0:00 which parkour athlete doesn't want bigger jumps more healthy Landings or more beautiful tricks and of course being strong and flexible will help you with all of those but here's the problem most workouts and tutorials you'll find online are about building as much muscle as possible so you can look good naked and most functional training content is focused on healthy lifestyle not necessarily athletic performance in short there's not that much parkour specific knowledge out there this means you could spend hours and days researching what exercises to do and how to do them but in the end you still won't feel more confident that the time you're putting into working out is actually going to pay off in your parkour skills and of course you could ask a professional athlete like me but what works for me might not work for you
0:45 however I do know who to ask say hi to Alex Lawrence who is most known for defeating any opponent with a single punch and also his YouTube channel Cali move a calisthenics YouTube channel with 4 million subscribers but Alex actually comes from a parkour and tricking background fun fact Alex invented the bullet flip with a degree in sports science Alex brings a nuanced scientific approach to his channel and I thought he would be the perfect person to give us a beginner's guide to strength training for parkour so get cozy for a conversation and afterwards you will know a lot better what to do with your training so let's say I'm 14 year old Jason and I meet you and I'm like hey Alex I love parkour I've
1:32 been jumping around everywhere for a year now I really want to improve and I think I should probably do some strength training maybe some stretching or Mobility there's all this whole world in front of me that's so complicated a million different YouTube channels none really specifically for parkour where do I start um do some basic stuff like find yourself exercises for like your legs your calves your back your um front core your pushing strength and your pulling strength and do those exercises on a regular basis and then try to get better at them and especially try to have a combination of a training
2:18 um that leads you to the strength in endurance training and maximum strength training like if you never did something before you should start with strength and endurance training to like get your body used to everything and then switch over to maximum training like max strength training um because this really gives you the ability to absorb the high impact that you can have in parkour if you just like you said did like one year of Parkour training and so on it's probably okay to get right into the maximum strength training so that you can improve your strength and with that get safer and better at popcorn before you worry too
3:04 much about Fitness am I fit enough am I not fit enough of course it makes sense to think about what are my expectations do I want to do high impact parkour do I really want to learn to do big jumps and big flips or do I just want to be able to enjoy playing around playing with my body exploring my environment in a little bit of a fun way for those two people do you think both of them should just go and do it first of course you need some preparation but um most people that never did something before and want to start parkour they should just go out and do simple stuff maybe go to a boardwalk and jump from from The Edge and do some small things like looking for some stones that are lying in a park or
3:50 something like this and try to go onto them or dropping off of them if they are not too big or of course I mean of course you you always need some kind of requirement but I think it's hard to say you need to be able to do like 10 push-ups or five pull-ups or a plank for one minute or something like this you need some core tension some some coordination some strength in your legs in your arms for pushing and pulling and it's really hard to say how many of the specific exercise you should be able to do so really if I'm able to walk down the street I can start balancing on the crap and then I can improve my coordination and of course at some point once I know I enjoy
4:37 it I'm getting more ambitious then it makes sense to start yeah thinking about strength training and physical education what do you think about someone who says opaque is going to be my strength training so as I say I'm going to do strength training I'm just going to get better at Parkour By Doing lots of jumps and repeating my tricks over and over again is that a smart strategy that you would recommend or it's definitely a way of improving your strength but I think it would be um better and maybe also faster if you do specific strength training next to your regular training so if you only jump you always have a high impact if you don't prepare for it it might
5:22 happen that your joints wear out much quicker um it might also be that you injure yourself because you're not prepared for it so in my opinion it definitely makes sense to make some strengths training if you want to go a little bit further and maybe do some bigger jumps it also depends a little bit on which kind of person you are some people they really need like a like a a way that they can follow they need maybe 10 exercises and they want to do all the time those exercises and get better at them and want to improve and go to the next goal and then the next goal and so on other people need some variation and they get
6:08 bored very quickly if they do the same over and over again so it's hard to say um one solution that fits for everyone okay so so tell me if this is correct we have the different types of strength training right you have the endurance strength training which is basically anything where you do more than 15 repetitions yeah right and that's when I'm doing that I'm not building any more max strength max strength is what I use when I'm using all my power same parkour when I'm taking a big drop and I couldn't take another drop like that right away because I used all my strength in that moment and in a gym it would be like a max squat with as much weight as I could push and then there's also that range in between hypertrophy you said if you're training it is that relevant for parkour
