19th Jannnn =)

I've been off all this week so far with sore throat, stomach pains, and general tiredness. I think it's going around at the minute, everyone seems to be ill. Anywayz, last week I had a really good session, we split up into 2 groups, and our group consisted of me, Stuart, Pembury, Dale, Tumo, Liam, Luke, Mike and Cobie. The split was mainly due to too large a group for training in small areas. After we did a nice long warm-up, I worked on a few movements around the top of the stairs at City hall, trying to keep things fast and smooth. I also did the large rail precision at the top of the big stair set, which was quite nice. Stu then decided to attempt and horrificly bail 'Menergy', which left him with a very sore leg for the day. We trained at the green rails for a bit where I accomplished another rail precision that I was pleased with, I think I'm the only person to have done it so far so it was named the jacknife, Haha! Cobie accomplished some new movements here, doing two different underbars over one of the rails, he did them both really well and they're in the video of the day.
After this, we moved onto the college, where we acquired Jammie into our group, and we decided to head up to the Castle. There was a new play park recently built there, which we used for a while, and then trained around the rails there, working on clearing them quickly while using only the white squares. I think it left quite a few of us with aching quads, as the floors are sloped, and the uphill run-up added to the challenge. We worked on lots of different varieties of movement for a few hours here, and then worked our way back down to the centre of Lincoln where we met up with the other group, and me, Stuart and Luke did a nice warm down to end the day.

It was a really good training session, but it did take it out of me and I think I probably pushed myself a bit too hard for my current state, so I'll have to take it real easy this saturday, especially as I've been ill. However, the saiyans are down again! So we have another day of training with them, and we're also heading to the new chinese restaurant to celebrate my birthday. What a great birthday!

Things as of late..

So, christmas has been and gone and its the start of a new year. Training died down a bit over christmas due to, well, christmas, but also due to the ever-continuing problems with my knees and back. Over the last few weeks I have really listened to my body and have been much more careful with my movement affecting these areas. I've cut out a lot of high impact things and have been conditioning my lower body more, particularly with calf raises and shin raises to strengthen the muscles around my knees. I'm also stretching a lot more and for longer periods, and all of this does seem to be having a positive effect. My knees ache less while training and after training and I'm not feeling the loss of power as much as I was. However, my back seems to have seen the improvement in my knees and has decided to get worse, just to keep the steady balance of pain, or something. So yer, in summary, knees hurt less, back hurts more. This may also stem from missing a chiropractors appointment a few weeks ago now and not going again since, so I havent had any manipulation for over a month now.

This makes my christmas sound pretty morbid though, when it hasn't been at all. Christmas itself was great and we also managed to have a fair few jams, and a trip to Nottingham that was a nice break, and a good day all round. As for training in particular, I've been working on taking impact out of movements and working around my injuries. The other day we were practicing taking off the opposite foot for running jumps and with cat passes, as it's not only helpful for when you land on the wrong foot into a movement, but it also helps me because I'm not constantly applying force to the same leg on take-offs. The injuries have also made me think carefully about every landing I have to take, because if I bend too far then it hurts, but if I don't pay attention and don't absorb the force then it also hurts, so I'm constantly alert for how I move. Although I hate not having the freedom that I used to have, it's given me newq methods of training and a different mentality that I think will stay with me for long after these injuries (eventually!) heal.

At the minute I want to work on actual parkour as much as my injuries will let me. I mean being properly fast and efficient, not just that kind of fluid vaults and a jogging pace kind of efficient, really quick. I think I'm at the point where I'm really comfortable and natural with all the basic movements but I don't work nearly enough on putting them together and working on them like in a proper parkour situation, and that's what I want to do at the minute, so I shall make a mental note to post again soon with how things go :)

Love x

Compilation (GAYYY)

Well not much has happened in the last couple of weeks. The weather has made training very difficult, with saturdays being wet, and weekdays being dark too early to allow any training. So, my amount of training has gone down, however my conditioning is still going well, so all's good there. I've found some benefits; raise-ups are reeeaaall easy now, and I've just got fingertip raise-ups (and L-sit to raise-ups) which is cool, but my technique on my muscle ups has gone all poo which is annoying. I feel that my strength has been quite off lately but I think its to do with coming down with some sort of illness as I constantly have headaches, sore throat, ear ache etc. so hopefully after a bit of rest and taking it easy that should be sorted. I've got my insoles for my shoes from the chiropractor and I'm wearing them all the time so I should be on the way to recovery from my stupid back and knees.

