Down and Dirty

by Matt B. Davis

  A Brief History of Parkour

  Parkour comes from the expression parcours du combattant, which loosely translates to “fighting the obstacles.” The expression comes from the French military firefighter brigade, which often held competitions that involved overcoming obstacles quickly and efficiently. As those competitions continued, one male participant began to win over and over again. Raymond Belle took the concepts of Méthode Naturelle, which is a complete movement system with ten basic principles of movement, and applied it to his military firefighter brigade training. The incredible ability that Belle possessed inspired his son, David Belle, to create something that was the opposite of the stringent and locked-down method of only ten principles, and take his newfound art to the streets of France: Parkour.

  In the late 1980s, David Belle created Parkour and shared it with his friends and cousins. They began to explore more of the urban landscape and develop techniques that were more efficient for the common obstacles we have today. The movement of Parkour evolved over many years, and it has grown in popularity.

  You can find a sprawling infrastructure of Parkour videos all over the Internet, and it’s even featured in popular movies such as James Bond’s Casino Royale.

  Parkour in OCR

  Now we can talk about how Parkour can help you in OCR. One way is by helping you use less energy as you overcome obstacles, and by allowing you to focus that extra energy on running, lifting, and carrying. Parkour is about efficiency of movement. Parkour is a tool that can help you more easily overcome obstacles. Next, we’ll detail three direct ways Parkour training will help you in that next obstacle course race.

  GET UP

  Getting up a wall is one of the crowning achievements in an obstacle course race. Most racers are excited to come away from a wall having gotten over by themselves with relatively small amounts of bruises and torn-apart pride.

  Using Parkour can help you get up and over those walls without spending the energy you need for running. Something that Parkour practitioners hang onto desperately is their technique. Most Parkour practitioners can climb up 10-foot (3-m) walls and drop right down from them without spending an exorbitant amount of strength, and repeat this process for hours. Deploying the right technique allows a practitioner with modest strength to outperform relatively stronger athletes. The following technique will help you to achieve a good wall scale—without having to rest on the other side of the wall.

  “Parkour is about efficiency of movement.”

  1. Start with a good run up. Yes, you have to run at a wall, quite aggressively at that, too.

  2. Once you get your forward momentum going, here comes another force of momentum. In Parkour, we call that force a “tac.” That’s using the ball of your foot to apply force into the wall at around hip height.

  3. When forward momentum meets downward movement from your foot, you get lift off. Yes, you have mud on your foot, but this still allows for momentum up the wall and good positioning for climbing up and over that wall. Without getting your feet higher up on the wall, it will be hard to gain the right force of energy to overcome the obstacle.

  4. While getting airborne, push all the way out of your foot to propel yourself upward. As you are tacing the wall, use that momentum to continue your hands to the top of the wall. OCRs generally have walls about 2 inches (5 cm) thick, so you should be able to get a significant amount of grip.

  5. Now start pulling yourself up. Your momentum does not stop here in a hang. Use that momentum from your tac to continue pulling up the wall. If you think “pull” too late, you stop dead in your tracks and lose your speed up the wall; you will be stuck hanging, and your efficiency will be out the window. You should pull until getting into what we call the “beached whale” position, with your head hanging over the other side of the wall, then the wall pulled to your waist.

  Pull your nose right over the top of the wall. Scrape your chest across the top of the wall. Keep your elbows in close to your body so that you don’t spend any more energy than you have to with a wide-arm grip. Keep your body close to the wall. This allows you to do the most conservative pull-up, thus not spending extra energy. When overcoming these obstacles, you never want to be higher than you have to be.

  6. Next, fight hard to get your upper chest over the wall. Use your feet to kick, climb, and scrape up the wall.

  Don’t stop your forward momentum when your foot hits the wall.

  Pull yourself into the “beached whale” position, with your waist pulled up over the top of the wall.

  GET DOWN A SMALL WALL

  Many racers think so much about getting up an obstacle that they might not even think about how getting down from an obstacle in a different way may increase your performance in a race. Using Parkour, you can jump from great heights or continue your momentum through obstacles with some simple techniques that are easily learned.

  It’s common to see racers jump over a 4-foot (1.2 m) wall with the greatest of ease, but then smash down into an “Iron Man” three-point stance on the other side of the wall. That should never be your goal. You can lessen the impact that you take from drops and continue your movement to the next obstacle.

  1. When getting down from a low obstacle, such as a 4-foot (1.2 m) wall, you’re going to find a way to vault or jump onto the obstacle. We are going to use a Parkour technique called the “safety down.” It starts by bringing one hand and your opposite foot onto the top of the wall. When getting into this position, it’s important to remember that your fingers should always be facing the direction you are going. This allows you to have the proper grip needed, and it gives you the force you need to keep your momentum moving forward. Your second leg is dangling in front of the obstacle waiting to strike the ground.

