Adjustments: If you don’t have a barbell, hold a kettlebell or dumbbells in the front rack position. If spiderman pull-ups are too challenging, scale back to regular pull-ups, or jumping/eccentric pull-ups as necessary. If ring dips are out of your grasp, try jumping/eccentric dips, or bench dips for a beginner option. 

How I did it: 185 lbs for front squats, + 25 lbs extra for the ring dips. 

Yet for those of us who aren’t professional athletes, being well-rounded is one of the best accolades out there.

A well-rounded athlete can hold his or her own across a variety of sports. She can kick butt on a trail run, dominate a ski hill, and thrown down in a game of ultimate. A well-rounded athlete can also transition to a new activity—bike polo, anyone?—without fear of thrashing his body.

In short, the well-rounded athlete is ready for any physical challenge that might come at them.

The 49 tactics listed below are a collection of the standout insights from a career in helping people move better. They aren’t listed in any meaningful order. They also aren’t listed as a brain dump of every single strength or movement-related cue possible. Instead, think of them as a selection of targets to build you into a more robust, more capable athlete.

Wherever you are at in your athletic training, hopefully at least one or two of the tips will be useful. If you’ve been on the strength and conditioning grind for a long time, much of this will be a reminder. Some of it might be a little unique, if not controversial. Becoming a well-rounded athlete is process of improvement and innovation, so adjust as needed.

As Bruce Lee said: Absorb what is useful, disregard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.