Overall, I'm just focusing on conditioning and finding a way of training that I like at the min, experimenting with bits and pieces, as well as conditioning. The stupid weather is going to stop my training for a while but I'm just going to try and use the time to sort out my strength and flexibility, working on simple movements and 'ironing out the creases' in any things that I find wrong with my movements.

New compilation of movements is at the top, although as you can tell by the title, I'm not ecstatic about it =P

Leicester Trip and Chiropractors

Since my last post there have been two Lincoln jams and the trip to Leicester on Monday. All of these went really well, but my two highlights were Saturday and Monday, so that's what I'm going to write about.

Saturday - Lincoln Jam.

We did the usual warm-up at city hall, talked for a bit, and then the cleethorpes guys turned up. We did some training and filmed a few bits and moved up to the spare for some food and drink and training before we headed up to the arbouritum. At the arbo we did a small bit of training before we got fed up and decided we wanted to do something different, so we decided we had enough people to have a pretty awesome game of.. something!? What we ended up doing was splitting into 2 equal teams and playing a massive game that involved one team protecting a park, and the other team attempting to get as many people into it as possible. The arbouritum is basically a huge hill, with the park at the top, so the attacking team had to go right to the bottom and then work their way to the top. The defending team had to take anyone that they spotted to the floor before that person reached the park. It turned out to be really fun and testing, and it was great for our stamina and sneaking skills! After a couple of games, me and Ben decided we wanted to do some more training, so we said bye to everyone and made our way back into town and to city hall. Here we worked on sticking precisions on rails (which we both struggle with) and got some things on camera. I came very close to a big cat-pass arm jump from a rail to a wall. However, the wall doesn't go right down to the floor, as it's suspended on railings, and so I couldn't let my feet go too low or else I'd have no shins left! As I had one final go at it I put all my effort in and got both feet on the wall, but got my hands on top of the wall instead of on the rail that I should have gone for, and fell back onto my ass, as well as cutting my one of my fingers! Ah well, shall do it very soon. After this, it was pretty much the end of the day, so we both headed home.

Monday - Leicester Trip.

To get us to Leicester for a decent time, we had to catch the 8:34 train from Lincoln, so it was a fairly early start. We (Me, Ryan, Stuart Pembury and Gainey) met at the train station at about 8:15, bought tickets and food & drink, and waited patiently for the train. It arrived on time and we met Johnny on there who was heading to Newark to meet his girlfriend, so we talked together until we got to Newark where we attempted to keep Johnny on the train by grabbing random parts of his body so that he had to go to Leicester with us. After several violent outbursts Johnny escaped our grip and left us to wait another hour or so on the train until we arrived in Leicester. On arrival we quickly made our way out of the station and tried to find the way to the university where we arranged to meet Callum at 11am. By the time we had wandered around a bit, found our way to the uni, strecthed and lightly trained on the rails, Callum arrived. We did another short burst of light training and moved onto the first spot: the park. I accomplished several things here that I was quite proud of; a dead-hang muscle-up with hands together, a squirrel leap, a cat pass to laché and best of all, I learned to do those flick up things in between my hands on rails after you muscle-up, which is rather handy. We then moved on to the H-bar, which is a thick muscle-up bar that appears on Blanes PINWC video. I managed to double-arm muscle-up on it which I was pleased with. We then trained more around the nearby areas, where I accomplished quite a few movements that I was pleased with (many of which can be seen on the video). We eventually grew hungry and so went to a nearby Subway which was about 5x bigger than the ones in Lincoln, and got some rather tasty sandwiches to keep us going for a while. After this we carried on checking out the spots, mostly around the uni, where we trained and had fun. One particular spot at the uni that we called the yellow walls (you can guess why) was pretty amazing, we all agreed that we could of trained just there for a day. I found quite a few nice movements there but after a good 1hr+ of training there (+ some really nice free smoothies) we left after accomplishing probably about 1% of what was available to do there. We carried on moving between spots, training, talking, laughing, until eventually Ryan had a rather nasty bail which hurt his knee (its in the vid) and so shortly after this we decided to head back to the train station and catch an earlier train home than we had planned. The train journey was pretty long and boring despite a man that was so deep in sleep that his coughing fits and sneezing failed to wake him up (as did several train conductors) and he was eventually carried off the train several stops later than where he was headed, slowly waking up.All in all, a fantastic trip. The journey was funny, the spots were amazing, the jam 'host' (Callum) was a great guy, and we all had a laugh and a good day of training. Brilliant!

The Chiropractors.