6:56 um let me give you a short overview like you have different numbers of repetitions that you can do and we are always talking about um this number that you can do as your repetition maximum um like if you can do 20 reps and you stop at 10 it's not that you build a lot of muscle um if you can do 10 and you stop at 10 it's more that you train for hypertrophy hypertrophy means that you build muscles that your muscles grow six to about 14 reps is the goal for uh hypertrophy training and from 15 up to like 25 or 30 reps would be strength endurance training and if you do like six or seven reps you still
7:43 have some kind of maximum strength but you also have some hyper hypertrophy training if you do four reps you also have a little bit of hypertrophy adaptation but the main goal is max strength and so on it's also possible like if you do 30 reps and you go really all out and you you push it to the max that you have some hypertrophy stimulus it's only like that you have an orientation for the numbers okay so that's a basic understanding between the three different types of strength hypertrophy is the least relevant to parkour because you build a lot of muscle mass right which is bad for us because um because it makes you heavy I mean with muscle mass you get stronger
8:31 of course but you also get heavier when you train in the in the maximum strength region it's more like you improve the neuronal connection and the neural functioning of of the muscle so that they can produce more strength but you don't really grow those muscles that much okay so what I'm doing is I'm not just grow like one way to make the muscle stronger is to grow it right and every sort of exercise I'm going to do there's probably going to be a little bit of that yeah but another way to perform better to develop more strength is not to actually get a bigger muscle is just to make it possible for your brain to access the strength you already have so you get better at recruiting that muscle but also the coordination of how your muscles work together and the timing and
9:18 the feeling of the movement and that's something I can train by one doing those endurance reps because I can do them very safely I'm doing a lot of repetitions and my body is just getting used to that movement it's getting better at the movement by doing it a lot of times right but then you don't train that intramuscular coordination I only get that with Max yes okay so I have to do both I have to do the max so my brain can really get all the juice out of the muscle right and it's it's very good to start with strength endurance training because um it has less resistance it's easier because like you can do more repetitions it has to be easier and um this makes it
10:03 easier to do the movement correctly and not cheat in the movement and it's much safer in the beginning and when you do that over and over again you start learning how to correctly execute the exercise and perform it safely you you improve your stability and the joints and so on and once you improve that you can go over to the max strength training and then be much safer with that talking about that what are your thoughts about weight training versus body weight training for someone who's a beginner what are the pros and cons of each I think body weight training is much easier accessible for everyone because you can do a lot of exercises at home
10:49 weight training always needs some kind of Weights not everyone wants to go into a gym get a membership and so on or get some weights for them at home so this is is one big plus for the body weight exercises but it has some limitations [Music] concerning the the like the intensity especially for the legs if you ask anyone on the street how many reps they can do of a regular Squad I think there will be no one that says I can do less than 10. like you use your legs all the time you walk every day and like everyone has a
11:35 basic strength and is able to do like at least I think 30 reps and so it's very hard with a with regular squats to get into that zone where you train for maximum strength because as I said earlier you have to have five rep max like if you do five reps you won't be able to do another rep no matter how hard you try it so you need a lot of resistance to be able to reach that point and of course you can do a single leg squats which are called pistols but there you have other things that are very hard to do like Mobility is an
12:21 issue for many people they don't come get down all the way or maybe balance is an issue um so that's one one thing that is um like where where body weight training is limited um if you have weights you can do your regular squat of course you also like you said need to learn the technique correctly but you can put weight on it and you can um over stress the muscle which is kind of necessary to build up strength okay so recap if I if I'm trying to like sum it up a little bit if I'm starting at parkour it's probably fine for me to just go out and move around see if I enjoy it level up my coordination unless I have super highly ambitious goals
13:07 right out of the gate but of course at some point I will have a goal that I would like to reach that might require me to have more strength say I'm able to run up the wall but I can't pull myself up the wall then it would make sense to figure out how can I learn a muscle up what exercises do I need and on the other hand there might be some people who don't care about the muscle up at all who just want to learn how to jump further and then in both cases the training that you would recommend would be different right you have someone who I just want to learn how to muscle up as you just said that's a pulling exercise and a bit of a pushing exercise and that's something that you could train fairly easily easily with body weight training because you have to lift your whole body so it's likely that there are a lot of exercises that would be in your