1. Commit to a mobility practice. Fight your body’s tendency to lose flexibility with age and settle in for 5 to 10 minutes of mobility each day.
2. Have a comrade, better yet a team. Training with one or more athletes keeps you accountable, and it’ll push your harder than on a solo session.
3. Schedule it. Mark your calendar with play dates and training days, and then let nothing keep you from them. Your physical and mental health depends on it.
4. Be able to name and demonstrate at least two of your favorite yoga poses. My favorites are the pigeon and revolved lunge pose. Anything that opens your hips and strengthens the spine are excellent options. Experiment and find the duo that your body craves.
5. Make your home into a den of strength. Set and setting are crucial to any good trip, and the athlete’s journey is no different. Give yourself ample opportunity to get stronger by outfitting your abode with a dedicated workout space.
6. One foot, two foot, go. Sport rarely happens with both feet planted firmly on the ground. Be sure to train single and double leg movement variations.
7. Know when to fold ‘em. Listen to your body and quit while you’re ahead. If you feel a tweak in your ankle or shoulder, back off your training to avoid a muscle tear or worse.
8. Don’t over do it. High intensity is fun and all, but moderation is the path to movement enlightenment.
9. Know when and how to advance your bodyweight skills. At some point your calisthenics are going to need an upgrade. Learn how to use leverage or added weight to your benefit.
10. Play as much you train. Life is suffering to begin with, so why beat your self up in the gym all-of-the time? Get outside and have some fun!
11. Don’t dog aerobic fitness. Jogging and other simple “cardio” activities have a powerful influence on mood and hormonal control. Disregard them at your own peril.
12. Do get-ups. Everyone ends up on the floor at some point. Get back on your feet and build all-around strength with the Turkish get-up and other variations.
13. Have a sexy plank. No one likes a saggy, wet noodle-looking plank. Add a little posterior pelvis tilt, and lock that puppy down.
14. Support yourself off the ground. Be the life of the party with a commanding handstand, planche, and L-sit. Who knows where your shenanigans could lead?
15. Take a strongman class. Don’t worry, you won’t be asked to pull a semi trailer by your teeth. Besides getting a killer workout, you’ll learn a handful lifting variations not found in other gym settings.
16. Clean-up. It’s hard to think of a compound movement as functional as lifting something from the floor to your shoulder. Whether you choose a kettlebell, a sandbag, or barbell, lift that sucker UP!
17. Hold your own in a street workout. Breakdancer you may be not. Yet, that shouldn’t stop you from having a little street credibility. Should you find yourself in the midst of a street workout, be familiar a handful of push-up and pull-up variations. Better yet, see if you can do them plyometrically. Bonus points if you can move in and out of front, back and side levers.
18. Show me your hollow body position. A solid core needs no further explanation.
19. Train loaded carries, like farmer carries, Zercher carries, and fireman carries. After all, you don’t want to get hurt lugging your adventure gear from the parking lot to the mountain, right?
20. Stay supple. Sport breaks you down. To stay in the game for decades of action you need to know how to perform basic bodywork on yourself. Hat tip to Kelly Starrett for lighting the fire.
21. Jump like you mean it. A well-rounded athlete shouldn’t have a weak jump. Train both box jumps and broad jumps, striving for full-body coordination, and max intensity.
22. Learn a parkour climb-up. Muscle-ups are all the rage, but as a well-rounded athlete you should also be able get above a head-height wall in a smooth, synchronized movement.
23. Build a bullet proof low back. Stay out of the doctor’s office and rehab clinic by supporting your back with an abundance of muscle. Next to the good old deadlift, supplement your training with Superman’s, and some time on a Roman chair.
24. Be a movement omnivore. A well-balanced diet includes nutrients from a variety of food sources. Becoming a well-rounded athlete also demands a physical diet made up a many different types of movement.
25. Poise like a dancer. Athletes can benefit tremendously by emulating the kinesthetic awareness of dancers. Strive for body awareness from the top of your head to the tip of your toes with everything that you do.
26. Be only as strong as you need to be. Bulk up with enough muscle to support the demands of your favorite activities, but don’t over do it. More mass demands more effort to move around and a higher energy input to maintain.
27. Keep a list of things NOT to do. As you get older and your cabinet of injuries fills up, record which movements your body hates. Meaning, it’s best to avoid a skill if history has shown it as a guaranteed way for you to get hurt. For me, a bulging cervical disk requires that I avoid activities with prolonged neck extension. Handstand races, I divorce you.
28. Stay agile. Agility is the forgotten stepchild of the health and fitness world. Lace up those metaphorical dancing shoes, and let your twinkle toes shine. Aim to be light on your feet, and fast to change directions.
29. Record yourself on video. Do it for Instagram, of course. But also do it to watch how you move. There’s nothing like immediate visual feedback to help correct a funky movement pattern.
30. Swing heavy. I’m with Tim Ferris on this one—heavy kettlebell swings are one of the simplest tools for maintaining your fitness.
31. Train 6 degrees of core strength. Work your midsection with trunk flexion, extension, side bending, rotation, diagonal patterns, and static bracing like planks and hollow holds.
32. Develop your connective tissue strength. Building muscle is easy. Building the strength of your connective tissues is more challenging. Without a dedicated effort to strengthen your tendons and ligaments you risk becoming sidelined by an injury. Parkour Strength Training by Ryan Ford and me has some great ideas to get you started.
33. When in doubt: Push, Pull, Legs. If you’re ever at a loss for how to design a gym session, you can’t go wrong with some form of upper body pulling, some form of upper body pushing, and some form of leg strengthening. Keep it simple.
34. Practice imperfection. If you don’t periodically load your body in an imperfect manner you won’t be prepared for when things go awry. Be gentle, but be ready.
35. Improve your balance. Adults rarely challenge their balance in the same way that kids do, and the results are scary. Dust off the balance beam and start practicing. Besides staving off a future fall, you might love with how it tickles you inner ear and cerebellum.
36. Hinge like you give a damn. Your backside will thank you. Plus, you won’t break next time you need to dig your gear bag out of a car trunk. Deadlifts are the gold standard, but mix it up with swings, good mornings. and bench-supported hip thrusts.
37. Teach others. You’ve got a stellar pistol squat? Great, show me how I can get there. A movement isn’t really yours until you can help others perform it.
38. Land properly. Whether it’s from a broad jump or a height drop, very few things can make a coach cringe like watching a nasty landing. Learn to protect your knees with safe landing mechanics.
39. Be more bodybuilder, less powerlifter. This isn’t to rag on powerlifters. And, it’s not meant to elevate bodybuilders either. It’s only to say that the well-rounded athlete is better served by focusing on balanced muscle development, than going down the rabbit hole of an ever-greater PR. The squat, deadlift, and bench press are crucial movements, but unless you are a competitive weightlifter they don’t need to be ground out ad nauseam.
40. Incorporate partner-based exercises. Humans are social animals, and let’s face it; training solo can get a little stale. Keep things spicy with some good old-fashioned wheelbarrow races and med ball tosses.
41. Nurture a body that lasts 100 years. Play a mind game with me. Let’s assume that advances in orthopedic surgery were set back to a pre-1900s era. Imagine what life would be like without the advent of arthroscopic surgeries or joint replacements. How would you approach your training and participation in sports? Without the possibility of surgical repair or replacement, you’d probably be a little gentler on your joints, right? Next time you’re contemplating anything with massive impact, ask yourself: What would my 100-year-old self think?
42. Hang out. Bipedal locomotion? Yeah, everyone is doing that. Unless you’re comfortable hanging and swinging by your arms, you’re only halfway to becoming a well-rounded athlete. If you’re a total newbie, start with passive hangs under the monkey bars and work your way up.
43. Fall without getting hurt. Athletes fall down. Heck, everybody falls down. Understand and practice the fundamentals of safe falling so that you don’t wreck yourself. Watch pro skateboarders or judo masters if you need a jumping off point.
44. Train rotational movements. Where the head and shoulder go, the body follows. To be a well-rounded athlete you need to be comfortable adding some spin to your motion. Woodchop lifts, rotating lunges, and diagonal med ball slams are some standbys to employ.
45. Recover. And, not just like one day off every two weeks. Be serious about that stuff. Sleep, eat quality food, hydrate, meditate (if you have the fancy), and then go for a walk. And then do it again. And again. Remember how it felt to be well slept, lazy, and carefree midsummer during high school or college? If you can harness 10% of that in your adult life, then you’re doing well.
46. Meet me at the bar(bell). Building the muscle to be a well-rounded athlete demands moving some weight. And, as any strength and conditioning coach will tell you, the barbell is second to none as the go-to implement to scale your weight training. Load that guy up, and get down to business!
47. Press it overhead. Use one hand or do it with two. Use a jerk or do it strict. Use a kettlebell or dumbbells. The details aren’t important, just be sure to program some type of shoulder pressing into your weekly training.
48. Vary your load placement. Repeating a motion the same way day-in and day-out has the potential to lead to an overuse injury. It also doesn’t fully prepare you for the variability inherent in sport and life. Get in the habit of mixing up how you perform the big strength movements. For an example with squatting, switch between the back squat, front squat, and overhead squat.
49. Be strong to be useful. If you’re looking for a guiding principle to your athletic development, this one is as good as it gets. Run through every situation where you may need to step into the role of hero. Maybe you’ll need to down-climb to assist an injured mountaineer. Maybe you’ll need to head out on an impromptu trail run to find a lost friend. Do some brainstorming, and then pursue those fitness activities that prepare you for maximal usefulness. Follow this one principle, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a well-rounded athlete.

