For me Methode Naturelle training became my guiding training philosophy june of this year when I went to train with Erwan Le Corre in france. Erwan and I had formed a internet friendship through our discussions on parkour.net and he had talked to me allot about methode naturelle training, which fascinated me. Within the parkour world we often talked about usefulness and training to be able to deal with emergency situations, but the more I thought about it the less sense the common practice of parkour made to me as far as utility. What good is being able to run down a mugger if you can not defend yourself from him or protect someone else? What good is climbing into a burning building if you don’t have the strength to carry a person out? This was Erwan opinion... rant perhaps might be a better term and his answer lay in the forefather of parkour, Le Methode Naturelle, and I was fascinated to learn more about it. I had been doing my own little MN type trainings for a couple months prior to going to france, adding climbing trees, picking up, carrying and through rocks and logs and elements of martial arts practice, but experiencing the training Erwan would be something altogether more powerful and complete.
Beth and I meet Erwan in City of Nice along the French Mediterranean. There he was staying and working as an independent salesman for the summer so he could spend his winter in Brazil working on his MN project and school. Erwan met us at the train station.
After Erwan showed us to our hotel we were forced to find shelter from an unexpected downpour that blew in of the Mediterranean. So we took a seat in a little french Cafe on the boardwalk, drank tea and talked till the weather broke. The talk quickly turned to our passions for movement and the desire we shared to develop the full capacity of the body and mind not as specialized athlete but like a wild animal, both of us felt that modern human beings had lead themselves to a very sad and domesticated state. Parkour and MN is inspiring because it offers us a window out of the cage we have built for ourselves. Its always strange to meet someone in real life after communicating with them soley through the net. Erwan is less polite, and even more passionate in real life, he is also allot funnier, he is one of the few people I have meet capable of out talking me. One might say he has tendency to rant but what he has to say is fascinating and its worth taking the time to listen.
Anyways after tea we headed down to the beach for our first training together. The training was spontaneous and unplanned just moving down the beach getting warm looking at what seemed interesting much like I see parkour generally practiced, we found an interesting wall that was sloped in and then rounded out creating a difficult catch for the rail on top, and did a vareity of other passe muraille, jumps and quadrupedal movement the most interesting part of the training though was when Erwan found a long metal pole like one might fly a flag from lying on the ground. He picked it up and pressed it over head and practiced throwing it, when we was done he invited me to follow up and soon we had devised many different ways of training with this tool. Throwing and catching, lifting overhead, moving down on its length so we had to fight against the leverage and finally having one person sit on it while the other two lifted it to chest height or even overhead. This training was both productive and really enjoyable, I have found myself going back to similar games in my own training and in working with other athletes over and over again.
The next days training began at sometime around the crack of noon. A hard task master Erwan maybe but luckily his sense of appropriate timing was similar to ours. Erwan took us to down to park just over the Beach. We started straight out with quadrupedal movement, previously I had never focused on training for QM for any kind of endurance, and as Erwan showed us various varieties my abdominals and shoulders were soon screaming to stand up. I couldn't believe how fast I became exhausted. I was worried about what the rest of the day held in store if I could barely make it through this warm up. Beth in contrast seemed to be moving free and easy, and of course for Erwan this was child’s play.
Finally after what seemed like 20 minutes but was probably less than five Erwan took us across the streets to train sprint intervals, first we ran up hill and jogged back down for 5 repetitions then we switched. The sprinting was relief after the quadrupedal and here I felt keeping up with erwan was no problem. After sprinting Erwan had us jump up on the backs of a couple park benches and do squats, as we fell of repeatedly trying to get through our reps, Erwan helpfully pointed out how difficult balancing was after even just a small amount of hard training, after a variety of other balance exercises Erwan had us running up a hill which he explained was 3 miles to the top and took him about 20 minutes to run, which combined with swimming in the ocean he would do intervals of for 3 hours! After the sprints, and quadrupedal and the balancing Beth and I were struggling just to keep running as Erwan told us this story.
Beth dropped back early on and said to go ahead and keep up our pace, but soon enough my pace was to slow for Erwan to so he jetted ahead while I struggled to keep my legs moving. About half a mile ahead Erwan had stopped and was working on a jump. When I reached him I stopped to catch my breath, but Erwan scolded me quickly the work must be continuous in a MN training session. So I kept moving around working on a Saut Du Chat until Beth joined us. We jogged more easily down to the beach after that, were leathery old men and topless ladies watched us in bemusement as we worked running and standing precisions, drops, and a Saut Du Bras once again without ever fully stopping. When Erwan was satisfied with our work there we headed back up to some tree's Erwan had seen for climbing practice.
