Have you ever done AcroYoga? I’ve had the pleasure of playing around with it a little with Shira, co-owner of The Athletic Playground in Emeryville and some of our other friends. I think it’s actually really fun and stretches you out in a way that feels so positive to your body that it’s hard to describe. I was wondering if any of you have ever tried it and what you think of it if you have. There are two main “types” of AcroYoga, one “therapeutic” which feels,… well, therapeutic, and the other one that emphasizes the Acrobatics and fancy moves which is fun and cool but a bit more show-offish. Here are some videos that can give you an idea of what it’s about.
This is a really good example of therapeutic Acro. You have no idea how good this feels are your spinal column unless you’ve tried it. The “flyer” is the one benefiting from the “base”.
I really like this one not just because the practitioners are so good, but also because of I think the sound track and tempo are perfect for a good relaxing, therapeutic AcroYoga session. Not that these two throw in their fair share of acrobatics in there as well!
Here is one of Crystal and Kathy from The Athletic Playground demonstrating one of their tricks:
Can you believe that there is also an AcroYoga move called a “Ninja Star”? Well, you know I have to post a video of a “Ninja Star”, don’t you? These are Zac and Crystal from at The Athletic Playground as well:
And finally here is the 2011 AcroYoga festival, which gets pretty fancy. Maybe even proves that even hippies are competitive at heart. Rofl.
So what did you think? Would you try something like this? Why or why not?
As you know we’ve held several American Ninja Warrior events, seminars, & competitions here at the “Cave”. Nevertheless, the next one coming up is going to be the biggest and most spectacular yet, and best of all there will be a new format that will enable even more people at different skill and fitness levels to try their turn at the course and practice their skillzz. Here are the details:
Saturday Nov. 3rd 1-6pm: 1st Annual American Ninja Warrior Kid’s Course & Parkour Training Session with Celebrities and Guest Coaches Ages: 6-12 y/o Come train with the American Ninja Warrior Legends. There will be 2 Kids courses, Ninja Challenges, Vaulting Clinics, Games, & More. Meet some of the biggest personalities of the show and half a dozen of the United States top Ninja Warriors from the “Great North West Region” as well as the stuntmen from the “Spectacular South West”, and don’t forget the Cave’s own Mt. Midoriyama veterans! Re-define your Ninja Skillzz. Cost: $50 early-registration/ $65 preregistration / $85 at the door. (Early registration ends Oct. 19th, preregistration ends Oct. 30th.) (no sibling discounts- sorry.) Registration open for: 36 little athletes (may be extended to 48 good weather permitting) Includes 2 obstacle courses, parkour vaulting clinic, games, raffle & course prizes, and of course, mingling with American Ninja Warrior celebrities.
Who will likely be present? : David Campbell, Travis Furlanic, Chris Wilczewski, JB Douglass, Kelvin Antoine, Ryoga Vee, Tom Hutchman, Andres De la Rosa, and several others! Event Location: The Cave
Member cost: $50.00 Nonmember cost: $50.00
Notice how stylish and comfortable Travis looks in his sweatshirt!
Sunday Nov. 4th 8:30-2:15pm:
Ages: mature teenager to 50+
Cost: $50 early-registration/ $75 preregistration / $85 at the door (Early registration ends Oct. 19th, preregistration ends Oct. 30th.) Registration open for 36 ninjas (may be extended to 48 good weather permitting) Includes 2 obstacle courses, parkour skillz clinic, ninja challenges, course prizes, and “meet & train with the American Ninja Warrior celebrities”,
Some of you may have noticed that we recently cut two new holes in the walls next to the adjustable wall run bar in the parkour area. Or maybe you haven’t since no one has asked me “what are those holes in the wall for?”. Nevertheless, there they are, and for a purpose. We now have another Gibbon slack line anchor wrapped around the post that’s in the wall and we can easily set up the slack line for our kids and adult parkour classes. If you’re ever interested in training on them and you are experienced with one, you can ask me and I’ll see if we can set it up for you during non-class hours. If you are inexperienced with them and would like to learn you can also schedule a private with myself or one of our other coaches. You can also sign up for our parkour classes where we use them on occasion. We used to have open gym on Thursday and Friday nights where athletes and clients could come in and play on the equipment at their leisure but we cancelled it due to poor attendance. If you’d like to see ”open gym”, or “Optional Skill Training” time, as we used to call it, make a comeback on the schedule during the day or in the evenings or make any other suggestions you can always try to sway The Cave’s management by signing in to our website’s members area and then click on “Give us Your Feedback”. Writing up feedback on our website counts for a lot more than just telling one of the coaches or owners what you’d like because then there is a written record of the clients’ requests. In the meantime I will leave you with this cool little video of some of the possible tricks and skills that you can eventually work up to on a slack line. Truth is, just walking across one is loads of fun and there is no better way to develop your balance.