For more ideas on how to craft yourself into a well-rounded athlete, pick-up the 2nd edition of the Mad Skills Exercise Encyclopedia. The new release has over 1000 bodyweight and free weight movements to help you perform better, and build a body that lasts.

What additional tactics do you use in your training? Feel free to post your favorites so that we can all improve and keep playing longer!

Whether you coach your own clients or you simply enjoy exercising with friends, it’s a creative and crazy-hard finish to a workout. Here’s how to play it:

Structure of the game

Have your athletes form a circle on the ground, in a push-up position. Their heads should point into the circle, and their feet should point outward. Space people far enough apart that they won’t bang heads or bump elbows once they’re moving.

The more people that you have playing the game, the better. Strive for at least 4 participants. You can play it with less than that, but it isn’t as fun.

The game starts with one player doing a few push-ups. Everyone else should be to holding the top, plank position during this time. Once the first player has done his or her reps, the next person – going clockwise – repeats the same number of push-ups that the first person did.

Besides doing the first person’s reps, the second person must add at least one push-up to the total number. He or she could add one rep, or as many extra as they have the stamina for.

For example, if the first person did 20 push-ups, then the second person would have to do at least 21 push-ups. He or she could do 25, 30, or even 40, but 21 is the minimum to be completed.

If that person can’t complete the number of previous push-ups completed plus one more, then that he or she is out of the game.

Assuming that that the second athlete did the required reps, plus one or more, then the third person then completes the number of added push-ups that the second person did. If it was only one push-up, then that is all required. Yet. Like the second person, he or she must add at one or more push-ups on top of the required number.

The game proceeds in this manner, with each player performing the previous number of added reps, plus contributing however many more they can muster.

How do you win?

As mentioned above, whenever someone can’t complete the previous number of added push-ups plus one, then he or she drops out. Round and round, the goal is to proceed through the circle repping out push-ups until you are the only one left in the game.

The premise sounds simple, but it’s smart to use some strategy.

