Prabu guiding a student to climb a wall during a recent parkour session on harrington road in chennai.

Are My Parkour Movements Efficient?

People often get confused between “efficient” and “easy”. Most people don’t even give enough thought about what the difference is.

Practicing parkour does not mean just jumps and workouts and random things on a day to day basis. There has to be a fundamental truth to the whole practice if anyone wants to achieve any kind of progress in their parkour practice.

If you do at least 30 push ups everyday, then 30 push ups becomes easy. But does that mean you are doing it efficiently?

This restrictive question immediately gives rise to the thought about perspectives. From what perspective does one measure efficiency of movement in parkour. I was talking to a silambam practitioner the other day, and they revealed a very interesting fact about how silambam was practiced in earlier times. It was not just practiced by soldiers who would be using it in a battle field, but was practiced by people in every household. If there was a problem with bandits and thieves raiding a village, then one man from every household used to take a weapon to defend the village and their loved ones. This required them to practice a martial art everyday. Looking at the amount of work that a farmer does in the field and at the end of the day, practicing one of the most gruelling martial arts before going to sleep on a day to day basis… Now, that’s strength. Strength to do what is necessary.

Am just talking about this to give an idea of what the possibility of the human body is. These days a lot of emphasis is on repetitions, numbers, structured progression, benchmarks, programs etc. While these are maybe useful as a tool, the sad truth is that most people are caught up in doing repetitions as an ultimate target. That is not how your own parkour evolves.

Train hard everyday. But be mindful of what you train. Mindful does not mean “counting every repetition” or every jump or repeating every movement by counting. Keep your mind inside your body. Be aware of what you are doing. Not just mechanical movements. Do not train just as an escape. Of course, it happens at times after a tiring day that your training becomes mechanical. But keep pushing your boundaries mentally and physically. Mind within the body as you train. Then, the movements become efficient.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.