MUSCLES FOR TRACEURS by WillWayland

In this article:

Muscles and Size are not dirty words
Bashing on Body Weight
You are not special
The Method
Exercises
Sample Training Day
Conclusion

Muscles or Size is seen as dirty words in the parkour community, many are under the impression that any sort of muscular size on a traceur will kill their performance.

This misconception is born of ignorance, media bias (muscles are out right now in fashion) and long standing myth. I have encountered this myth during my time as a martial artist. As I gained weight I was lectured by various instructors that being bigger would hamper my fighting ability. Some even went as far as to say it would slow me down (giving long winded physics lectures).

In martial arts this comes from marketing gimmicks, the student puts faith in the instructor that what they are learning will help them against bigger stronger opponents. If that bigger stronger opponent happens to be skilled you are going to experience alot of pain.

Bruce Lee also propagated the myth by being quoted as saying 'Sure he's big but can he use that muscle?' oh man now the lord god Bruce has said it surely he cant be wrong. He never says if it is good or bad he merely poses a question. This is my personal experience of the 'size is bad' myth. I keep seeing it popping up in parkour forums all over.

In general bigger muscle is going to be a stronger muscle (you don't see many weak big guys and no I don't mean fat people). While that's not always the case, it is part of the equation. It has to be useable mass or relative mass.

You don't want to send somebody into a weight class heavier if they're just going to be weaker and have bigger muscles. Parkour doesn't have weight classes so this is a non issue but still it's just going to be counterproductive.

So we have "non-functional hypertrophy" (HUH?..Hypertrophy = Increase in muscle size), an increase in muscle mass that's not accompanied by a performance improvement. Now generally this is rare but it can happen. Shortlimbed lifters sometimes get this. But too achieve this a long devotion to eating and imbalanced training must be maintained. Don't let this be you in the gym.

The main difference in hypertrophy beneficial to parkour and bodybuilding is where the general concern is and what parameters are going to be used. The traceur will be more concerned with the mass he has around the elbow joint, the lower part of the triceps. He'll be concerned with the mass he can develop around the knee, the lower quad area. Also the stabilizing mass, the rotator cuff region, back thickness, things that are going to help him with his parkour. We want these size gains to come with a performance improvement.

So the traceur needs to increase performance with different muscle actions (concentric, isometric and eccentric) Lifting, lowering and static holds. They need to work on high-threshold motor units or fast twitch fibers, explosive movements.

With parkour any sprinting, jumping, sudden stops or change of direction where the athlete must absorb and stop the weight of his body, requires a lot of eccentric and isometric strength. So we are looking to improve the force a contracting muscle produces and encouraging the elastic component of the muscle to improve force production.

FOR OTHER WORLDWIDE JAM HEALTH AND FITNESS ARTICLES

BASHING ON BODYWEIGHT

The point is this... 'bodyweight exercise only' programs will only take you so far, and then some form of resistance training must be applied to see further improvement.

You cannot achieve the same loading especially for movements like deadlifting and squating using bodyweight even with the addition of weight. I'm not aginst bodyweight movements. It's just using only bodyweight limits your potential development because the load ultimatly stays the same, breaking a cardinal rule of resistance training that load must increase to make improvements.

I'm yet to see the body weight equivalent of snatch/clean and jerk/deadlift or any real pulling movements involving the legs.

YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL

Sorry you're not. The traceur is a human being and adheres to the same laws of physiology and biomechanics everyone else does, despite impressive feats the traceur doesn't build super special muscles that can do things normal people can't.

In my work you have to see the human body as an organic machine that needs to be primed for optimal performance sure programs are specialized for the individual needs but the body adheres to the same simple laws. One other thing that needs to be addressed is the concept of 'sport specific' training for athletes.

The bottom line is this, there is no such thing as sport specific training!

I repeat 'there is no such thing as sport specific training'!

So we take a Max Effort Lift (1) for each training session and shoot for 3-5 reps working up from a warm up.

Progression may go on bench press for example 60 x 8, 100 x 6, 115 x 6, 125 x 6, 130 x 3-5. Max effort lifts can be anything. Sometimes I use pull-ups and other pulling variations, Farmer's walks, tire flips or even regular, old-fashioned squats.

Dynamics Movements (2) revolve around taking a submaximal load and moving it as fast as possible, we have the supplementary lift and dynamic days lift to maximise this.

Finally Concentric Failure (3) helps kick hypertrophy and structral changes into gear, here we seek our functional hypertrophy.

You'll see many of the movements are simple compound exercises, these give best bang for buck performance return.

Why the Russian conjugate system?? because I have found it works best out of all the modalities I've tried. Traceurs don't have an on or off seasons and the conjugate system reflects this. To keep progressing every 3-4 weeks all the exercises are changed for another from the list.

EXERCISES

Upper Core movements to choose from: Flat Bench Press (different grips to choose from), Dumbbell Bench, Weighted Dips, Weighted Pull ups, Floor Press, Shoulder Press.

Upper Supplementary Movements to choose from: Dumbbell Bench press incline/decline, dumbbell floor press, close grip bench press, weighted pull ups/chin ups, weighted press ups

Upper Assistance Work: Bent over flyes, Bend push downs, tricep extensions, scarecrows, bent over cable flyes, seated rows, lat pull down, pull-ups, bicep curls

Lower Core movements to choose from : Squat Variations, Deadlift Variations

Supplementary movement to choose from : Lunges (overhead, dumbbell, walking, reverse), Bulgarian split Squats, Step ups on to a box(with barbell or holding plate at arms length).

Assistance work to choose from : Glute Ham raise, Good mornings, pull throughs, Straight leg deadlifts, one legged deadlifts, Abdominal work.

So training days look a little something like this over 3 days a week:

You may notice two upper and one lower day, this is because the lower body takes such a beating from parkour activities that it would be determental to try train a dynamic lower body session.