When should you keep your reps low? When should you crank out as many as possible? The key is to pay attention to your neighbors, and monitor your fatigue level. There will be time to go easy, and a time to go hard. Play it right and you’ll be the victor.

One more rule

There is one final rule that needs to be observed. The longer that the game goes on, the more that the players will get tired of holding the plank position. People will want to drop to their knees for a second, but it isn’t allowed.

To stay in the game you have to remain off the ground, supported only by your hands and feet.

Dropping to your knees disqualifies you.

You must stay elevated in a plank position. It’s okay to shift your weight side-to-side, or rock forward and backward a little, but once your knees drop down, you’re done.

Variations

For athletes who want a more challenging game, up the ante with clapping push-ups or other plyometric variations. Add resistance bands or weight plates for extra effort. Try one-armed push-ups. Take things vertical with burpees. I’m sure you can come up with your own wicked mutation.

Let me know how it goes. If you have any alterations, recommendations, or different rules, post them below. Have fun!

You probably have a few of exercises that you use in heavy rotation. That’s to be expected.

However, we all know that exposure to a wide range of stimuli is important to a strong immune system. And in the same way, a diversity of movement is important to your physical wellbeing.

Thus, if you aren’t incorporating a large arsenal of movement within your workouts, then your health and fitness aren’t as robust as they could be.

Consider these reasons for using more variation in your exercise routine:

Life is unpredictable

The physical demands encountered in the real world are rarely symmetric or linear. Imagine how you hoist a 50 lb dog food bag from a shopping cart to the trunk of your car. It’s a complex movement. You bend over or squat, lift, twist, and are probably taking a few steps with your feet. How often do you train that specific combination of movements at the gym? You probably don’t, and that is okay. Yet, if your training doesn’t involve a variety of lifting, loaded carries, and rotational movements, than you are missing out.

Another example could be carrying an awkward piece of furniture up a flight of stairs. In this case, one arm is probably more loaded than the other. There is also likely some weird bending at your waist as you squeeze through tight spots. If you aren’t used to training a wide spectrum of movement, then it’s a prime scenario for getting injured.

Now, add in the speed and quick reactions that are needed during your favorite sport. Once the adrenaline surges, you’ll be hopping on one foot, spinning around, and recovering from getting thrown off balance. By its nature, athletic activity is chaotic. The more movement variety that you are familiar with, the better prepared you’ll be to play at your highest level.

Prevention of overuse injuries

Repeating the same motion over and over puts you at risk for developing a repetitive-use injury. Golf and tennis elbow are two well-known examples. Musicians and factory workers also develop musculoskeletal injuries due to how they use their bodies. Similarly, if you only exercise in one specific manner day-in and day-out, you are setting yourself up for tissue damage.

By varying your hand placement, the angle of pull or push, and also the tools used during your workouts you can stave off injury. Instead of only working on pull-ups with your hands in a pronated position, switch your grip for supinated chin-ups. Hammering away at classic deadlifts is a time-tested way to get stronger, but if you don’t mix it up with sumo or stiff-legged variations then you might run into problems down the line. Adding variability into your fitness isn’t just fun – it plays an important role in keeping you healthy.

Brain health

Your brain is a complex organ that helps you move and manipulate objects in a  3-D world. When you fail to use your body in a variety ways, then your brain is being starved of an important input. Like the old saying goes, you either use it or lose it.

Psychiatrist Dr. John Ratey  talks about how movement complexity is important for neurological health in his excellent book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. One of my favorite sections is where he talks about how technical physical challenges, like martial arts, can help school children improve their focus and their grades.

But, it’s not just for young people.

In my job as a physical therapist, I work with many older people in their 70s, 80s, and beyond. Those who push themselves to keep gardening, take dance class, or practice yoga, are more vibrant and healthy than those with a more impoverished movement skill-set. Obviously, the causality runs both ways. Whenever you’re feeling a little stagnant, add more vitamin M(ovement) to your routine.

Self expression

Exercise doesn’t need to be one size fits all. Maybe you don’t have the required mobility or coordination to make a movement work. Maybe a prior injury makes an exercise unsafe to perform. Maybe it simply doesn’t feel right to you.

With so many different ways to move, if an exercise isn’t working, just find a variation that feels better. Adjust your stance. Fine-tune the direction of travel. Find a different weight or other implement that you’re better able to control. Your body is unique to you alone; so don’t feel pressured to do what everyone else is doing. Familiarity with a large variety of movement skills lets you settle on the exercises that best fit your personal needs.

