Because I’m a big kid, and I want to bridge the gap between me and the top American competitors who are similarly obsessed with Ninja Warrior, I signed up for an “adult parkour” class at my kids’ gymnastics studio that started back in January. Quite a number of the top competitors in Ninja Warrior have backgrounds in parkour and free-running, and their general athleticism and mentality to attack and intuitively understand how to navigate their bodies quickly through obstacles make them natural studs at any obstacle course competition. I wanted me more of that. While I felt confident on any of the strength-based obstacles, based on my training rock-climbing, I felt I was definitely lacking in general agility and speed that help with other obstacles and transitions between obstacles. Thus my reasoning for taking a class in Parkour. Plus, as I’ve previously mentioned, I’m a big kid and it looked like insane fun.

The class is once-a-week, and my buddy Ron joined me in the class to complement our rock-climbing training. We now we look forward to parkour class every week. Seriously. Like little kids. I can’t wait for Wednesday nights. What happens in the class? Well, basically we attack obstacles for an hour straight, and the instructor is continuously adjusting the course and adding new nuances. He also periodically lets us breath and pauses to instruct us in a new technique which we then employ in the attack. Such insane fun, and probably the most intense cardio workout I’ve ever done as he just drives us to keep going.

While we just finished our first course (10 classes), here are some of my incomplete notes about what we did in the first classes:

First class…shoulder roll, dive roll, monkey vault, underbar…

Second class…Man, second class of Parkour kicked my ass last night. So much fun. Just an hour-long continuously changing obstacle course with very little rest. Worked on speed vaults, lazy vaults, penny drops, and wall spins. And did too many handstands.

Third class…cash vault, dash vault, side spin, handspring flip, ax vault..

Tags: Parkour, Ron Friedman

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 1:53 pm and is filed under American Ninja Warrior 3, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.