If parkour reinvents the world into a playground, parkour strength training reimagines benches, tree trunks, and scaffolding into novel yet useful training tools to maintain and upgrade your physical performance. Improving at deceptively basic skills such as crawling, jumping, vaulting, and climbing will greatly improve your potential to face and overcome future challenges of the physical, technical, and mental variety. Before you focus on thrusting around heavy metal objects and/or friendly Homo sapiens for sport, first consider a safer, bodyweight approach to improved athleticism. Building a better movement foundation with parkour strength exercises is both an engaging and proven method to optimize your physical abilities. Here are nine of the best #ParkourStrength movements for beginners.

Wall dip

Slightly harder than basic push-ups, the wall dip is a more transferrable pushing exercise for parkour athletes. The wall dip is an upper body exercise that is closely related to parkour skills like vaults and the second half of a muscle-up or climb-up. If you want to quickly get up and/or over obstacles of all types, make sure you can bang out at least 5–10 wall dips in a row.

• Easier progressions: 1) wall support, 2) scapular wall dip 3) jumping wall dip + negative
• Harder: 1) corner bar dip 2) demon dip 3) top-out tuck planche

Air squat

The air squat is a fundamental movement pattern to master before seriously drilling squatting/jumping/landing skills of greater intensity and complexity. While a good squat is one key to strong, safe landings, squats are often overlooked because they seem boring or basic.

Honestly, they’re not completely wrong — –especially when compared to flashy flips or jumps. However, you should still practice good squats, now and for the rest of your life. Keep squatting whether you want to perform better in sport, build a booty, mitigate injury, or simply become a badass 100-year-old human who still moves well.

In many cases, squatting to hip-below-knee is good enough but you should also develop your full squat. If you can’t squat this low yet, keep working on your mechanics and mobility until your ROM is greater. Make it a point to constantly improve at this basic squat variation but as you get better/stronger, also experiment with deeper ROM, more explosiveness, single-leg variations, adding weight, and jumping/landing.

• Easier: 1) full squat 2) box squat 3) seiza squat bow
• Harder: 1) rail squat 2) squat jump 3) pistol squat

Monkey plant

The monkey plant is a practical, challenging movement that is extra useful for building leg and upper body pushing strength. Think of the monkey plant like a box jump on steroids or an obstacle-based burpee. By using the object to cover more vertical space than during a box jump, you are doing more work (force x distance) via a more complete full-body workout. A monkey plant will bring you to a squatting/standing position on top of an obstacle — useful as you transition into a jump or run. With practice, you can progress your monkey plant toward more difficult progressions like top-outs and double kongs.

• Easier: 1) ground kong 2) box jump 3) wall dip
• Harder: 1) top-out 2) running climb-up 3) jumping climb-up

Knees-to-elbows (dead hang)

Knees-to-elbows from dead hang is a solid full-body exercise with an application to bar skills that require an explosive knees-to-chest tuck. To improve at underbars, pullovers, kips, and laches, you must learn to lift your legs to your torso by using your abs and hip flexors. Also, this general knees-to-chest movement shows up in many more movements like backflips, vaults, and jumps.

• Easier: 1) hang (passive shoulders, pronated grip) 2) hanging tuck hold 3) hanging tuck-up
• Harder: 1) knees-to-elbows (kipping) 2) toes-to-bar 3) windshield wiper

Wall handstand (abs-to-wall)

The handstand is an important fundamental of gymnastics as well as parkour strength training. Handstands increase upper body strength, full-body tension, spatial awareness, and balance. Plus it’s a great way to practice controlling your body while upside down, making it a vital introduction to flips & spins. But it can be scary and frustrating to try freestanding handstands when first starting out. To safely develop a handstand, begin by making friends with a wall; practicing with your stomach to the wall promotes better habits and positioning than back to wall.

• Easier: 1) straight arm front plank 2) scapular push-up 3) handstand wall walk
• Harder: 1) handstand walk 2) handstand push-up 3) freestanding handstand

Broad jump

One of the fundamental power movements of parkour strength training is the broad jump. In parkour, this basic move is applied to gap jumps, precision landings, plyos, and cat leaps. The broad jump is a beauty-full-body exercise for developing power, strength, mobility, and coordination. Additionally, coaches and athletes from parkour to the NFL use the broad jump as an important and elegantly simple athlete assessment.

• Easier: 1) air squat 2) squat jump 3) vertical jump to soft landing
• Harder: 1) consecutive broad jumps 2) broad jump stride 3) quad jump

Quadrupedal movement (forwards, basic)

Quadrupedal movement (QM) is widely used in parkour as both a strength training exercise and a practical skill. The most simple form of QM is the reciprocating (basic), forward-moving variation. This parkour strength training movement is a killer full-body exercise that also develops the coordination and balance skills needed for vaults. In general, QM is useful as a means to get over, under, and through small spaces, navigate across irregular surfaces, and provide extra security when moving at heights.

• Easier: 1) front plank 2) straight arm front plank 3) scapular push-up
• Harder: 1) QM (basic, backwards) 2) QM (basic, backwards, up stairs) 3) cat balance

Vertical jump to soft landing

The vertical jump to soft landing is a parkour strength training spin-off of an already well-known and useful exercise, the vertical jump. Vertical jumps build explosive jumping power while the soft landing develops the eccentric leg strength and skill needed for lovely landings. Landing with the intent of general softness or silence can be effective ways to fortify your technique and increase your ability to safely absorb impact.

• Easier: 1) full squat 2) air squat 3) squat jump
• Harder: 1) tuck jump to soft landing 2) box jump 3) depth jump for height

Pull-up (dead-hang)

While kipping pull-ups are generally more similar to practical parkour movements, you should first develop your dead hang pull-up. The relatively simple and safe dead hang pull-up is one of the best exercises for building the upper body pulling strength needed for better brachiating, swinging, traversing, and general climbing skills. Once you can do at least 5–10 dead hang pull-ups with perfect form, start practicing more complex pulling movements like the kipping pull-up, kipping muscle-up, and gymnastics kip.

• Easier: 1) passive bar hang 2) scapular pull-up 3) jumping pull-up + negative
• Harder: 1) cat hang pull-up 2) high pull-up (dead hang, chest to bar) 3) muscle-up

LEARN MORE

If you want to learn more about parkour strength training or parkour in general, check out my book, training programs, or online coaching. If you’re currently sitting there thinking:

“Hmm…looks interesting but I’m not even close to doing any of those.”

or…

“Yo, way too easy man.”

It’s cool, I got you both. Here’s an article I wrote about the most simple parkour strength movements. And this one on intermediate parkour strength movements.

Lastly, here are a few of my YouTube playlists with hundreds of other parkour strength training video demos, categorized by fitness level:

• PST for untrained beginners
• For trained beginners
• Intermediate
• Advanced

Ryan Ford is author of Parkour Strength Training & founder of ParkourEDU and Apex School of Movement.