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Parkour Week 4: Day 2 - More Vaults!

Wait, it's Friday. Why am I blogging about Wednesday's training session now?

Two reasons - first, I ended up going directly from training on Wednesday into an XBOX 360 killfest with some of my friends and crashed shortly thereafter. Second, I was actually going to skip it until Saturday but I'm sitting here at work waiting for word back from Net App on a core device failure that is resulting in massive impact to our clients... with nothing really to do, so I figured I'd recap.

Of course, my memory is a little fuzzy now because I didn't get it down right away. Let's see what I can recall...

Warmup x1:

1 lap (4 blocks)
QM up on precision trainers
10 pushups
5 pullups
20 squats
10 pushups
10 pullups
QM back on precision trainers
1 lap (4 blocks)

I think that was the deal. I knew I should have photo'd it with my phone... blargh.

In any case, it was a higher focus on upper body than normal (prep for next week), with the QM on the precision trainers being key. The rest of the stuff was easy and normal, but the QM on the trainers was interesting - we all had to line up and go one by one, so you could only move as fast as the person in front of you. I didn't like this, as I seem to do much better faster.

Same "problem" I seem to have everywhere else - when I go slow, I "think" through my movements and feel like I mess up more. When I go fast, I think about the movement ahead of time, then let the movement happen and it works.

In any case, the QM was an interesting challenge and I enjoyed it. I only almost fell off twice and both were when I was thinking about how to place my hands and second guessed myself. This is a good part of training though.

After the warmup, the rest of the day we focused on vaults again. This was very similar to Monday, with us moving towards a speed vault. There's not a lot for me to expand on here now (since it's not fresh in my head), but it felt very good and was very fun to continue to work on this form. Rob again continued to point out key bits here and there, and Travis, Adam, and Rob all helped all of us at different times.

I did have one issue at this point in the class - on Tuesday I pulled something in my groin, not badly, just lightly. Don't remember how, might have happened when I was doing a monster slide into 3rd in softball (scored the only run of the day for our team wuwu). In any case, all the vaulting definitely made this hurt more, and it was messing up my form. Near the end of the class I was having issues with both the jump and the landing because of it, but it wasn't too made - just made it look clumsy.

Rob did do one thing totally awesome to screw with us - he put two precision trainers at random distances in front of the boxes and told us we had to step on them as we ran towards the box for the jump without looking at them. This was actually quite hard, and a great exercise in cadence. Interestingly, I could manage this all right when trying to do a jump off my right leg, but I could not match things up when trying to do a jump off my left leg. I think it's because I have to force my body out of natural cadence to move towards a left leg jump.

I talked with Adam about this for awhile as he noticed me getting frustrated, and he had some cool stuff to say. The most important thing he said is that being a little frustrated is good, it helps you train, as long as you don't let it impact your training. He also said he had the same problem. Logically I know this is okay and normal, but it's frustrating when it comes out so clearly. All good, definitely need to work on this.

In any case, Rob took these away after a few runs and used it to make the point that training in the gym is different than training in the real world, and we need to think about things like obstacles interfering with us. Good timing, since four weeks in we're all getting a bit cocky.

After all these vaults we closed out with our homework of self-invented parkour pushups. I had worked on some interesting stuff, which focused on not bending my wrists (they don't like pushups), doing more upper body stuff like balancing off the arms and head, and my coup-de-grace was a sideways flip - from pushup position to pushup position via a pushup+spin. Fun.

The two we ended up picking were neat. The first was a set of QM movements with a pushup at each extension. Solid. The second made me laugh a lot at first - it was the same drill I used to do when wresting in high school! I can't remember the last time I've done it, clearly a solid 15 years ago... It's basically doing a full pushup where you clap your hands *and* your feet *and* rotate your body slightly, so in around five or six of these you rotate in a full 360 around the center. This was both fun and easy for me - I was actually surprised that it was so easy. Yay.

And that was that! I seem to recall Rob giving us homework but I can't remember what it was. >_< Hopefully it will be all good.

One interesting bit as I was leaving - I had my backpack on and a water bottle in my left hand and I felt like doing a roundoff, so I did a quick one handed roundoff on my way out. That got Rob excited, "I didn't know you could do that!" I responded with something like "oh yeah I can do all sorts of flips and shit" and we got onto a discussion about Acro which is a gymnastics place up in Maryland (one of the places I had looked at when looking for a gym but they didn't seem to have anything for "just messing around"). He said they sometimes get together at Primal and head up there on Friday's to monkey around because Acro does open gym on Fridays.

Awesome! I was all stoked for doing that and was gonna call and see if it was on tonight when the stuff broke at work. Bummer. Next week maybe!

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