13:53 max rep range for you to do having somebody who wants to learn to get better at taking big drops or taking big jumps he would never be able to really improve that skill just doing squats even of course unless he's jumping into squats but he's making his life very very complicated when he could just get a gym membership and really improve his skills in a much more efficient way using weights right so that would be the first thing would be to figure out okay what are what are the skills I want yeah right and again when I do I want to take one big drop or do I want to do 50 ply biometric Precision jumps in a row right but I wouldn't wait until I find out what I want to do because one um goal of
14:38 Parkour is also do to be prepared for any situation that comes so it would really make sense to have a few basic exercises um that you start training right from the beginning um if you start and you don't want to learn the muscle up or the wall climb right away then it's still good to do some pull-ups or some rows or something like this um in case you maybe have have you later want to start training that then you already had half a year of time training the pull-ups and building up some strength and then it's much easier for you to get into that technique it's always good to have some some basic strength all the time and train for it if you
15:25 could give me I know I'm putting you on a spot here because you always says it depends what you want to do and that's how you choose your exercises but if there was a base plan you had to do for anybody who starts parkour and you will only allowed to say give them five to ten exercises what body weight exercises would you give them I would choose um at least two exercises for the legs like one that targets your upper legs like maybe squats or um lunges or begin split squats or something like this something for the calves like calf raises as in my opinion a very good exercise for that I would train like the core the front and back core so that you have enough stability
16:10 and tension in your in your midsection I would include something for pushing like a push-up maybe even a pike push-up where you are like in a more opened angle in your shoulder um and some pulling like pull-ups are a great rows are good um skin the cat is a great exercise and if you know which which kind of muscle groups you want to train then you can take a look at which which variation of the exercise you need to meet the requirement of your repetition goal awesome I think that's a good starting point because those are great exercises that you can use to just get a feeling for strength and it looks like how you feel about it and of course
16:56 the deeper you go into it the more you're going to learn but also the more you're going to learn and understand your goals yeah and now we've sort of covered the strength part of course athletic performance also depends a lot on flexibility and mobility and that's also something that you cover a lot in your content how do I understand the difference between flexibility and Mobility and the basic difference could be described as passive versus active stretching or flexibility like um if you take a position and stay passive in that position or maybe have an external force that puts you in this position it's a stretching and it has the downside that you don't really control the the position and the the
17:41 joints um in Mobility training you have active training that means that you try to use your own strength and your own muscles to get into a specific position it means that you won't have the range of motion like in a passive stretch of course um but it has the the advantage that you train your stability and with that the range of motion you can actively actively take and this is something that you would need for parkour because I think you already had it that you were like um over stretch your ankle somehow and know how it feels and that's not very nice this mainly happens because you're not able to stabilize it in this range of motion like if you only stretch it passively you can you can reach that
18:28 position but you cannot stabilize it in that because it's not active it's passive and if you try to go there actively you have to um use all the muscles around it to get into that position and that makes the brain work much more and and coordinate much more all the muscles how they work together and this gives you the stability okay so if I'm just sitting in a split for two minutes I'm stretching I'm getting more flexible but that doesn't mean I'll be able to use this new flexibility I have in my movement safely because even though my body can get in that position using external Force someone lifts up my leg or it's just gravity pulling me against the ground I have this extra Force helping me but I
19:13 really don't have control of my body and safely in that range of motion another downside is that um you lower the tension of the muscles and this is not something you want to have before you train the muscles because lower tension means that you can have less output um it is good if you want to relax a muscle then it's okay to passively stretch it and hold it for a long time then you really get the tension out and then can relax it but um right in front of a training but also after training you want to have um like like a good coordination and not this lower tension and this is something you can reach with Mobility training with active stretching
20:01 a good um comparison would be the stretching that you said like a split um a split of passive and if you stand up on one leg and raise the other leg into the split like position yeah right like a high kick um that would be an active version of that same uh possession or same exercise yeah I can get my leg pretty high if I like rest it on top of a wall yeah but I have to lift it up and hold it back right that's it big difference it's a big difference it's always a big difference because active range of motion is always smaller than passive range of motion um but this is is the way that you really train the muscles and really also train your brain to um