This parkour video is a jewl. It helps you look through the skewed prisms that people view parkour through and gives you a more precise and pure perspective. Check this out. I think every Caver that is interested in movement and fitness should watch this!
One of the reason I gravitate towards parkour so much as a training protocol is because I love learning stuff. I honestly believe that since what humans are good at and designed for is learning, “fitness” has to be directly tied in to learning. For this reason I think that only promoting “work capacity” in basic movements that have already been acquired is not enough to fullfill our potential for “fitness” and that’s why I promote activities such as parkour, gymnastics, martial arts, climbing, swimming as well as other sports and not just CrossFit. CrossFit should complement and enhance our lives and other activities and not be the only focus of our fitness. There is no doubt that CrossFit is valuable, it just shouldn’t stand alone.
Parkour Fail videos are horrible, because people get hurt, often badly, and not just physically. They’re embarrassing too. But I actually like watching parkour fail videos, as much because I enjoy the process of analyzing what went wrong and mentally archiving how to avoid that “wrong”. I often cringe even before the crash. Most of the time if you have an experienced eye, you can tell what’s going to happen before it does, and especially when the “athlete” doesn’t look anywhere near well prepared you know it’s going to go horribly wrong. Nevertheless, in contrast there are “pro parkour fails”. I recently watched one of Jesse Le Flair during a commercial shoot. Sometimes even pros eat it, but more often their training kicks in to save them. Look at the difference between Jesse’s fail and the other fails in the Parkour Fail compilation. My reaction to Jesse’s fail was… “Wow..! Nice reaction. Great awareness. Grip strength came in handy.” As opposed to “you fool, you’re no where near strong / flexible / prepared / experienced enough to try that outside of a foam pit!” Many people trying or learning parkour on their own are often fool hardy and try a trick or skill well before they’re athletic base is an parkour skills are sound enough to attempt a trick of the level of difficulty that they have in mind. People who try parkour and freerunning tricks that they are nowhere near ready for aren’t only a hazard to themselves, but mar the art form and set a bad example for others as well. Here is the video of someone failing a cat-to-cat with a strong base:
In contrast, most of the fails in this next video are performed by folks who don’t even seem to know they’re not ready to try these. I love the music for this next one. It’s so appropriate. Try analyzing some of the fails and “read” what exactly went wrong with each trick. The more you understand, the safer you’ll be.
Ultimately, my philosophy for throwing dangerous skills is that it’s better to be over-prepared for a skill than to increase the risk of injury or even tragedy by throwing a skill prematurely.
By the way, I think that the kid in 3:40 may have broken his neck.
One of the things I find myself doing during the parkour classes that we teach is explaining physics to our kids and why it’s important. In parkour, it all comes down to physics, and the more you understand it, the better you’ll be able to figure out the moves and the more confident you’ll be it what you’re doing. Newton’s three laws of motion form the basis of classical mechanics and, according to en.wikipedia.org, can be summarized as follows:
First law: The velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force.[3][4][5]
Third law: The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear.
These are reoccurring themes in parkour moves. One of the common explanations during our classes is in regard to jumping and the third law, which can also be stated as “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” When we jump, we push down on the earth (or down and back, if we are jumping forwards) by extending our ankles, knees, hips and also shoulders. That’s why we swing our arms in time with opening our hips, because by swinging our arms up, we are exerting a greater push down on the earth, and since the earth doesn’t move much (but in theory, it actually would move a teeny-tiny bit) the result is that we get air-time. It’s an interesting experiment to try to “jump” by just swinging your arms without using your ankles, knees, or hips. You can actually get a bit off the ground, and it’s magnified when you do it in time to the rest of your jump. One of the common mechanical breaks that parkour coaches notice in new aspiring traceurs is the lack of optimal use of the arms in time with their jump. This also commonly happens with CrossFitters doing box jumps who don’t have a particularly strong athletic background.
At The Cave we have commonly had kids do their school projects on parkour and take video footage during their parkour classes. I don’t know if any of them have done physics presentation for their projects, but the material lends itself extremely well. During the next couple of months I intend to intermittently post several parkour physics projects that young traceurs from around the country or even overseas have put together, after all, the more you understand, the better you can get!
Here’s the first one:
Are there any errors or inaccuracies in our young parkour and physics teacher’s explanation? Can anyone identify them or make any clarifications? All around, I think it’s a great video.
