Which Parkour athlete doesn't want bigger jumps, more healthy landings or more beautiful tricks?

Of course, being strong and flexible will help you with all of that. Here's the problem. Learning how to improve your fitness for Parkour is not a straightforward path.

Most fitness content is targeted towards bodybuilding or simply health benefits. In short, there's not that much Parkour specific advice out there. 

So I asked Alex from CaliMove, a Youtube channel about bodyweight fitness with 4 million subscribers, to give us advice for beginners.

Alex is uniquely qualified, because he has a history in Parkour and a degree in sports science.

Watch the video above for the full conversation or keep reading for a summary of key lessons and handpicked videos from Alex's library.

PART 1 - STRENGTH

1. How fit should I be, before starting Parkour?

It's hard to give an exact number of repetitions or exercises you should be able to do before you start Parkour. Of course, you should have a bit of strength in your legs, core tension, basic coordination and upper body strength for pushing and pulling.

For most people, it's fine to just go out and start doing Parkour.

Find some low curbs or stones in a park. Practice your balance and start with low impact movement.

If you want to get into high impact moves right away, you should be more trained.

2. Let's imagine I am somebody who enjoys doing Parkour and I want to do some exercise to improve my performance, but never did any strength training before. Where should I start?

Start with some basic exercises, do them on a regular basis and try to get better at them. To get going find yourself some exercises for your:
- legs & calves
- back
- front core
- upper body pulling & pushing strength

Work towards a combination of strength endurance and maximum strength training.

Strength Endurance means you are doing 20 repetitions of the exercise or more until muscle failure (you can't do another repetition, even if you want to).

Maximum strength means you reach muscle failure at around 4-5 repetitions. This type of training will help your intra-muscular coordination. In practice this means your muscle can output more strength without an increase in size, because it learns to work more efficiently.

The repetition zone in between max strength and strength endurance is not ideal for Parkour, because it causes Hypertrophy. This means you will grow a lot of muscle, which will make you heavier.

Strength Endurance and Maximum Strength will make you strong while keeping you as light as possible and prepare you for the high impacts you can experience in Parkour.

Note: If you're doing a new exercise, it's best to start with endurance training. That way you can get used to the new movement, before you add some max strength training to the mix. 

3. What do you think of the idea to simply get better at Parkour by doing Parkour, instead of any strength training?

It's definitely a way of improving your strength, but I think it would be better and maybe also faster, if you do specific strength training next to your regular Parkour training.

If you're always jumping you always have a high impact. Without any preparation your might wear your joints out quicker and risk injury.

It also depends a little bit on what kind of personality you are. Some people need structure and need to know exactly what to do in each session. Others enjoy variation and get bored easily. That's why it's hard to find a one size fits all solution.

4. What's better for Parkour, weight training or body weight training?

Bodyweight Pro:
- you can do exercises at home and don't need a gym membership or buy weights

Bodyweight Con:
- it's harder to do maximum strength training. Especially when it comes to the legs. Here are some examples of how you can build leg strength without weights, but they do require more flexibility and mobility than weighted exercises.

In practice this means: If you are doing low-impact Parkour or have a style that is focused more on upper body strength, you will probably do great with just bodyweight exercises. But, if you want to do bigger jumps or higher drops it's a good idea to look into leg exercises using additional weights.

5. Should I find my style of movement or have specific Parkour goals before I start strength training.

I would recommend to start basic strength training from the beginning,

because one of the goals of Parkour is also to be prepared.

Even if you don't care about learning a Muscle Up on the bar just yet, it makes sense to include some pulling exercises into your training. That way you already have base strength once you reach that movement in your technical Parkour practice. It will make learning new skills a lot easier.

6. In that case, what would be a good set of basic exercises somebody could do, even if they don't have specific moves they are working towards?

- Squats, Bulgarian Split Squats or Lunges are great for the upper part of the leg.
- Calf Raises are a good choice for the lower part of the leg
- Front and Back Core for stability and tension
- Pushups or even Pike Pushups for pushing strength
- Pullups, rows and skin the cat for pulling strength

Then you can vary each exercise to hit your target repetition goal. For example doing one leg Calf Raises, if you can't hit the max rep range doing two leg calf raises.

PART 2 - FLEXIBILITY AND MOBILITY

7. Now that we covered strength I want to talk about flexibility and mobility for a moment. How do I understand the difference?

Flexibilty means you are in stretching passively. Meaning you are holding a static position and are being pushed down by somebody or something. If gravity is pulling you into a stretch that's also passive stretching. Passive stretching has the downside that you don't really control the position and the joints. You should avoid passively stretching before training, because it lowers the tension in your muscles, meaning they will have a harder time generating power.

Mobility exercise means you are being active.

You are using your strength to put your body into a position or move it through a range of motion. This means you want be able to go as far into a position as you would in passive stretch, but

it trains your stability in that position which is of great benefit for Parkour..

Mobility for example is a great exercise to prevent the classic Ankle Thing. An over extension of the ankle on a bad landing. The Ankle Thing mainly happens, because you are not able to stabilize your ankle in this extended position.

Passive stretching will help you get into that range of motion, but not increase your stability and strength in that position. That's why, generally speaking, Mobility training is more useful for Parkour.

8. So is there no reason for passive stretching?
Passive stretching has it's place. You can use it to release tension and relax a muscle. In specific cases you could stretch specific muscles and mobilize others. The reason for this would be to increase range of motion in a move like a piked flip, for example.

9. Anything big mistakes I should look out for when it comes to mobility training?
Pretty much everybody who does it on a regular basis will feel the benefits. And there are loads of easy ways to include it into your schedule.

Any time of the day, right before or right after your training are good. You could do your strength training in the morning and mobilize in the afternoon or the other way around. If you like you can also mobilize one day and then do your training the next day. As long as you do it regularly, you should see progress!

PART 3 - ENDURANCE

10. I was told that adding some endurance training, like running, cycling or rope skipping, into my training would be a good idea, because it would increase my base fitness. What would you recommend?

That's absolutely not wrong :)
I would say it depends on your schedule. If you have extra time in the day, go ahead and throw some light cardio into the mix and it will benefit you. But I wouldn't prioritize it over your strength training or mobility.

What's good to know is that, cardio can improve your regenerative ability.

Let's say you did a max strength training yesterday and don't feel rested enough to do Parkour today. Go for a low-intensity ride on your bike for an hour and that will help your recovery.

Use it as a place-holder. If for whatever reason you can't make your strength training or Parkour session that day, cardio can be a good replacement.

PART 4 - SCHEDULING

11. I've run into the problem that I'm doing all the conditioning I am supposed to do, but I have no time left for Parkour anymore. What are some things I should look out for, when it comes to fitting both into my schedule?

It's important to know that you should be fresh in body and mind for your max strength training.

This means, don't do Parkour training and then max strength training after. Also when you feel exhausted and tired or are sore from the day before, it's not a good idea to train max strength.

That's why max strength also requires you to rest for at least 3 minutes between each exercise.You want your body to feel optimally recovered.

You CAN do Parkour training after your max strength training. Just make sure to stick with Parkour moves you can do fairly easy and are already familiar with.

I want you to be aware that you might not feel exhausted AFTER a max strength session. That's normal. The goal is not to break down your body

With strength endurance training you can do the opposite though. Go all the way to muscle failure with short rest in between sets, until you feel like you will "crawl out of the gym".

12. Thanks so much for your time! Any last words?

Like I said in the beginning:

It always depends. What's your goal? What is the circumstance you are in? and what do you want?

There are many options and most of the things you can do have some benefits and downsides. So you have to ask yourself:

Are the benefits worth my time and effort or not?