There we muscled up, lached, and climbed in any variety of ways. At one point an attractive young woman stopped to ask what we were doing and Erwan stopped completely I might add to explain it to here in great depth. French flirting aside, by the time Erwan finished his conversation, our forearms were pumped and our imaginations dry as far as those tree's were concerned so Erwan lead us to our final training spot. A boulder strewn rocky beach, home to exactly no sun bathers. There we grabbed some good size rocks and worked on lifting them overhead. Then we switched to a smaller rocks and practiced passing them back and forth which again is surprisingly entertaining if somewhat scary. For the grand finale of the workout, we were to swim in the ocean.
The area we were to swim from was abutted by boulders all around and slick as snot with Algae and the surf was while not heavy neither was it calm. Erwan who was a former triathlete and very good swimmer took off into the waves and I followed, focused on finishing the workout. Beth was intimidated by the size of the waves the rocks and slick jetty, and decided to opt out. When Erwan saw her approaching the water he started back to make sure she was safe. I followed Erwans path out into the ocean at least to the point were he turned not particular far but not easy swiming in the swells. About the time I felt an intense sting on my shoulder followed by a burning sensation. Apparently I had hit a jelly fish in the water. I have never really swum in the ocean much and I was already intimidated by the surf, but being stung by the jellyfish definitely antied up the adrenaline level. I was worried my arm might shut down. As it turned out it was just a light burn and I was easily able to get back to shore where we treated the burn which did no more then buzz lightly for the rest of the day. After that we showered, dressed, and found a cool rock for picnic.
The next day Erwan offered to take us out of Nice into the country for some training in a natural environment, it ended up being quite the trip. To start with Erwan drives like a French man, or as we would say in the U.S. a psychopathic maniac. Of course he maintains we drive like drugged up sheep and are more dangerous because it so easy here. We'll Viva la difference I say and hopefully next time I train with Erwan someone else drives. This was all made worse by gnarly traffic and it took us an hour longer then it should have to make it out to the creek where we were planning to train. After a quick lunch Erwan said he was very tired from the sales the night before and wanted a nap before we started training. So while Erwan slept Beth and I explored the creek. Running up and down creeks has been a favorite activity since I was a kid and something I have done a fair bit as part of my parkour training, so I had a good time and stopped to catch several toads on the way. When we got back Erwan had decided that this area was not as good as he remembered for a full MN training and we should go to the nearest town to train instead.
Ciele the town we went train in was an amazingly beautiful town complete with a castle on a rock thrusting up from the side of the rather sheer cliff upon which the town perched.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2307/2099703283_7f26874c93.jpg?v=0
Beth decided she was still tired from the day before and wanted to take pictures of the town instead, so she skipped training and took some pictures instead.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9527742@N03/sets/72157603524772787/
We all wandered down in to the town and Erwan I worked on doing precision jumps. Erwan and I had similar distance but his control was much better, as Erwan would say over and over, "You do not lack of strength, you lack of control." There was a particular large precision perhaps seven or more feet with a three-foot rise from the start to the finish. Erwan did this and wanted to see me do it. I did it and craned stepped the landing. He said this was fine, a good technique for a longer precision, but that he knew the distance was easy for me I needed to have the control and the confidence to land it on both feet. “It is good to see the easiest route but you need also to push yourself to do what scares you.”
Just asking me to do it was enough motivation and I found the jump really wasn't as hard as it had looked. I still find myself looking at stuff and knowing that infact it is well in my range but the distance seems very large to me. We continued to explore the little square in which we found the jump. The square had some nice small wall passes, a couple of vaults, and various different gaps to jump. As we played around Erwan kept noticing the excessive tension I carried in my movement. He had me do lots of mental and physical exercises to force me to relax and not have so much tension before I jumped. It must have looked strange, us running around pretending our arms were limp spaghetti while bent over like a chimp in this beautiful medieval French town. I never quite mastered it to his satisfaction but I did improve at least. Then we worked on learning to breathe under control while practicing top outs. Previously I had held my breath during the movement. Again Erwan was pointing out my excess of tension.
It’s something that has always bugged me seeing my movement. I am capable of high speeds and big movements but my movement looks jagged and tense; my movement lacks beauty to my eyes. Still something I continue to work on is to move with ease and grace as opposed to jagged tension.
