Colin Pistell Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 5:43PM We kicked off our new Parkour Office Hours Tuesday schedule last night by discussing unilateral leg exercises and progressions as well as dash vaults. Enjoy it, and tune in live next Tuesday evening at 7PM EDT!
Colin Pistell Monday, April 23, 2012 at 4:59PM I don't know about you, but I greatly enjoy all the wonderful collective nouns people have come up with for different types of animals. We have a gaggle of geese, a peep of chickens, a murder of crows, and, my favorite, a business of ferrets.
Right here we have a romp of announcements:
1) Parkour Office Hours! New time!
Wednesdays have become a rather busy day for us and consequently I've been struggling with the current PK Office Hours schedule. Then I remembered that I'm the boss around these parts and I can actually change the schedule... so I did! The new time is Tuesday at 7PM EDT. Tune in live and join the conversation!
2) New course sessions are up! You should register!
We've got the next round of our Parkour Fundamentals and regular Fundamentals courses on the calendar - Check 'em out! If you've been wanting to get involved with our training and community, this is a great way to get started. You can learn more about our Fundamentals courses here - we hope to see you out there!
3) No classes from 5/31 - 6/3.
Sean and I will be attending a MovNat certification that weekend and Eric will be out of town being a rock star. While our regular weekend meetup is cancelled, we're excited to be having the next Paleo Potluck on the evening of Saturday, June 2nd. We'd love to see you there!
Colin Pistell Friday, April 20, 2012 at 12:07PM Over the past week I've had several versions of the same conversation and it's got the ol' brain going. Actually, there have been two recurring conversations this week - one is the duality and harmony of training and the other is ticks and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The former will make for a far more pleasant read...
Most of us are familiar with the classic Taoist yin-yang symbol. It speaks to the balance between dark/light, male/female, life/death, etc. To be in harmony, one must have this balance.
This duality applies to our training as well. Bruce Lee speaks to this eloquently:
"Here is Natural Instinct and here is Control. You are to combine the two in harmony. If you have one to the extreme you will be very unscientific. If you have the other to the extreme you become, all of a sudden, a mechanical man."
Watch children playing. They don't need anyone to tell them what to do. They just do it. But, if we push a little at those skills, add in some focused practice time and some supplemental athletic development then we can get some truly impressive capabilities.
But go too far and we end up with isolation, segmentation, and compartmentalization. Fitness and health become all about hitting numbers - 30 minutes on the treadmill, 10 reps on the leg extension machine, X number of calories per day - and not at all about vital and raw experience. There's no building to something greater. No discovery. No purpose. Some people are fine with that. They want to put their 30 minutes in on the treadmill, do their leg extensions, and go home. I don't think they're "doing it wrong," but I do find it a little sad. Treating your body as nothing more than a meat car buys into a Cartesian worldview that is profoundly limiting.
You need both. You need sets, reps, and linear progressions and you also need experimentation, exploration, and play. But here's the trick - you can't simply do both seperately - that's not harmony. Each aspect needs to flow and feed into the other. Use the gains from your focused athletic training to push your explorations out to the next level and use your explorations to inform what to focus on with your serious work.
Probably the most common mistake I see with implementation is that people tend to compartmentalize arenas. They do their focused squat and deadlift work in the gym, then go outside and just mess around. Or, they do their 50 precision jumps outside, then go into a gym, put some weight on a bar and see what happens. You need to have focused goals in the gym... and sometimes you also need to try to Turkish Get-up weird things. You need to have fun and explore your environment... but sometimes you need to buckle down and spend an hour practicing that jump.
Above all else, be easy on yourself. You don't need to ace this idea right away. Go one step at a time, relax, and remember to enjoy the moment.
