Recently, I have been giving my training a lot of difficult introspection. I have been wondering what use all this technical training is when the progression has slowed so much that I am not sure if the techniques need so much more refinement any more. I could easily continue training in this way and make progress, but it would surely be slow. In fact, I believe that it is the strength that will be gained over time from technical drilling that would be the majority of the progress made. For sure, that technical drilling would further instill muscle-memory and ensure less failure, which is definitely important, but I am beginning to think that strict technical drilling is a little more useless at this stage in the game than many people consider.
However, it has also crossed my mind that it is merely the focus on techniques that needs to done away with, not just the drilling. While I have lately been focusing much more on conditioning than I ever have before, some new and creative ideas have sprung forth in my mind. Many of these ideas have come as a result of watching videos and realizing that some movements that completely awe me are only so seemingly incredible because I have not trained the capacities to perform in such a way. It was, ultimately, the limit of the technical drilling I had been taking part of; not the drilling itself, but the manner of drilling.
When I return home in two weeks, I will shoot a video demonstrating my revelations. This is, in part, to analyze these new methods and see if they are, indeed, useful, or if I am just wasting my time and energy, but I honestly believe that it is training these methods that will lead to the progress that I want in Parkour. This has nothing to do with increasing entrance or exit distance. This has nothing to do with ensuring that I can vault something six inches higher than I could before. Quite in fact, this has all to do with the control of my body and the ability to effortlessly move through any given environment. This has all to do with learning the body.
One of the ideas that has seeded into my mind has been from a short clip of a video in which a traceur exited a roll into a stand, already in a split-foot position, threw his arms back and launched into a kong immediately. He did not take so much as a step coming out of the roll. I realized immediately that this was an ability I lack, and so I intend to train all of my vaults, wall-runs, etc. coming out of a roll, trying to minimize the necessary steps coming out, and understanding how to exit the roll and set up for a coming technique at the same time. I will do this with a straight-on approach, a left approach, and a right approach, and see how effective it all is... I will see if it cannot improve me in some way. Another idea came from a post on PKNA, which caused me to understand that while I had always been strict about diagonal approaches in my vaulting drills, I never even considered a diagonal approach on a wall-run. The very thought of it seems extremely difficult, and so I will drill this technique to the best of my ability, figuring out whether the inside or outside leg is best to kick off of. Many other ideas in my mind, and we shall see where this all leads.
Happy training.
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Good to see you taking up blogging Andy, I here what your saying as far as Drilling, my sig on washington parkour for a long time was fundamental training preceeds technical training, that is training that challenges the physical capacity is more important then training that refines technique. So rather then doing 50 SDC focusing on perfect technique make a course that is challenging and do intervals through it jogging to rest in between. Its amazing to me how much I can improve in something while practicing it very little if my overall capacity is improving.
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