Competition and Parkour

We are going to take a quick detour on the blog here and talk about specific issues in the world of Parkour. I will be back to blogging on my ideas about and evolutionary approach to fitness over the weekend.

Two years ago I wrote an article about my opposition to competition with in Parkour. It was well received within the Parkour community and I think in many ways came to represent the anti-competition stance, in this article I am going show why my position has changed. 

In my previous article I outlined two primary reasons for being against parkour competition. The first was that parkour as a discipline was general and that a competition would perforce be specific and that this would narrow the definition of the discipline as has happened with martial arts, where people stop training for the discipline and start training for the sport. The second was that the competition would encourage athletes to take dangerous risks with their body and this was contrary to the ideals of parkour as a life long discipline.

At the time Jesse Woody made the point that these problems already existed but I held hope that we as a community could overcome them and feared that competition would greatly exacerbate them.

In my view, neither of my primary concerns have proven true.  Even then parkour was a competitive sport, practiced for general ability by only the smallest handful of people. Most people are attracted to parkour from seeing videos online and most people then wanted to put their own videos online to impress everyone else. We copy the movements we see online, you can see trends develop as to what is the latest fashion in parkour - kong to precisions, cranes, kong to cat, etc. There is competition in parkour and has been from the very beginning; the competition of who can put out the best video.

Between the time I wrote the last essay and this one I have gone from being a gymnastics coach who teaches occasional parkour clinics to a full time parkour coach. I have worked with over 400 athletes as a coach, and met countless others as at jams and gatherings. Here is what I have seen: parkour, which when practiced safely is one of the safest possible sports in the world, is damaging lots of people because they're trying big drops and jumps far before their bodies are able to handle them because they're trying to live up to the videos they're seeing on YouTube. All the problems of competition are already part and parcel of our community. 

In addition to the video competition, there are now competitive events; red bull art of motion, barclay card freerunning world championships, parcouring, and most recently the world parkour free running ultimate challenge. The capacities displayed at these have not been broad or general. The athletes competing have largely been unable to continuing moving for even a couple minutes, and all of the formats so far have focused primarily on acrobatics which were never the focus of any of the founders of parkour/free running/l'art du deplacement. Finally, injuries have been frighteningly common at these competitions. At the recent UPC, 4 of 8 athletes were injured or had dramatic falls during the competition. King David fell attempting a large jump diagonally to a ladder. Daniel Arroyo slipped on a lache and landed on his head, spraining his neck and suffering a minor concussion. Brian Orosco knocked himself loopy banging his head on the ground on roll out of a diving front flip. Ryan Doyle shattered his leg at the red bull art of motion championships, and Gaettan Bouillett blew out his knee at the WFC.

There is one upside to these competitions so far; they have mostly been poorly produced and have had little impact on the parkour community or mainstream conciousness. The prediction that competition would make the rest of the parkour community more reckless in their training does not seem to be true so far.

At this point though it seems clear to me that we cannot ignore competition in parkour. We cannot hope that online protests or ignoring or boycotting competitions will have any effect on them.

As I see it, Parkour/freeruning right now is competitive. It is extremely narrow and specific in application and has very limited transfer to utlity application as commonly practiced.

However there are possible benefits to competition which the current formats have not given us. Competition can benefit a discipline. Just as some martial arts fall into the trap of becoming sports and forgetting the parts of the discipline not applicable to the sport, so martial arts that do not compete often become directionless; all theory and no practical application. When military, police and security want extra training in combat skills they do not turn to Tai Chi, they turn to Judo, Muay Thai, and competitive styles of Karate. They turn to these disciplines because they do something very well; they have a measurable way to say what skill is, and they have solutions honed by competition.

In my own practice and the classes we teach we have found competition to be both fun, rewarding and immensely developmental of ability and understanding in what it truly effective. We do time trials through obstacle courses, run races, and play tag and capture the flag. All are forms of competition and all are in my opinion not only good parkour training but absolutely necessary.

Competition does increase the chance of injury but it also helps us discover what really works, it can create community by bringing people together for events, and yes it can help the individual athletes who wish to eventually earn a living from it.

A good example of this is the Sasuke Ninja Warrior competition. These do not carry the parkour name, and they existed before parkour was well known in Japan, but the competition is an excelent testing ground for parkour skill. More and more traceurs have been traveling to Japan to take on the challenge. This show is almost universally admired by traceurs. It is all about movement, effectiveness, has a great history of safety, and has postively effected training as I know many traceurs who are now practicing more climbing skills due to the influence of the show, a skill that is necessary and sorely lacking in much of the parkour community.

