April Training Video

Small Change

I decided to have 1 week mesocycles because i prefer it this way. I think either short or long mesocycles are most effective and 2 weeks is in the middle, I think for long and effective mesocycles they should be atleast a month and short ones at most a week.

Training

Training has been going well recently, i have been inspired a lot by Blane's post on periodised training, http://www.teamtraceur.co.uk/goodies/blane_periodised.html , so i'm going to try this out but with much smaller mesocycles each lasting 2 weeks, so a macrocycle of 4 weeks consisting of 2 mesocycles, one focusing on conditioning and increasing strength whilst maintaining technical ability and the other focusing on progressing technical ability whilst maintaining strength, power etc. I will probably do this for at least 3 macrocycles then possibly change the size of the mesocycles and when i feel im ready to trust my body (know how it feels and what that means and my recovery time etc.) i'l listen to my body each day and do what i think is best for it and will give the best results to help with my progression.

I am at the moment focusing a lot on constant movement and hardly stopping moving while training, doing a lot of runs, never stalling and beying aware of whats around me and my foot and hand placement in movement to improve my stamina and instinctive ability. I believe my ability whilst training is probably A LOT higher than my ability if i was being chased atm and i want to change that so thats what im focusing on a lot atm, i might make a video soon just to note progression on my training with a lot of runs etc as i havent made a proper video since october.

One goal strength wise for me atm is a muscle up just from strength (using n swing momentum just power) and then after that planche en force. And i realy need to do the top dyno at the climbing wall ARRRGGGHHH!

Getting Organised

Right, it's time i got my ass organised, with conditioning, sleep, diet and school.

Conditioning: Over christmas holidays i slacked way too much when it came to conditioning and even when i was back at school i continued with not doing nearly as much conditioning as i should have done so this week i realy got back into it with a slightly new regime which i will post up later on. I should keep doing this weekly regime for a few years at least but making it harder every month or so by adding weight or more reps.

Sleep: I have decided to give myself an 11pm bed time so that i am not soo tired in the mornings anymore as i have been going to bed way to late recently and it doesnt help, and makes me late for school almost every day.

Diet: A healthy diet is a must, but it's another thing i'm not very good at maintaining. I sent an e-mail to Chris (blane) quite a while ago about food and what is a good diet for parkour and his reply helped me very much in knowing what i should and shouldn't eat.

Here is the main part of the absolute legends reply:

'I'll keep it as simple as possible so it's pretty straight forward to follow. What you want to do is take in plenty of protein, some carbs, and hardly any fat...

Basically, when it comes to a good diet for Parkour, it's all down to getting rid of the crap. If you are - then stop eating crisps, chocolate, white bread, cake, pies etc. This doesn't mean you can't ever have this, but it needs to play a small part of your diet.

Breakfast: Everyone says this but it really is the most important meal of the day. After sleeping, your body craves good food and if you exercise and train without breakfast, you will be forcing your body to BREAK DOWN muscle and literally eat it as a food source!!! Not good... so make sure you have food in your system before doing anything or all your hard muscle training will be wasted.

I recommend (and regularly have) orange juice, yoghurt, weetabix and a sliced banana with semi-skimmed milk. If you're still hungry then toast with peanut butter on it and tea. Eggs with your toast is good too but make sure they're not fried, go for poached or boiled.

Lunch: Pasta, chicken and vegetables on brown bread ( never ever EVER white :P ), fruits, dried fruit if you prefer, turkey sandwiches, salad.

Dinner: Plenty to choose from, try and make this different from your lunch time meal... Potatoes, rice, fish, chicken, turkey, vegetables, spaghetti, salads, eggs etc.

But although I've given advice for three different meals there, it's actually more beneficial for you if you have SIX meals per day. This doesn't mean overeat, this means cut all your usual portions in half and eat twice as often. This allows your body to digest the food easier as there is smaller amounts and since your never more than a few hours from more fuel, your body will always have energy.

So perhaps have breakfast at 7am, a snack at 10am, lunch at 12pm, another snack around 2-3pm and dinner at 5-6pm. Try not to eat heavily before going to bed as the body doesn't like digesting food when it's trying to shut down and rest.

