Training is going well at the minute. I feel that my progression has slowed a bit but I'm focusing on conditioning a lot now, averaging about 1000 press ups a week (my target is to make sure I do above this every week from now on). I am now benefiting from the conditioning in my parkour, my increased arm strength makes climb-ups much faster.

Something that I have noticed is that one of the traceurs that I look up to and learn from, Stuart, is clearly above my level, and a big level as well. I don't try and compete with him but I focus on having a go at the things he does. I feel that even though some of my techniques are close to his, I am still a big step away from pulling off the things that he does that make people amazed. My aim is to try and break this barrier and be able to do the amazing things that he does, as his control and skill is fantastic. It's great to have someone that I can learn from.

So, for now, my aim is to work on my weak points that put me at a lower level than some of the more experienced traceurs that I train with, Stuart in particular, and keep at my conditioning to improve my strength. I'm also considering taking up jogging regularly to improve my cardiovascular fitness as well as my physical strength.

I probably won't post now until the end of February as I go skiing on Friday 16th.

Jack - Sampler 07

Woo! Birthdaaaaaaaaaaaayy! After today I will have about £220 so I'm gonna save it towards going to new places with Lincs parkour in spring/summer.

My mum let me have the day off school today so I went out and did a short bit of training, practicing muscle-ups and reverse-muscle-ups.

A thread has started on WWJ to try and get the community to do as many press-ups as possible and reach a collective target of 1 million press-ups, however long it may take. I asked Wizey a few nights ago if he would like to join in me in participating, to which he agreed. We then did 15 press-ups every 3 minutes for half an hour, doing 150 press-ups. Jammie, Gainey, Will and Marcus also wanted to join in and the other night I did 250 press-ups, despite my aching funny bone (trapped nerve or something). I'm really glad we've started doing it because it is very motivational conditioning and I want to keep on doing it every night...

January 28th

Me and Gainey trained in town for about 3 hours and got some really good training and footage. I have used most of this footage to create a sampler, which is at the top:

Lincs Parkour - January 27th

I haven't posted here for a while once again...

Training has been going brilliantly, I set up my own conditioning regime about 2 weeks ago which I am sticking to firmly, and I've started contributing to a community challenge of doing 1 million press-ups between us which is spurring me on to condition. The effects are becoming noticeable, today I got reverse muscle up's (180 underbar up into muscle-up), and my normal muscle-ups are improving greatly. Hopefully in a few months I'll be drilling out double-handed muscle-ups. I'm going to try and keep condtioning intensely as much as I can as the benefits are definitely worth it.

The winter months have been good for us, we seem to be fairly lucky with the weather, although it's constantly damp. Everyone at Lincs parkour is progressing quickly and the importance of conditioning has spread to people, so strength training is a regular thing at jams now.

I got a mini DV camera for xmas which we've been using at the jams, and we've captured some really great stuff. The video of today's training session is at the top...

I haven't posted for over 2 weeks, due to being quite busy with christmas and schoolwork and crap.
Training has been steady, I'm getting smooth and fluid in my movements now, as well as being very confident with what I'm doing. The last few jams have been quite steady because the conditions have been getting pretty bad. If it has rained overnight then everything stays wet throughout the day as it's not hot enough to dry it up which sucks.
Todays jam went quite well though. After looking at the big level arm jump (that I mentioned in the 25th November post) for several jams, I plucked up the courage to give it a go and went for it... and landed it! Woo! That was quite an achievement for me, and it gave me a buzz to try more things. We trained for a while at the magistrates court which is pretty good, but I noticed a considerable difference between my level and some of the more experienced traceurs, which annoyed me a bit. Oh well, I'll keep training as I am and if I keep improving like I have been for the last few months then hopefully next year will be a good year for me and I'll start trying some of the bigger things.
At the end of the day me and Jammie got talking about tricking, frontflips mainly, and we both wanted to try one 'cause we knew we could both do one if we went for it. After practicing the technique for a while I forced myself to go for it and landed on my feet on my first attempt, and actually quite confortably! I had a few more goes and landed them every time, and they were getting better, but I had to stop 'cause I was just too tired! Hopefully Jammie will have them by the next time I see him, good luck t0 him. So overall, it was a good days training, and a good laugh as always. I think this will have been my last jam before xmas.

Achievements for the day(s):

~ Finally nailed the big arm jump!
~ Learnt to frontflip
~ Got an inch from popping up the first floor of Lucy Towers car park (on the to-do list)
~ Had a great day!

I haven't posted anything for a few days so here's an update on what I've been up to.

P.s. I also haven't been feeling very well from Sunday onwards so I haven't done a lot of parkour/conditioning since Saturday.

25th November

Today was the annual Lincoln jam which went really well, except it rained pretty heavily in the morning and never dried up throughout the day. So seeing as everywhere was really matt we decided to go to a part of city hall that's under shelter and train there for a while. Although we don't often spend a lot of time down there we all trained really hard, focusing on improving the fundamentals, improving speed and accuracy in techniques and also putting together the techniques together in a more fluid manner i.e all in a flowing sequence of one move rather than just a set of seperate techniques. I worked on my underbars (which improved thanks to Stu's advice). We also found an arm jump from a large rock area to a wall that was really slippery. This made a good challenge for everyone because there were three different heights that you could take off from, each increasing the distance and difficulty. I managed to do the first 2 arm jumps and I was really close to going for the furthest one (about 10 foot and level) which I knew I could do but didn't have the confidence to go for. I'm determined to do it next time.
Anyways, a good day of training, everyone put in a lot of effort and it was good fun.

Achievements of the day:

~ Better head-on underbars
~ More confidence in basic techniques resulting in more speed and precision
~ Two new arm jumps (and another to do next week)
~ New areas found up by the bailgate (where I accomplished a new arm jump and nearly landed a very large crane-landing precision)

24th November

Tonight I worked on conditioning as I was at my Dads girlfriends house for the night. I did really well as I did my normal routine of press-ups and sit-ups etc and then about another half of what I usually do. I then did about 200 metres of quadrepedal (on all 4's) across the long living room floor. I could really feel my legs burning at the end of the quadrepedal walking so I suppose thats a good sign that it's working.