Boredom

Life can get monotonous. And, let’s face it; if you are bored when working out, then you’re less likely to do it again tomorrow. Training time should be a refuge from the tedium.

Think of how you use different spices when cooking. By varying between Indian, Thai, and Spanish flavors, you don’t burn out eating the same thing day after day. Approach your fitness the same way. You haven’t done any rotational movements in a while? Add some twists to your next workout. Getting tired of barbell squats? Challenge yourself with a heavy sandbag. Use exercise variety to spice things up, so that you’re more likely to stick with your training.

Now, there is one major caveat to using variety in your exercise routine: You shouldn’t be getting fancy if you don’t have mastery of the basics. There is no point add complexity when you’re struggling with simple movements.

When you’re starting out on your fitness journey, first strive for good form on a handful of skills. Depending on you goals, those could be push-ups, dips, pull-ups, squats, or deadlifts. Before loading anything asymmetrically, be sure that you can do it with equal weight bearing. Likewise, before adding extra degrees of motion, be sure that you do the simplest variation without difficulty.

It’s like the cooking analogy again. Before making a soufflé, you should first be able to cook a hard boiled egg. Conquer the basics, and then open yourself to variety.

***

In case you missed it, the first edition of the Mad Skills Exercise Encyclopedia came out in 2013. It has over 700 exercise variations, and is a great resource for athletes, coaches, and trainers. I haven’t announced a release date yet, but I’m currently working on a second edition, with a ton of new movements.

Stay tuned.

It’s time we apply the same idea to how you build strength.

Watch a few late night infomercials or walk the exercise aisle of a box store. You’ll be overwhelmed with new fitness products. A similar phenomenon happens on social media. Tune in to Instagram or Facebook, and you’ll see people cranking through some crazy, inventive exercises.

Before you open your wallet or drop to the floor to imitate the 8-part calisthenics routine of a celebrity trainer, stop and ask yourself: Would previous generations recognize the new equipment or movements as a way that helped people get stronger? If they wouldn’t appreciate it as something that obviously takes strength to perform, then it doesn’t belong in your strength training.

My maternal grandfather was a muscular, barrel-chested Midwesterner. He had his own business as a plumber. Day-in and day-out he made a living carrying lead pipe, busting up concrete, and wrestling with wrenches. He died when I was young, so I never got to ask him, but I suspect that he didn’t have a specific exercise routine. His work was all that were necessary to keep his body thick with muscle.

Perhaps your grandpa didn’t have a physically demanding job. Yet, go back enough decades, and I’m sure that at some point you had a relative who worked manual labor. There might not be the pictures to prove it, but the chances are good that he or she was built solid.

Imagine transporting that relative to the present day. Would that person recognize how to use the colored resistance bands, the thigh squeezers, or the other contraptions sold at an exercise store? I doubt it. The use of those items isn’t intuitive. He or she might find them amusing, like a bunch of toys to play around on, but they wouldn’t be seen as tools for strength development.

Back in the day, you built strength by lifting, carrying, pulling, or pushing heavy weight. You also built it by commanding your body to perform simple movements against gravity. You climbed a rope, pulled yourself above an overhead structure, or dipped between parallel bars.

The underlying principle to strength development hasn’t changed over our evolution. Progressive overload remains the name of game. Either continue to add load to your weight training, or increase the amount of leverage and time under tension to bodyweight skills.

Gymnastics-type movements like levers, L-sits, and planches, might seem foreign to your grandparents, yet I bet that they would still applaud them as feats of strength. Those types of movement are immediately and cross-culturally understand as demanding a high-degree of might.

The point is that we need to be better consumers of fitness products and trends. Be wary of advertisements that claim how a new device will help you build muscle. Unless you are rebounding from a few months of bedrest, there are very few items sold on TV or in your supermarket that will help you build muscle in a meaningful way. Similarly, be skeptical when you hear about some hot new exercise to add to your workout routine. The design of the human body is hundreds of thousands of years old. The stimulus to build muscle hasn’t changed over the millennia. Go back a few paragraphs to what I said about progressive overload.