Hey guys, check out this video from our friends up north at Parkour Visions, Seattle:
Justin Sweeney competed with us at American Ninja Warrior 4 ’s North West Regionals at Venice Beach, Ca back in Early March 2012. Look for him as well as your friendly neighborhood Cavers when it airs at 9pm (Pacific) on G-4 on June 9th, 2012. The semi-finals for the region should be on NBC on June 10th, 2012 at 9pm.
Can you name any of the moves that they do? If any are of note, name or describe them and post the time on the video to comments. I will answer questions or comment on the move/trick.
Last week I wrote a blog post titled “Mental State and Competitive Performance” which briefly discussed controlling your emotional and mental state in anticipation of competition. Jacqui asked the obvious question, “…but how do you “practice” controlling your emotions before a competition?” A couple of ideas come to mind. First and most obvious would be putting yourself in competition situations often so you get better at dealing with your emotions from the experience. This is how rookies become veterans. Of course, you may be a rookie and want to get some of that experience before your big competition. In this case you can set up smaller mock competitions with your friends and gym-mates that may have some of that “go time” feeling to them. You may also want to try visualization exercises where you see yourself in that high pressure situation and try to create the atmosphere in your mind and to bring yourself to the emotional state that you want to be in at that moment. One of the things that I would suggest as a long-term habit is regularly placing yourself in new high-pressure situations where you’re going to be nervous trying something new or even slightly dangerous but where you’re still likely to succeed. Gymnasts, traceurs and rock-climbers do this all of the time when they’re trying a new trick, parkour move or climbing route. My old gymnastics training partner used to say things to the effect of “o.k., now I know I’m doing real gymnastics” whenever he started feeling the butterflies fluttering in his stomach. Of course, “real gymnastics” in this context basically meant he was trying something far enough out of his comfort zone to be scared. One way to keep this fear from controlling you is to “look past it” or your relation to it, and focus exclusively on the movements, mechanics and body positions themselves. If you can make yourself do the moves, you’ve achieved the skill, fear or no fear. There is a level of mental control over your emotions that you have to start getting a grip over when you’re putting yourself in this type of situation. There is a point where you know what you have to do and you know you can do it and how to do it, but still, you’ve never done it before. At that point you just have to go for it and once you do you’re committed, there’s no going back and you know that the biggest obstacle is your own head and self-preservation instinct screaming at you to stop. As a matter of fact, if you do try to stop or “go back” once you’re “in”, then you’re in real trouble because you’re a lot more likely to get hurt; there’s no hitting the breaks in the air. It’s time to fly. It really is a beautiful and frightening feeling, and when you start “getting used to it”, although you never really get used to it, you realize that you’ve started to attain an ultimately desirable level of self-mastery, and you can do it again more easily and apply this self-mastery to other skills. Nevertheless, you still have to be careful not to get too cocky because you can still get hurt or die if you make a mistake. It’s always seemed to me that this emotional control applies well to competition situations, at least from self experience and observation of most other people with similar skills, nevertheless I do know at least one excellent and naturally talented gymnast and one amazing lady-rock climber who kind of freak out and aren’t all that good at high stake competition situations but perform extremely well when they’re just practicing their disciplines, so I guess it must not apply universally. Also, people can get comfortable taking new risks in their “field” but may experience more serious mental blocks in something that is similarly frightening in a different discipline. I for one am far more comfortable working through gymnastics progressions, taking that last leap for a big precision jump, or even taking that sixteen foot fall on a lead rope climbing outdoors, but when it comes to going over the edge of even a five or six-foot wave while surfing, oh my God, that really freaks me out. It feels like I’m plunging over a rolling cliff that is about to toss me into an unknown abyss. I’m just not used to it at all. So to me the guys in the following video have achieved close to the consummate level of emotional and mental control. This has got to be one of the scariest things a human being could possibly do. You have to have absolute commitment, and you know you’re going to fall and a mountain of water is going to take you for a roll and you may die, but you do it anyways. This is truly amazing.