  2. Next, lower yourself down from the obstacle. Bend your opposite side leg and arm to allow your hips to move lower beneath the top of the obstacle. From any height, lowering yourself down will allow you to save a harder strike on the ground.

  3. After lowering yourself down from the obstacle, push away from the obstacle and use your other leg to reach onto your toes to step onto the ground.

  4. Then use your opposite foot to continue on into your run. You can do this quite quickly and efficiently by trying to keep your momentum through the whole movement.

  Use one hand and your opposite foot to reach the top of the 4-foot wall.

  Bend your leg and arm to lower your hips and reduce the force with which you hit the ground.

  GET DOWN A TALL WALL

  Your biggest waste of energy, however, is jumping from the top of 6-, 8-, and 10-foot (1.8, 2.4, and 3 m) walls. You want to find ways to lower yourself quickly without losing time and energy. When you learn the get-down technique that many Parkour practitioners use, you’ll feel less like the wall is an obstacle and more of a way to shave minutes off your run while spending less energy.

  1. Remember to keep your chest close to the wall. You want to drop your chest to the left or the right on top of the wall. One at a time, swing your legs over and bring yourself into a beached whale position. If you try to drop down from the wall from the top of the wall, you still have a chance of expending a lot of energy, tiring yourself for more obstacles to come.

  2. While in a beached whale position, bend your first leg, sticking your foot to the wall. (Without your first leg sticking to the wall, you are very likely to just slide down the wall; this is why we bend that leg.)

  3. Slowly lower yourself down the wall, keeping your foot against the wall and push, regulating your descent. After lowering, you will look just like you’re doing your tac up the wall and reaching for the top.

  4. Make sure to push away from the wall with your foot and land on your midfoot, allowing your legs to sink and absorb the shock of the fall. Don’t bend your legs beyond a 90° angle. Going below 90° is not efficient because it allows for deep tissue exertion and unnecessary impact on your joints and tendons.

  You could ask, “Why not just slide down the wall?
” You could slide down the wall on the other side, however, lowering yourself in this way allows you to stay in control of your movement. It keeps you from falling over the side, banging your knees or tearing up those ankles and heels while dropping. Often when sliding, however, you will fall close to the wall, and you have to bend your legs to absorb shock. When your legs bend, it will send your knees straight into the wall.

  Reach down and drop your chest to touch the wall.

  GATE VAULT

  If you’d like to make getting down even more efficient, here’s a final technique that will remind you more of a cartwheel than getting down a wall. It’s very efficient and the fastest way of overcoming a wall.

  1. Start in a beached whale position. Turn one hand so your fingers are pointing backward on top of the wall, and reach as far as you can down the wall you have just overcome and let your chest drop all the way until it’s touching this side of the wall.

  2. Pull hard on your hand turned backward, and push hard on your hand reaching, then pull your legs up and over the top of the wall on the side in which your arm is reaching. Pulling your legs on the opposite side will result in a cluster of flailing arms and legs to the ground. When performing this movement correctly, it will look more like a cartwheel over the wall than a drop off the wall. The most important part of this whole movement is that you keep your eyes on the hand reaching down on the wall. If you do not keep looking at your reaching hand, you are more likely to do a front flip than you are a cartwheel.

  3. Now that you are pushing your legs up and over the wall, keep your arms holding strong, and try as efficiently as possible to bring your legs over to the ground one at a time. Your top hand will need to release once you get closer to the ground, or you will end up back into the wall.

  4. Finishing this movement, you can push away from the wall cartwheeling out into a run. Cartwheeling out is the very last step and requires that you twist your body, turning away from the obstacle at the last moment. However, starting out, you may practice by coming straight down over the wall, feet together while holding strong to the wall, landing near the wall.

  This movement is potentially dangerous without a lot of training and practice, but this a fast and efficient movement that fits into Parkour because it allows you to continue your movement without having to stop for an obstacle. You must remember overall that jumping down from a wall spends too much energy and is a potential injury waiting to happen. You want to keep your legs healthy and strain-free.

  Keep your eyes on your lower hand as you bring your legs over and to the ground, completing your cartwheel.

  GET OVER

  Sometimes getting over something is the least of your problems in an obstacle course race. Like the linebackers that we think we are, we just barrel through obstacles—not worrying about clipping ankles, knees, or the people next to us. However, Parkour practitioners tend to think of movement in arcs rather than straight lines. Often people may think a straight line is the most efficient, but in Parkour, we find that if we treat obstacles in straight lines, we often spend too much energy trying to overcome them.

  Let’s take the dreaded balancing act as an example: the Log Hop. Although seen in several different arrangements, the Log Hop is generally made with telephone-pole-size logs sticking vertically out of the ground in a row, with several other logs to accompany. The point is to hop from log to log—up to 10 to 15 at a time—without hitting the ground and getting those dreaded burpees penalties.

  “Parkour practitioners tend to think of movement in arcs rather than straight lines.”

