New-found confidence and new training

The first aspect I'd like to blog about today is helping someone learn parkour which is something I've never really done before. Earlier I decided to train some more parkour and called up Conner to come out and train with me. He is having some confidence issues with his parkour so I tried to help with his training. I showed him some things I done when I started, as he is coming back from a long break off parkour and feels like he is starting again. I told him that for vaults and things he should just forget about what 'type' of vault he was doing and just concentrate on passing the obstacle. Once he could pass it five times safely I explained that then he could focus on how he was approaching his vault and how he was landing, where his hands were going etc. This way he doesn't think "I'll lazy vault this" or "I'll speed vault that" but thinks "I have to pass this obstacle in this manner with this hand, moving from this side and land like this so that i can pass the next obstacle" etc.

While he was working on various things like that I was working on basic things but from my non-dominant side so that I was at a disadvantage. I was trying to do two vaults in close proximity so that I was passing one wall at a disadvantage and examining where I was landing so that I could pass the next wall in the most efficient manner. This was very useful and something I plan to do more often. Especially since you can't always choose where you approach things from and if you need to move fast, you also need to be able to take off from and land on both feet, same with your hands and arms.

Secondly, I've been very surprised to find out that I have much more confidence than I did when I was training parkour more often a few years ago. When I started training again a few weeks ago my confidence was shot and I had to start very small and work my way up but this didn't last long and now I have more confidence in what I can do. I also had more ideas on how to improve myself in areas in which I am not as good and feel better trying things I previously wouldn't have. As an example of this, I filmed a few bits of footage for myself to examine where I was going right and wrong. I'll stick them up below. These are both things I have never done before and I've tried different ways of approaching and departing from each.

This first one is a decent first attempt:



and this is me trying different things, different landings and movements, ending in a bail. :(



I've never done this particular obstacle before, as I explain in my video I was playing a game where the pavement was water or something like that and I had to take off from the kerb and land on the wall:



This is the final video and I was doing the same thing as before but also trying to clear the imaginary water hazard both ways - from and to the kerb.



Overall, I had a lot of fun both playing about with inaginary hazards and also trying new things, as well as experimenting with new training methods. Conner has a little bit less hestiation and now has new methods for training too which helped both of us alot.

I apologise for the poor video quality but it is raw footage from my phone. I'm going to make a 2 min video of things I'm training so that I can make another one in a few months to check on my progress.

Thanks for reading,
Kieran