20:46 to let the body do the uh the movement so now if I have the choice I can either do 30 minutes of stretching after my parkour training or I can do 30 minutes of Mobility which one will improve my performance more I would guess it's Mobility yeah okay pester stretching has its place like like I said if you want to release tension and relax stretching is okay if you have like a like a competition in a specific sport it can be okay to passively stretch some muscles but mobilize other joints like for example if you do gymnastics it might be okay to passively stretch your hamstrings if you have to do like a a pike set or something like this or like
21:33 a front flip with a with a pike someone who's watching this now and is gonna try to include some Mobility training into their parkour training would there be anything to tell them to look out for when it comes to Mobility like with strength training obviously there's a lot of different channels out there who recommend hypertrophy training to grow your muscles which we established is not the best for parkour is there something like that with Mobility where this is a Time Mobility training you don't want or can I just um most people will always profit from Mobility training because most people never did it so um if you start you yeah will be better or will improve um there are also different possibilities
22:19 how you can mix it with your strength training you can do it before your strength training you can do it right after it you can do it on a different time time of the day like if you do Mobility training in the morning and you do your regular strength training in the in the afternoon or in the evening that's fine you can also do like in the afternoon your strength training and in the evening your Mobility training and you can do it on a different day it's there are many possibilities and um as long as you do it on a regular basis um you will be able to see some improvements I just want to take a quick break to thank our sponsor myself if you are into this kind of content there's a big chance you would enjoy my newsletter the levels letter which is a newsletter
23:05 for movement gourmets every Friday I share five tips that will help you along your training your movement Journey this could be hacks this could be different tips and tricks how to improve your moves something inspiring or a piece of gear that I've enjoyed lately so if you're into that please click the link in the description and back to the podcast thank you I think now we have a good idea of what I could look into when I want to start parkour I just want to build some Base fitness or I'm hitting a certain Block in my training and I just want to up my skills we know what we can look at in which direction we can go and what we can research online and I think a lot of people run into the problem that I've run in before that I have to get way too deep in the rabbit hole I have a huge list of all the exercises I could do and and I realize now I'm doing
23:50 all the strength training I'm supposed to do I have no time to do parkour anymore so how would you balance the two or how would you go about I guess fitting it into your schedule what are some things to look out for um first of all you have to take a look at which kind of strength training you do um for example I would never do like a parkour session of like one hour or so and afterwards to a maximum strength training because for max strength training you need to be fresh in your body and in your mind um maximum strength training also requires very long rests like we talk about at least three minutes of rest um so that you don't or are not exhausted bodily and mentally
24:39 so that you can really focus on um putting out all this the power and strength that you can so a typical max strength training would look like you do one set of maybe 5 RM but you stop at four reps like you would be able to do five but you stop at four so that you don't go all out this makes it easier to regenerate in the in the rest that follows and that your level that you can reach in the next set is higher and this gives you a higher output overall because max strength training is more of a coordinative training like it's not about breaking down the the body and
25:26 man like feel that you have to crawl out of the gym but you uh you need to be like fresh in your mind like I said already yeah because I've definitely done that where I do a popular session and I'm like that was great oh I should do some strength training too and then I get too excited and I really push myself but in the end I don't get any good strength training in because my body is not my mind is not ready to really perform anymore and also I'm sore for like three days afterwards because I did way too much which means I'm missing out on all the training I could have done in those three days and this is um like a very hard thing especially for beginners because when you train for max strength and you
26:11 don't feel exhausted necessarily and many people think oh I didn't train enough but it is enough because you train coordinatively so um don't try to feel that you trained but um be aware that you did what you planned like if you said Okay I want to do like five sets for pull-ups five sets for maybe handstand push-ups or pipe push-ups or whatever um and five sets for a leg exercise in that range in that repetition range um and you did that then that's it's okay you you might feel a little exhausted but most of the times you you don't and yeah
26:58 it's sometimes hard for people to accept that I needed to hear that because I'm definitely yeah oh I could do this still I could hear that yeah it's totally different if you train full strength endurance um is something where you really need to go all the way to failure and then if you're not able to do it again try one more and then try one more like try to break down your body do short rests go until failure and um in in this kind of training you are more likely to feel this training and have this situation where you crawl out of the gym of course not all the time but