To better identify what tools and exercises qualify as good for building strength, let’s return to the analogy of your grandparents’ cooking and nutrition. Two big concepts stick out when we consider what is on the shelves of our grocery stores today versus a few decades ago. First, the ingredient list on modern store-bought food is out of control. There are often dozens of ingredients, many with highly scientific names. Your grandparents wouldn’t even recognize most of what is in there. Their foods were made from a few simple ingredients, like eggs, flour, milk, butter, salt, and pepper. Second, the array of food products on the market today is disorienting. Back in the day, your food choices were limited to breads, pastas, meats, veggies, fruits, nuts, and dairy items. They might have been combined into something like a soup, or perhaps they came in variety of forms like a piece of French bread, a kaiser roll, or a biscuit. Either way, there were distinct and recognizable categories of foods. It’s much less clear today. Think about chicken nuggets made of soybeans. The amount of processing to achieve such a thing is no small feat. And unfortunately, all of the manufacturing doesn’t add any nutritional value.

So, from that perspective, ask yourself these two questions about your strength training routine:

1. What materials or tools are being used during your workout? Be skeptical of anything made of from plastic. If a device looks like it was cooked-up by a designer and then pitched to a marketing department, stay away. Iron, wood, canvas, leather, and rope were all that your grandparents needed. They’ll work fine for you too.
2. Does a piece of equipment or movement seem overly complex? Remember to think in terms of categories. Either you push, pull, lift, carry, or suspend from it, or you say goodbye. Balancing on a wobble board while trying to lift a kettlebell might be challenging, but it isn’t effective for building muscle. Use as many variations as you want, but limit yourself to a few basic categories like deadlifts, squats, dips, presses, and pull-ups.

People who say that cooking from whole foods like your grandparents did is too expensive or time consuming, have it wrong. It might take a little extra time to buy the raw ingredients and learn the recipes, but once you’ve done the prep you’ll have a lifetime of good nutrition. Ditto for strength development. It might take some time and energy to learn from a qualified coach or stock your home gym, but after that work is done the path to getting stronger is simple.

As someone who has written an exercise encyclopedia with hundreds movements, I don’t mean to disparage the breadth of fitness techniques available today. There are many different reasons why you might want to perform a certain exercise. You could be going for an aerobic burn. You could be on working on agility or trying to improve your stability. You could even be doing something just for the fun of it.

However, getting stronger in the truest sense of the word demands its own protected pillar. Muscle mass is so fundamentally tied with your health, that to be misled in its pursuit is dangerous to your wellbeing. If you’re ever at a loss for whether or not a tool or movement will help you build muscle, remember the question: What would your grandparents think?

Imagine being able to soar above the earth like Superman, while also being able to rip a telephone pole from the ground like the Hulk. It is weightlessness and pure strength combined into a single drill.

In this tutorial, I am going to teach you how to do an intermediate flag variation, called a shoulder flag.

The shoulder flag is a step down from the full human flag, in which you suspend yourself sideways between two outstretched arms. I wouldn’t classify it as a beginner drill either — it requires a substantial amount of grip, shoulder, and core strength.

If you are starting out with calisthenics and street workouts, you should try a beginner movement known as elbow flag. Fans of Al Kavadlo’s work will know of the elbow flag by its other name, the clutch flag.

Now, the best way to describe a shoulder flag is that you start by creating a vise grip between your hands, a vertical pole, and the meaty part of your upper shoulder. You are basically trying to make a pole sandwich between your upper trap and both hands. Once the pole is positioned correctly between your neck and your shoulder, you hop your lower body above the ground, while pulling through your arms as strong as you can. From there, you gradually extend your torso and legs until they are horizontal to the ground.

Obviously, the farther you extend your body, the more effort will be involved.

With that in mind, the way to work your way up to the full position is to master a few easier positions

Easier variations

The first one is the tuck shoulder flag. Suck your knees into your chest and curl into a tight ball. The more compressed you stay, the easier it is to hold the position.

After you can consistently hold a tuck shoulder flag for 10 or more seconds, try opening into a more extended position.

One option is to extend one leg outward, while keeping your other leg tucked. For lack of a better term, you can call this position a single leg shoulder flag.

The other option is to straddle your legs apart. Beginners will initially maintain slight flexion through your hips. The stronger you become, the lower you should position your legs. Remember, the goal is to obtain a perfectly straight and horizontal alignment.

Once you have a solid straddle shoulder flag under control, work to pull your feet together. As you can see in the picture below, my full lay shoulder flag needs some work.

See how there is little bit of bend at my waist? I should form a straight line through my trunk and legs.

