cat leap
• tic tac cat leap

These last three may seem simple enough but I need to get over the fear of putting my legs out after the motion of a tic tac or cat pass so they could more correctly be clumped in the more accurate but vague description:

• improve technique

I've got plenty of other aims including overall aims which will be achieved through training towards specific movements and distances and otherwise through ongoing conditioning, so the goals listed are by no means complete, with another full set of overall goals of:

• kong / cat pass to
• begin on handstands
• symmetry (confidence to do all movements equally on each side, e.g. running precisions from left or right leg, landings on both legs individually, 180 cat both directions, etc)

Many of the targets I have, in particular improving my distance and confidence in my cat passes, have to be delayed to allow my wrist to fully heal. The past couple of weeks it's been completely pain free but with noticeable niggles here and there, so I'll not try anything which could anger it until I've noticed nothing wrong for a few more months.

N.B. I consider this post very incomplete because all progress is ongoing...