After that I had Erwan critique my running form and surprisingly he found no faults with it. Now if I could only apply it for longer periods of time at higher intensities I might earn some respect.
After that we started heading back, stopping once for a large wall pass that presented itself, maybe 12 feet or so, but very grippy and slightly slanted. We both got it in a couple of attempts and headed back to Nice for dinner and for Beth to catch a train to italy.
The next day was to be my last in Nice and the only one with just Erwan and I, so as you might expect it ended up being quite intense.
Our training on that last day started down by one of the few sandy beaches in Nice. First we simply ran for 10-15 minutes, nice and relaxed pace, not difficult at all. After the running warm up Erwan had a course of perhaps 80 meters including a running precision, a saut du brasand a vault to a drop. Erwan started sprinting through it and soon enough sweat huffing and just focusing on keeping up. The running precision was in the range where it was not difficult to make the distance but very difficult to land it with control and it required a lot of speed to make at all. The Saut Du Bras was very safe and easy but the take of was from round rail and when you’re tired getting yourself to approach with good speed and take off something like that is difficult. Erwan would do the drop by jumping on top and dropping off the landing into a squat and running out. The drop was maybe six feet and with my history of knee problems that was not a good idea so I vaulted and landed and rolled. We did sprints through this with just jogging to recover for a 15 minutes. I was just barely keeping pace, barely on the level of able to continuing and doing it safely. After this course we were very tired or at least I was and Erwan who was worried about sunstroke decided we should take a short break before continuing .
After our break we went swimming. Erwan pointed out a buoy well out into the bay and asked if I could swim to it. I honestly answered that I was not sure. Still he said we would go and see, if I felt tired we would just come back. So out we went and though I experienced some fatigue I made it with relative ease. From there we practiced sprinting from buoy to buoy, or swimming without coming up for air, or swimming on our backs arms raised as if carrying someone. I was very very tired by the time we made it back to shore, but no rest for the wicked, and we jogged back to the circuit area for quadurepedal movement training. This was by far the most brutal part of the training. We moved around on all fours, trotting, cantering, stretching to go under rails, and moving crab walk style for at least 15 minutes, it was brutal. Every muscle ached, my palms were bruised, and I could barely breathe and it was hot, really hot for me coming from the northwest. Every time Erwan took us underneath the rails I could barely keep from scraping my belly on the ground. Finally Erwan stood up and lead me, to series of boulders to run and bound across. After this Erwan let us slow down to a walk and we headed over to some tree's to practice muscle ups. Three was my max, but Erwan eventually busted out 20 muscles up mostly symmetrically out of an l-hold on a rail. I was shocked. I still can't come close.
After our climbing training, we finally took the chance to train our defensive capacity. We started with kick boxing but after taking a few of Erwans kicks I decided I needed my legs to function when I went to Lisses and would prefer to just box. My leg work at the time was not great and Erwan was a formerly a national level Karetaka. We boxed using open hands to the face and fists to the body, and this proved a much more even match and was quite enjoyable. After some time of practicing boxing Erwan wanted to wrestle since he knew I had a grappling background. As he had the advantage in kicking so I had the advantage in grappling. We did some ground work at first but because the sand was very gritty it was rather painful so we stuck to working on throws. Erwan was able to throw me once, but other then that I was very much in control, which felt rather nice after being outdone at every turn before that. On one part of one capacity at least I was more developed! When we had exhausted our desire for wrestling and our skin was to torn up from the sand, we called it a day. Somewhere of over two hours of continuous and very strenuous training excepting one break. It was great.
After a break and more food, we headed up to an area with some good walls and rails for some technical parkour work. Erwan and I talked a lot about the concept of efficiency and how over any appreciable distance being good at running and choosing safe options over obstacles is going to be more efficient then the spectacular stuff you tend to see in parkour videos.
My wall pass and vaulting techniques were all approved of. The key for me is not primarily the techniques at this point but developing the capacities to employ them with effectiveness, grace, efficiency, endurance, speed, strength, etc. That was the main lesson of training with Erwan. Sure work that little technical thing 50 times in a row sometimes, but more often focus on the full capacity; vault and continue running, climb and don't stop. Challenge yourself across all your physical dimensions so that when you’re tired, injured, scared, you can still use all that technical skill. Once you have great capacity skill is much easier to develop and its pursuit is safer and more fruitful. Too often we look for the shortcut; if my technique is perfect then I won’t have to be strong, or fit or courageous. But this is not so. If you are strong, fit and courageous then technique can make you great but without those capacities it’s incomplete.