This last summer I went to two major jams, Toronto and Denver and helped host a third in Seattle. At each jam there was a small competition. The Toronto competition was based on the game Mirrors Edge and the Denver one was based on Ninja Warrior. The Seattle competition was less formal, just a time trial training period during the jam based on some of the training we had been doing. All were very well recieved by the people at the jams, no significant injuries happened at any despite over 70 participating at both the Toronto and Denver jams, and 15 or so in seattle. This despite very limited preparation or safety precautions, and I felt like we all walked away a little enlighted as to what really works. 

Brayden Jones beat out Dim Monk in Toronto despite a slightly rougher set of techniques because he was simply the fastest runner. This is something few traceurs focus on or realize being able to run fast is more key to most escape and reach situations than any parkour technique. The same thing occured in Seattle. Brian, a former soccer player with minimal parkour experience, blew everyone away due to footspeed. How many practice hours has the average traceur put into sprinting and running technique compared to say Kong vaults, or silly things like flips and spins? In Denver, Tyson won the challenge in large part due to superior upper body strength and climbing skill, two things that are also underfocused on in the parkour community.

Competition crystallizes what works. The problem with the current parkour/freerunning competitions is that, like the competition on the Internet, it has not been about what works but about what looks good. Aesthetics-based competition truly misses the heart of this discipline, as well as being inevitably subjective and subject to endless politics. The job of a soldier a firefighter, or truly needing to reach or escape is competitive, because your life or someone else may depend on your abilities. Free-form training does not capture that intensity or inform us about what works in that type of situation, but proper competition brings us closer to it.

It does not matter to me if these competitions are called parkour or not. At this point the name is not important. What I care about is the discipline of improving myself through movement, and becoming faster, stronger, more coordinated and agile, more courageous and focused. If competition helps me do that and helps me train athletes to achieve those things, then I am in favor of it. I also believe that taking competition into our own hands and creating formats that reflect the grass-roots level understanding of parkour, not the show that Hollywood wants to make it, is the best way to protect and grow parkour in the long run. One thing I think might be protective of the wider aspects of Parkour is a specific name for the competitions. Just as sparring in Karate is called Kumite, we could come up with a specific work for the competitive aspects of parkour training. I suggest the word "Coursing." The name is of course not important but clear communication is. 

The competitions so far have been poorly designed spectacles created by people who don't understand the discipline, but rather as a marketable product. But this is not how great sports grow. They grow internally. Look at the coverage of the UPC vs. the coverage of track and field or gymnastics in the Olympics. Which model would be preferable for parkour?

Most of all, what I would like to see is us as a community finding ways to develop competitive formats that help us achieve the basic goals of this discipline, and take the future of parkour and competition into our own hands.

Posted via web from Evolutionary Athletics's posterous

Conceptualizing Fitness Evolutionarily

 

Let me preface by saying this is all conceptualizing based on the best information I can find. None of this is experimental, verified, or based on long term observational studies. It's not science, it's just an attempt to understand fitness logically based on information pulled from scientific sources. 

Evolutionary science defines fitness as success in propagating your genetic material. This definition does not intially seem to be related to our concept of physical fitness, or what is sometimes defined as physiological fitness, but in truth they are closely connected. Before an animal can reproduce it has to survive. Everything we see as fitness or athletiscm can be seen as directly relating to the ability to survive: strength, speed, power, agility, accuracy, balance, flexibility, endurance, and stamina. Every one of these elements can be crucial to survival. Fitness is the extent of the development of those physical qualities which improve survival. Fitness is survivability.

While this may seem less meaningfull in the modern world were survival to reproductive age and beyond is virtually assured, these same qualities that allowed us to survive help us survive longer and healthier now, the strong muscles and dense bones that helped us hunt down prey or fight of predators in the past can help us survive car crashes today or in old age it can be the difference between a fall having fatal complications and being a mere inconvience. 

If you define fitness this way, it becomes clear that development of only one aspect of fitness is not sufficient. Being very very strong but unable to walk up two flight of stairs without stopping for breath would not have kept you alive in our evolutionary past, just as being able to run for miles and miles but being unable to lift heavy objects, jump powerfully or fight would not be sufficient. I believe that a balanced physical development not only makes survival in the unlikely event of a life or death situation more possible, but it also improves quality of life throughout life.

There are three broad categories you can divide survival-relevant movement patterns into: locomotion, manipulation and combat. Locomotion is any movement pattern that moves the individual's body through space. Manipulation is any movement pattern involving moving an external body through space. Combat is defined as movement patterns devoted to dealing with or resisting an external force.