  In Parkour, you follow your paths without hesitation, and you must keep your forward momentum—not for an instant thinking about moving backward or sideways or staying stationary. In Parkour, we employ a method called “striding.” This is the act of hopping large distances, one foot at a time, onto obstacles and objects using our constant forward momentum. We use striding so that we do not spend precious energy hopping from log to log one at a time and stopping or using the dreaded contortion act of the “reaching across method,” which usually results in an increased chance of injury or failure.

  Striding subscribes to parabolic motion. Parabolic motion is like a rainbow, where we strive to jump up, across, and then finally down in the shape of a rainbow. So even though Parkour is seen as a straight line, arcs or parabolic motion are required to obtain maximum safety and assurance of success. Using the Log Hop as an example, this is how you would use Parkour to your advantage.

  1. Try to wipe as much mud off the bottom of your shoes as possible before starting! However, you are mostly employing the toes of your shoes and do not require as much of the heels if done correctly.

  2. Lean forward on the beginning log, and start driving your reaching leg’s knee up while pushing hard out of the toes of your opposite leg. Pulling your “reaching leg” up will help you get the parabolic motion that you require. It is not enough that you push forward and reach; you must get your weight up and in the air instead of driving in only one direction—forward. If you drive forward, there is generally enough mud and momentum on your feet that for the most part, it will be hard to stop and may result in slipping off the object.

  3. As your arc begins to descend, you now have ample time to concentrate on the precise landing that you require to continue your motion. You want to land on the toe pad and not the heel of the foot. We are often less precise with the heel, and the heel will cause you to concentrate too much weight in one spot. Also, if you land on your heel, it will not allow your momentum to continue to reach forward with your toes so that you may continue onto your next jump. Instead, it will act more like a brake on a car, keeping you from moving forward.

  4. Upon landing, you must absorb the impact from propelling your body up and down while bringing your next knee into the air, instantly ready for your next obstacle. Even though you are striding, it is halfway between a squat and a plyometric drill. Your body does not spring instantly from the object, but it allows you just enough time to absorb, judge, and redirect your energy to the next obstacle. It is important that you do not lower your body more than a slight knee bend to absorb your landing so that you can keep your momentum going forward. Too large of a knee bend will also result in loss of momentum and keep you from continuing your stride.

  Striding can be extremely rewarding, though very difficult. One drill to use in training is to place cones or draw lines on the ground to practice this technique without too much punishment at first. You can often find poles at parks, universities, or playgrounds to get a better training regimen. When moving on to practice on something with height, just practice one pole at a time. You can start striding from one to another and getting to the point that your momentum continues, then move on to two and three poles until finally, your balance and coordination is enough to do it over and over again without hesitation.

  Look, Ma! No hands!

  This book may not prepare you to eat barbed wire.

  Parkour was created to help people get through obstacles better and faster. With these techniques, you’ll find ways to adapt this movement to even more obstacles in the obstacle course world. With Parkour training and practical use of the discipline, you’ll find ways to make the obstacles less about “if” you can tackle them, and more about using your body in a way that will break down less and have more energy.

  In our obstacle course races, we have a competitive spirit, and we get in the zone. With adrenaline and our willingness to perform, we must minimize our risk of unknown injuries during a race. In races, you can sprain joints, tear tendons, and bruise limbs pretty badly and still run without too much understanding of the severity of the the injury. Using techniques like this saves you strength and allows you to get through the race injury-free. Parkour is going to help you accomplish your obstacle course racing goals—safely.

  DOWN AND DIRTY TAKEAWAYS

  • Use efficiency of movement. When you use less energy to overcome obstacles, you can focus that unuse
d energy toward other things you will have to do in OCR, such as running, lifting, and carrying.

  • Learn to tac. A proper tac shoots you up the wall to your highest point. It conserves more leg energy than leaping does.

  • Beach yourself on the way up. The beached whale position conserves loads of arm energy.

  • Lessen your impact on the way down. Learn ways to lower yourself that require much less energy.

  • Learn to stride. When doing the Log Hop or similar obstacle, forward momentum is the key. When you start and stop, you’re more likely to lose balance. The techniques in this chapter can help you master this.

  As a second-generation Parkour athlete, Matthew Willis learned, trained, and taught with the originators of the Parkour discipline. He’s the founder and organizer of Texas Parkour, Parkour Federation, and co-owner of BAM Academy, a 7,500-square-foot (700 square m) Parkour gym in Austin, Texas. Visit them on the web at www.truenaturetraining.com.

  10 WORKING YOUR CORE

  Having a strong core will help with almost every obstacle.

  Featuring obstacle coach Ekaterina “Solo” Solovieva

  I have followed the writings of Ekaterina Solovieva a.k.a. “Solo” for a while. As an athlete and college professor, she consistently writes well-thought-out and well-researched stories on OCR. She also uses a wide variety of training techniques that help her stay in top physical form.