27:46 [Music] um like regularly and this kind of training is also possible after a parkour session like if you train for like one and a half hours or two hours you can still do some some strength endurance training um for the max strength training I would recommend that you do it on a separate day where you only focus on the max strength training on a clean execution on a very high power output and um what is especially important you should not be sore when you do this training like you're going into it going into it like if you trained the day before
28:32 um and you did new things and you feel you are sore somewhere then don't do a max strength training but you did say it's okay to have some light impact coordinative training so I could do a max strength pull training or even a leg workout and then I want to do some light vaults or maybe some balancing or some handstands absolutely that's absolutely fine and like if you if you have a a line that shows your um your fatigue over time um everything where you need coordination and control needs to be at the beginning and everything where you or let's say you don't need it um but it's not that important like for exercises that are
29:19 pretty easy because you can do like 20 reps or so it's not that important to have that mental focus that much and then it's okay to be a little more exhausted before you do that one last thing that didn't come up so far is the stereotypical going for a run going for a jog or doing some cardio on a bike or some swimming for cardio some rope skipping I heard when I went to the The Athlete Performance Center by Red Bull they said oh we think it's a good idea for you to do some cardio it's very light cardio just to get your base Fitness up because I never felt in most of my parkour training that I needed more cardio because most of the time I'm just doing two or three jumps in a row cardio is not really an issue but then they told me you could Raise Your Base fitness and you can do that by
30:06 doing some very low intensity cardio is that something that you think is a good idea as well um it's absolutely not wrong I would say um I would say it depends on your schedule if you have the time for it it's totally okay to do it and I think you can profit from it yes um but if you have a tight schedule like if you have to work if you have to train if you have to fit in your strength training somehow it might um might be a little bit harder like I wouldn't prioritize it too much like too high so if I have the choice today I could go for a run or I could work on my Mobility or strength I would get more gains from focusing on those two yeah um your regenerative ability is something
30:53 that gets better if you do some light easy cardio training so um like if you if you had a max strength training and you feel a little sore the next day and you you don't feel like I can do some good Poco training today yeah just take your bike and go for a ride for like one hour pretty easy pretty smooth and that's fine that will help you to regenerate of course so um I I think it's it's um something that you can use as a placeholder if you cannot do something else that you plan to do and something came in between and you you're not able to do it anymore then go for a jog or for a ride or go swimming whatever you prefer right
31:38 because it could be hard to do a 20 minute parkour training it can be hard to do a 20 minute workout but you can totally go for a 15 minute run and shower and then be done after 20 minutes and if you have either the run or nothing else to do totally that would be awesome yeah like it always like I said in the beginning that it always depends like what's your goal what is your circumstance you're in and um what do you want like there are many options and and most of the things that you can do have some benefits but can also have some negative sides so you have to see um all the benefits worth it to put the time and effort in it or not I think this is a great point to wrap up this conversation thank you so much Alex
32:24 for sharing all your wisdom and knowledge with us I hope for you the viewer this gave you a nice little overview of the topic of strength training for beginners I know there's a lot to wrap your head around which is why it's so incredibly difficult I wish we could just give you a base training plan that everybody could do who does parkour but that's just not how simple it is at the end you will have to do a little bit of researching and uh thinking yourself bad news to find out what's the right thing for you but there's a lot of knowledge contained in this episode which will help you know what to look for and where to look and what to think about and I think a great place to start with that is by simply heading over to the Cali move YouTube channel because their videos are labeled
33:09 in a way that makes it really easy for you to see what the effect what the result from that routine or from that exercise is going to be so you can just go over look at the video titles and see does is this something I want is this something I'm interested in and then you will get the right exercises to achieve that goal and I would also recommend you go click the link below to sign up to the levels letter which is my newsletter I send out every Friday which contains five tips for beginners intermediate Advanced and pro I forgot one five levels of tips for all stages of your movement and parkour Journey so I recommend you sign up for that newsletter and every week you get something that will help you inspire and
33:55 level up your training this could be gadgets this could be hacks this could be tips or inspiration sign up now check out Cali move and uh thank you for joining for my very first podcast episode trying to figure out my own style here it's gonna get better as we go along but I hope we're off to not a terrible start thank you for tuning in I'm glad to be back on the YouTubes and see you soon bye