I recently posted about how I've had problems with my knees and back. Well I spoke to my dad about it and he said he'd book me an appointment with a chiropractor, which was today. I've been to the chiropractor before for flat feet, which I had to wear insoles for for a year or so when I was about 9. I did think that I had cured it at the time, but I think it's slowly returned over the years. So anyway, I went for my appointment today and went in, talked about knees, back and parkour and she (Nicole) told me that she could see that I have flat feet which means that my knees will bend inwards slightly causing them to ache under the knee cap (which is where I feel the pain) and also will cause my back problems. This, coupled with lots of high impact exercise, has generally buggered my back up over time. She also told me that one of my legs is slightly longer than the other, which means my pelvis will be at a slight angle and will explain why my back problems are particularly on one side. She then went on to manipulate my pelvis and spine, which is about as gruesome as it sounds. It doesn't hurt, but my god, it takes it out of you. At one point, I had to put on leg over the other, cross my arms, lie down at an angle, while she then put a lot of sudden force on the base of my back which suddenly clicked all of the parts of my lower back at once. A strange sensation, but I think it's really helped, and she also gave me an appointment for next wednesday so check out my feet and see just how buggered they are. Apparently it's likely I'll be on insoles again which doesn't bother me, I'm actually kind of glad because I think this may actually sort things out. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Recent stuffs

So there's been a few new things since my last post.

First of all, the PGL workshop has been cancelled, apparently they got it wrong or something, but we're getting 6 sessions at some point, so all is good!
Secondly, tomorrow's my last day at school before half term! Woo! Plans for the days have already been made, with leicester on Monday, Jam on wednesday, and possible Nottingham trip on Friday. I shall post about them on here after each day.
Thirdly, I told my dad about my bad back the other day and he's booked me in for a week today, so I shall see how that goes, receive the inevitable 'don't do parkour for a while', and post the results here.

Anyway, woo for half term!

x

Lincs Parkour - September 29th

Two more jams have passed since my last post, and more training in Welton has occured. I’m also posting to say how pleeeeaaased I am that there has been another workshop announced in Lincolnshire, this time at the PGL centre, which I myself have never been to, but have heard from others about how good it is.
Well, truth be told, I'm not pleased with the way my training is going at the minute. I seem to constantly feel that I'm not on top form, and it seems to be steadily getting worse, with a constant aching, stiff feeling in my knees that makes me feel quite powerless, and I seem to tire much quicker than usual. I’ve also had a lot of trouble from my lower back in the last few months, the point where I banged never seems to have healed. I know that I'm not conditioning as much as I should be at the minute as well, and I'm constantly putting it off due to having 'other things to do' which is just an excuse in my head that makes me not feel bad about myself.
I know I need to sort things out, and I'm hoping that with the weeks break ahead I'll use the time wisely to train, condition and generally progress. However, my main concern at the minute is with my legs in general, as they don't feel strong at all, and I get twinges in the muscle when squatting. If this doesn't subside I fear I may have to take some time out to condition and stretch to the max and ditch the high impact stuff for while, until I feel my strength increasing again.
Hopefully this won't be the case and it’s just a short term thing, but I don’t want to risk long term injury, so if it has to happen then it will happen.

On a more positive note, I have accomplished a few targets and new movements lately, as have other people at LPk. The video of a recent jam is at the top which shows a lot of people accomplishing new movements. If knees and back prevail, much more of this should be going on very soon!

Welton 23rd September

Well it seems I haven't posted here in about 6 months, so there's some major catching up to do!

Training has been going well, the summer was very productive for most of us at Lincs Parkour, unfortunately it seems to be coming to an end now though as the weather is quickly declining and the nights are drawing in. Since my last post I've also been to Leeds, Nottingham, Boston, Sleaford, Ruskington and the peak district (for the TRACEur gathering 07) and not to forget Lincoln many a time. All of these have been fantastic, eye-opening and productive events and I hope to return to these places many more times.
On a less positive note, since my last post here one of our fellow training buddies, and a very good friend, James has moved to Australia. We all miss him very much, and always will do, but we're all still in contact with him and hear about his life down under, so all is good and he seems to be having a great time!
As the months have gone by my parkour and strength and parkour has also inrceased tenfold, and I've achieved many of my previous targets such as raise-up handstands, L-sit to handstands, double-armed muscle-ups and many more. I've also many accomplishments in parkour and become much more fluent and comfortable with my movement; I'll post my latest video in this post to show my progression. I've also delved slightly more into the tricking/street stunting area, as I now have front, side and backflips, although I practice them very little.

I think the main improvement has been in my strength, as I focused on conditioning solidly for a while which really paid off, and has improved my parkour greatly. I'm now focusing on conditioning my legs, as I feel I neglected them for while for reasons unknown, and my flexibility is terrible, so thats another main focus for me.

I'm going to try and keep updating this site regularly now, so hopefully I should be posting more often from now on.