Parkour is an extreme sport that has taken to the hearts of many young teenagers. I myself have been training for years and consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable on conditioning and training with weights specifically for parkour. As parkour practitioners do a lot of jumping and movements involving high forces and momentum, their bodies need to be conditioned and fit to handle these forces as a lot of them are repeated often and regularly in training. Many people who train parkour misunderstand the concept of conditioning. There is movement specific conditioning and general body preparation.
Movement specific conditioning entails training for specific movements, such as a arm jump or a cat-pass. The main forces involved in an arm jump are targeted to the shoulders. There is great merit in practicing arm jumps and getting your technique correct and perfect in different environments and areas but this falls under movement specific conditioning. Too many people focus on training for arm jumps or big precision jumps on rails and such. The problem with this is, repeating an arm jump 50 times is useful for getting technique perfect but it is harmful to your shoulder joints and can cause you real issues down the track.
General body preparation entails training with weights, or alternatively your body weight to be ready for any movement and have your body able to handle the forces involved with your training. For example, you may perform 200 precision jumps over the course of a week, and you may have powerful legs in a plyometric sense: that they can use a high percentage of their maximal strength is a short period of time. Although, your lower back may suffer greatly from the landings and forces of 200 jumps significantly more than your knees. This is one example but illustrates the point of body parts lagging behind and repeated forces and actions causing problems.
In parkour training, conditioning is a key element. Many practitioners prefer a body weight approach and training specifically for their movements – although you will be very hard pressed to find exercises that target the posterior chain (legs muscles involved in jumping) that use only your body weight. Furthermore targeting your shoulders and lower back effectively without weights is viable to a point, although after your muscles have adapted to your own body weight you will not see progressive strength gains.
Some bodyweight exercises that you can use for parkour conditioning are:
- Dips
- Pushups
- Pullups
- Body weight squats
- Crunches
- Bear walks
- Handstand pushups
- Sprints
Some exercises that you can perform with weights that will greatly assist you in parkour training are:
- Squats
- Deadlifts
- Overhead presses
- Bench press
- Rows
- Weighted dips
- Weighted pullups
- Power cleans
- Olympic lifts
- Weighted lunges
The effectiveness of weight training is often discredited in parkour circles, reading any parkour forum one will find a plethora of 13-18 year olds who believe weight training will make them large and bulky (most of these people couldn’t put on mass even if they wanted to) and slow them down. It is quite the opposite, and weight training will make you faster, stronger and keep you a lot safer when training. For parkour to truly progress as a sport people need to understand that, like any other spot – basketball, volleyball, softball, tennis and football, there needs to be an element of weight training and general body preparation.
Good luck in your training and feel free to ask me any questions related to parkour.