I view this as a sort of pyramid of fitness:

                                                                                                                     

Each Level builds upon the one before it. An athlete must have the proper mobility, coordination and strength to do an air squat before they will be able to squat with a object balanced on his shoulder, and he should be strong lifting inanimate objects before he tries to lift a resisting force on his shoulder and toss it off. Each level in this pyramid represents increased motor complexity.

Looking at it as a pyramid also reflects a pattern of regularity of occurence as well. While demands across these activities have varied over time, it seems safe to say that virtually always we have moved ourselves more often than outside inanimate objects, and inanimate objects more often than resisting opponents. Even soldiers in war spend far more time marching and lugging gear than actually fighting. 

Finally, each level represents increasingly potential dangerous challenges. A push-up is safer than a bench press is safer than trying to push a opponent off of you who is trying to rain punches on your face. 

An evolutionarily-fit athlete must have development across all of these levels.

It is clear that sports fall into these patterns as well. The most popular sports tend to demonstrate some level of capacity across all three realms of fitness. To excel at football, basketball, or soccer, one must be able to run and jump, manipulate an object effectively, deal with contact from other athletes, predict patterns and employ strategy. In short, sport appears to be sanitized rituals of group combat. 

The basic idea here is that fitness can be defined as those physical capacities related to survival, and that balanced development of these capacities must be based on understanding the relationship between locomotive, manipulative and combative capacities. 

In the next installment I will look into some examples of how this pattern is congruent with what we see in child play behavior and in the movement patterns of traditional cultures. 

 

Posted via web from Evolutionary Athletics's posterous

Untitled

 

Let me preface by saying this is all conceptualizing based on the best information I can find. None of this is experimental, verified, or based on long term observational studies. It's not science, it's just an attempt to understand fitness logically based on information pulled from scientific sources. 

Evolutionary science defines fitness as success in propagating your genetic material. This definition does not intially seem to be related to our concept of physical fitness, or what is sometimes defined as physiological fitness, but in truth they are closely connected. Before an animal can reproduce it has to survive. Everything we see as fitness or athletiscm can be seen as directly relating to the ability to survive: strength, speed, power, agility, accuracy, balance, flexibility, endurance, and stamina. Every one of these elements can be crucial to survival. Fitness is the extent of the development of those physical qualities which improve survival. Fitness is survivability.

While this may seem less meaningfull in the modern world were survival to reproductive age and beyond is virtually assured, these same qualities that allowed us to survive help us survive longer and healthier now, the strong muscles and dense bones that helped us hunt down prey or fight of predators in the past can help us survive car crashes today or in old age it can be the difference between a fall having fatal complications and being a mere inconvience. 

If you define fitness this way, it becomes clear that development of only one aspect of fitness is not sufficient. Being very very strong but unable to walk up two flight of stairs without stopping for breath would not have kept you alive in our evolutionary past, just as being able to run for miles and miles but being unable to lift heavy objects, jump powerfully or fight would not be sufficient. I believe that a balanced physical development not only makes survival in the unlikely event of a life or death situation more possible, but it also improves quality of life throughout life.

There are three broad categories you can divide survival-relevant movement patterns into: locomotion, manipulation and combat. Locomotion is any movement pattern that moves the individual's body through space. Manipulation is any movement pattern involving moving an external body through space. Combat is defined as movement patterns devoted to dealing with or resisting an external force.

I view this as a sort of pyramid of fitness:

                                                                                                                     

Each Level builds upon the one before it. An athlete must have the proper mobility, coordination and strength to do an air squat before they will be able to squat with a object balanced on his shoulder, and he should be strong lifting inanimate objects before he tries to lift a resisting force on his shoulder and toss it off. Each level in this pyramid represents increased motor complexity.

Looking at it as a pyramid also reflects a pattern of regularity of occurence as well. While demands across these activities have varied over time, it seems safe to say that virtually always we have moved ourselves more often than outside inanimate objects, and inanimate objects more often than resisting opponents. Even soldiers in war spend far more time marching and lugging gear than actually fighting. 

Finally, each level represents increasingly potential dangerous challenges. A push-up is safer than a bench press is safer than trying to push a opponent off of you who is trying to rain punches on your face. 

An evolutionarily-fit athlete must have development across all of these levels.

It is clear that sports fall into these patterns as well. The most popular sports tend to demonstrate some level of capacity across all three realms of fitness. To excel at football, basketball, or soccer, one must be able to run and jump, manipulate an object effectively, deal with contact from other athletes, predict patterns and employ strategy. In short, sport appears to be sanitized rituals of group combat. 

