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Parkour II: Week 1, Day 1

It begins again! Six more weeks of training at Primal Fitness, this time the intermediate class on Tue/Thu/Sat. Stunning.

Same primary instructor as the basic boot camp, Rob. New secondary instructor, Salil (might have that spelling wrong). Salil seems pretty cool, didn't say a lot but always on point when he did. The class is mostly the same people as the basic class which is pretty neat - only one person that hasn't been there with us before.

Immediately upon the start of class, Rob took it somewhere completely different - outside the gym. We all packed up and went to a nearby park, jogging about 3-4 blocks to get there. Then, Rob led us in some crazy group warmup routines. I can't even remember all of this, but it involved:

  • Stepping forward slowly reaching really high like you were stepping over something, then repeating it backwards
  • Same as above but coming down into a crouch/crawl with the opposite leg, then backwards
  • Jumping sideways across a crack while skipping your feet back and forth
  • From a squat ("rest position") repeatedly sliding left and right in a crouch movement (this was rough)
  • Standing on the back of a park bench and doing squats (balance)
  • More weird stuff
It was a pretty harsh warmup but like near the end of last camp, while I felt like I was going to die during it as soon as it's over my body is like "what? let's go!" We then moved into the focus of the class for this week: precision jumps again!

This time, real precision jumps. We started by jumping up onto a two foot or so high wall, then jumping off it. Repeatedly. Then we moved up to sorta running at it and doing the same thing - repeatedly. This was most of the class and it was awesome!

There's not a lot to say about it though! lol. I was challenged, felt some improvement, and generally enjoyed it like crazy. Go figure.

At the end of the class, we all stood on an inch wide rail about six inches off the ground and did squats while balancing. This was awesome too. ;) I'm not going to say I never fell off (I did), but in general my balance is still working and I think I stayed on very easily. I did around 30 squats in the time the rest of the class (or at least the slowest person) did 10, so, very solid.

That's it... not much more to say. Action packed, not a lot of time to think, just doing lots of good stuff. I think if this is a trend for the intermediate camps it will take a lot longer to digest - not like the last six weeks where I had all this stuff to think about immediately. Now it's sinking in slowly...

Oh, and a milestone for Pete today - I did my second real world super short parkour session today, just doing a safety vault and some other stuff... but my first real world turn vault! That was nifty and it was a perfect location. Very exciting. ;x

Okay off to XBOX!

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