I remember a defining character-building moment of my youth. I was about 10 years old and we were on our way to a camping and backpacking trip in Yosemite with the San Francisco Police Activities League (PAL) youth program. We stopped along the way at a pool spot along a river that our instructors were familiar with. At this spot the river widened enough for the current not to be too strong and there were a lot of folks who were bathing or lounging about at the pool spot. Some of them were diving or jumping off of a rock that may have been about twenty feet over the water. I remember telling our guide who was a great mentor to me, Walter Scott, that I was going to jump off that rock into the pool. He said that it was fine and that he would watch, but once I was at the top of the rock my legs literally froze in place and I could not move, I was so scared. I knew that it wasn’t high enough to be unsafe and that the pool was deep enough and that the people who were there to take care of me could pull me out of the water if I needed it, but changing that knowledge into self-confidence was a completely different matter. My friends counted me down at least a dozen times while I had at least that many false starts up at the top of that rock. Finally, after about twenty minutes of waiting Walter gave me “one last chance” at least three times and then waved me down. It was time to go and everyone was packing up. I was so disappointed in myself. I just wasn’t brave enough. I slowly turned around to walk back down the way I came up when I suddenly told myself ”No. I’m going to do it now.” I turned around and ran right over the edge of that rock and as I felt that I had nothing but air underneath my feet I was regretting that last step, looking over my shoulder to see how far away the ledge was but it was too late to get back. It was time to fly. My regret immediately turned to thrill as I dropped and plunged into the freezing cold water. I easily swam to the shore and saw Walter Scott’s concerned and curious look as he asked me if I was O.K. ”I’m Great!” was my strong reply. I couldn’t have possibly felt more alive and excited. During my childhood that moment always reminded me that I was brave and I could make myself do what I decided to do if I really wanted to. It helped form my self-perception for years to come and since then I’ve had a lot more practice. Special thanks to my P.A.L. instructor Walter Scott for the contribution he gave to the lives of so many children growing up, privileged or otherwise. I think that the moral of the story is to regularly put yourself in new and scary situations “outside your comfort zone” where you have to control your nerves and where you have to learn something new about a discipline, skill or maybe just about yourself. Make it a part of your life’s history, just as it is part of the history of human beings and our struggle in life and survival. Just be careful not to get yourself killed.
I just read Amanda’s blog about looking good naked. Then I noticed a comment by Debbie that somehow ties me to the subject matter. So I guess it would be appropriate for me to express my views on this whole affair. First off, I have the highest respect for Amanda and I am particularly fond of her awesome arsenal of skills and her exemplary character. I also get where she is coming from, but I myself am the exact polar opposite. I have never been motivated by “wanting to look good naked”. My motivation has more to do with “wanting to be like Spiderman”. Spiderman is awesome. He’s small and unassuming enough to not be too conspicuous, yet if motivated enough, he could pick up a truck and throw it over his head. This kind of strength is much more desirable than looking good naked. How about being such a good gymnast/acrobat that you could swing between buildings and balconies and travel through cities without even using a car? Way cool. I have to keep working on those parkour skillz! Also, despite my obstinate obsession with rock-climbing, I’m still nowhere near the level of Spiderman. Spiderman is probably almost as good as Chris Sharma, so he can probably climb about V-12 or 13. I can only climb V-5’s plus-or-minus a grade or so. I have my work cut out for me.
So despite all of the flack that I’ve gotten for “not wearing a shirt most of the time”, vanity is personally not a motivating factor at all, yet Debbie isn’t too far off the mark with her comment. Although I don’t wear a pink sports bra, I AM that girl on the treadmill. It sounds to me like she was more concerned about her performance than about her looks. When I find someone like that I would much rather approach them, see if they’re friendly and are interested in being my workout partner, but that’s just me. The rest of you can worry about naked-or-not-naked and keep hating if you want to.
As far as I see it, it’s not about your looks so much as it’s about what skillz you have and what you can do. Quite frankly, I think that worrying about looking naked is a complete waste of time and usually other people’s as well. You would look better and more importantly be more skilled if you spent that time doing something fun and interesting like learning how to dance or doing Judo. Also, never forget that “With great power, comes great responsibility.
JB was invited to come to our American Ninja Warrior Open Audition back in Feburary. He’s a friend of Zack Weldon and Christian Fairfax and used to coach parkour, gymnastics, freerunning, Kid’s Night Out and Birthday parties in Rohnert Park gymnastics. He competed with us in American Ninja Warrior 4 down at Venice during the qualifiers in early March and he coached the parkour classes on Monday and has been helping out in the gym all this week. If you watched the ANW 4 trailer that I posted last night you may have noticed him towards the end. They didn’t actually show him doing anything, just screaming. Here’s a little video of some of his basketball,… ummm,… parkour skillz:
I love The Beatles, don’t you? Who do you like more, Elvis or The Beatles? (Pulp Fiction!) Post thoughts to comments.
JB is a passionate coach and loves to teach. If you see him around the gym, feel free to introduce yourself and maybe even ask him for some pointers for your 3-point shot or your double-Kong or precisions.
As a side note, we are still trying to figure out the logistics for the American Ninja Warrior viewing party on May 21st. We’ll let you know when we do.