The basic idea here is that fitness can be defined as those physical capacities related to survival, and that balanced development of these capacities must be based on understanding the relationship between locomotive, manipulative and combative capacities. 

In the next installment I will look into some examples of how this pattern is congruent with what we see in child play behavior and in the movement patterns of traditional cultures. 

Posted via web from Evolutionary Athletics's posterous

Transitioning

I am going to be writing a allot more on my evolutionary athletics blog again I since i have this nice autopost function I will send them over here for awhile but I encourage everyone to subscribe to me over there.

Why Evolutionary Athletics

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." -Theodiosis Dobzhansky

 

The thesis behind this blog and my approach to physical training and lifestyle is based on this quote. The human body is a biological phenomenon we can not hope to understand how to best optimize its function for health or performance without approaching it from an evolutionary perspective. We need to understand the context from which we have arisen.

This is my second blog; my previous blog was given the name Natural Athletics. You can find it here. There is a reason for the name change. As my thinking has evolved it has become clear to me that evolution is poorly understood by many in the fitness field and that far too many in the fields of health and fitness fall into naturalistic fallacies when trying to understand the human body's function.  

According to Crossfit, squatting is natural but leg pressing is not. According to Methode Naturelle, it is natural to be nearly nude and it is not natural to wear clothes. According to MovNat, practicing movement is natural and conditioning training is not. According to the Paleo Diet it is natural for humans to eat meat, it is unnatural for us to eat grains. According to vegetarians it is not natural to eat meat. According to bodyweight culturists it's not natural to train using weights, etc., etc. 

Each of these are based on assumptions of an inherent human nature that is unchanged and unchangeable from some primordial beginning. Instead of basing believes on Genesis, Paleo proponents for example see 100,000-10,000 years ago as our time of being natural and everything that deviates from that as unnatural.

All of this is logically very weak and easily falls into dogmatism. If humans are an evolved phenomenon and a product of nature then would not everything we do be an expression of nature? How and where do we define the line between natural and unnatural? Furthermore, there is an assumption that what is natural is good and what is unnatural is bad, at least in whatever domain we are talking about. Of those who advocate for a natural diet, few are advocating for abandoning their central heating or plumbing, which are certainly no more natural then Hot Pockets. "Natural" is an ill-defined concept that does nothing to further our understanding. Peach pits filled with arsenic are perfectly natural and they are not good or bad in and off themselves. What we can say though is that humans do not have an evolved capacity to handle the levels of arsenic present in them and that using them as food sources is a dangerous and stupid idea.

Therefore, by basing our hypotheses about health and fitness on evolution, rather than what's "natural," we are able to use and apply a logical and extremely powerful theoretical framework to our understanding of how best to optimize human function.

This blog is not about claiming to have an answer; a system perfectly derived from understanding human evolution and sports science for how to optimize physical function for all individuals in all athletics pursuits. Far from it. What I want to achieve here is to help move the dialogue about fitness forward; to be putting forward my thoughts on training and trying to ground them in sound evolutionary thinking.

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to produce articles outlining my core ideas and how I have come to them.

1. Defining Fitness Evolutionarily

2. Fundamentals of Movement

3. A Critique of Crossfit, Methode Naturelle and MovNat

4. Evolutionary Thoughts on Diet

Posted via web from Evolutionary Athletics's posterous

12/29/09

Last workout of the year, Deload week on 5/3/1 still working hard on my gymnastics and pull ups.

Weighted pull ups +5x3, +10x3, 15x3, 25x3, 30x3, 20x3, 15x3, 10x3

Squats, 45x10, 135x5, 155x4, 170x5, 205x5

L-hold-Tuck planche 3second hold x 3 3x press shoudler stand

First set had to break up the shoulder stands second set I as short on shoulderstands, 3 sets was the best got the second on video.

Gymnastics Sequence 

205x5 squats

Lost the footage of the pull ups. 

Felt great after this work out very fresh liking the ramp up and down on the pull ups feel like I need more volume but again want to keep the movement quality real high. 

Posted via web from Rafe's Training Log

Moving My blog

I will be moving my blogging over to posterous.com it gives me chance to connect a blog for musings on evolutionary fitness, with a training log and a general log for everybody at parkour visions to update about classes. Check out my new blogs at

evolutionaryathletics.posterous.com

rafestraininglog.posterous.com

parkourvisions.posterous.com

Thanks.

Rafe