Finally, if you REALLY crave chocolate and pizza and all that stuff then put aside one day per week, maybe Saturday or Sunday where you allow yourself to eat whatever you like. As long as you're sensible on the other 6 days then this won't be a problem. ;-)'

So i'm pretty much going to stick to that and have 6 meals per day at pretty much those times (7.30am, 10.30am, 12.45pm, 4pm and last meal between 6 and 9pm dependant on when im training!

Also i am meaning to get some whey protien soon to help with conditioning recovery and strength improvement which was also a GREAT tip from Chris. (apparently they taste soo good aswel :D)

So a massive thank you to Chris is in order for the extremely helpful tips.

School: Now I realy realy need to organise myself for school because i hardly ever get my homework and coursework done on time, i'm very often late and sometimes hardly put any effort into my work so i realy need to sort this out because i think my education and the job i have when im older will have a large affect on my parkour. What i want when im older is a fairly well paying job so i can live healthily and happily but with as little hours as possible so i can train and condition almost whenever i feel like, but to get this i will need a broad education and good gcse's and a levels ( i don't plan on going to university at the moment but i could change my mind) so that i have a wide variety of jobs to choose from so i can reach my goal and keep on training and conditioning whenever I want, and just keep progressing in parkour. So to do this i must get organised and get all my coursework and stuff done on time and be on time and sort out my education. :D

Climbing!

Over the christmas holidays i started going climbing (indoor) much more often and i hope to keep this up for it helps with strength and strength endurance and can help a lot with parkour it's also realy fun and there are soo many roots and missions that i aim to complete eventualy and then make or find new ones to try. The only downfall is that its very expensive and i aim to get some climbing shoes asap but they are quite expensive aswe, but i might stop going to huntington gym or at least not go very often to save the money because i realy think climbing is much more beneficial to parkour. One of my goals atm at climbing is to get is 3 dyno's up a section of the wall ive done the first two (second one only one got one arm to it) but havent goten the 3rd yet but hope to get it done soon :D

AWESOME WEEKEND!

Just had such a sik and inspiing weekend in reigate. It was raining pretty much all weekend but we still managed to train for most of it and found some realy awkward but cool movements, also on saturday a lot of traceurs from the uk had a meeting and then went to cree's hut for a photoshoot so me, teg and joe went pretty much when it finished to see people because we wanted to know what they were doing for the rest of the weekend and there were sooooo many people in there ( siayans, blane, danny, and soo many other traceurs), it was ridiculous lol, i was surprised they could train it was soo packed, it was realy cool to see and meet people there and good training there with them althoug we didn't stay fpor too long. Then on sunday we just had a realy good day training in the rain and in a car park n stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cy2aw_JRzY

I also now have a pair of Feiyue's and they are such good shoes for parkour, they have amazing grip and they make you focus soo hard on your landings for everything because if you don't land on the balls of your feet it can hurt your feet and they help you cut out a lot of impacet and you absorb landings better because you focus on douing things softly and on the balls of your feet.

Ladder Pistols

After the success of ladder pushups we will now be playing ladder pistols on thursday nights (only me, teg n joe so far) but hopefuly moer are interested, it works the same as with pushups but we will go up in 1's so for 1 you do 1 pistol on each leg and for 2, 2 on each leg and so on.

For the last game of every month i will record what i got up to:

Nov= 11 Dec= 16 (going up in 2's)

Ladder Pushups

Every tuesday night me and a few others (chris, bobby, jin and teige) play a game of ladder pushups (were thinking of doing ladder pistols also sometime). Basicaly in ladder pushups we go up in 2's and how it works is the first person does 2, then the next and so on, until everyone has done 2, then the first person does 4, and then the next and so on until everyone has done 4, then do same with 6 and keep going up until everyone is out ( your out if you don't complete the number pressups you are at). I just wanna do loads of conditioning atm to be strong and to build my suit of armour (read blanes article on teamtraceur.com) which will help with my parkour.

For the last game of each month i will record what i got up to:

Nov= 28 Dec= 30