Difficulties and supplemental exercises

One of the most challenging aspects of learning these flag variations centers upon your ability to gauge where your body is in space. You might think you are horizontal with the ground, but you could be WAY off.

The solutions are either to film yourself, or work with a training partner. The side view is essential for assessing how parallel with the ground you are. Have your friend spot your alignment, or capture yourself on video.

After enough feedback, you will eventually be able to sense the right position on your own.

The second major fault entails slipping down the pole. Poor grip and shoulder strength are your enemies here. If you find yourself in this situation, go back and work on a few basic bodyweight exercises.

The main exercises to work on include the passive hang and the pull-up. If you cannot hang beneath a bar for 30 or more seconds, or do at least 10 dead hang pull-ups, you will not have the strength for the shoulder flag.

Toes-to-bar leg raises are another great core strength exercise that also target your grip and shoulder.

Speaking of core strength, the ultimate calisthenics drill to help you obtain a shoulder flag is known as a dragon flag.

To do a dragon flag, find a park bench or a set of bleachers without a backrest. Lie down and use both hands to grasp the bench above your shoulders, near your head. Next, raise your lower body off the bench so that your feet point toward the sky.

Beginners should stay in a tuck. Intermediate athletes can open up into a more extended position. As with the shoulder flag, the more laid out you are, the more challenging it becomes.

Here comes the hard part. After you have raised your lower body off the bench, you are going to slowly drop your feet back towards the ground. The idea is to generate whole-body tension, from your shoulders all the way to your toes.

Before returning to rest, pause and hold your body at a low angle. See if you can hold the position for a few breaths, and then gently drop your butt on the bench again. Try a couple of repetitions, staying absolutely tight through your shoulders, trunk, and hips.

Don’t be ashamed if you struggle with the dragon flag. It can take a while to master. Working on planks and hollow holds are a few good supplements to further strengthen your midsection.

Conclusion

One of the best aspects of bodyweight strength training is that your journey never ends. You always have a new movement or skill to work toward.

It is also pretty cool to watch how strength gains in one position will carry over to other positions. For example, the front lever and the full human flag are two skills that will benefit from training the shoulder flag progression outlined above.

By the way, the more time you spend training these holds, the faster you improve. One session a month will not cut it. Finding time for a few 15-minute sessions each week will really accelerate your progress. Feel free to tag me on Instagram so I can see how things are coming along.

Finally, please leave any comments or questions you have in the section below.

Good luck training, and be sure to download the Mad Skills Exercise Workbook!

Overall, your training has been going really good, but you’re looking for a way to spice things up.

Enter the realm of “short-form” versus “long-form” training missions.

Although the terms short-form and long-form are arbitrary, they reflect an interesting distinction.

The idea is this: If your routine basically looks the same and lasts about the same duration every trip out the door, than you aren’t experiencing the full spectrum of parkour.

Getting in a rut is easy. You know the obstacles and features at your local park. You can run over and drill a flow that you’ve been working on without too much thought. You know the best places to train your climb-ups, precisions, and work on your upper body conditioning. You’ve got the spot dialed.

I understand, and often succumb to the ease of a well-known routine. Heck, there is this killer spot just a block from my house, why would I bother searching out another place to train!

Okay, so the situation described above encompasses what I would refer to as a short-form training session. You hit up 1 or 2 spots for about 30 to 60 minute of total training time. You drill some techniques and also fit in a bit of conditioning. Although it didn’t last a long time, your body feels good. You burned off some steam, and were able to see some progress in your skills.

Nothing wrong with that.

Short little missions definitely get the job done when you have a packed schedule. They are convenient after a full day of work and will certainly fulfill your need for a daily movement fix.

However, if you can carve out a bit more time, something magical starts to happen once you take your training above 2 hours.

At the most superficial level, when you explore your city via a long-form mission you’ll encounter unique obstacles and interesting challenges. A quick session in your local park can’t touch the exposure to newfound features that you’ll enjoy on a longer walkabout. Aside from the thrill of finding new training spots, there is a simple pleasure in learning about the different streets, buildings, public areas, and hidden gems that you might not have found before. It is a very grounding experience, joyous really, to connect with the place you live in this manner.

Next up, on longer training sessions you’ll notice that endurance becomes a new dimension to conquer. Do you have the fortitude to keep pushing your body when it has been on the go for two or more hours? Tired, fatigued, and possibly cramping up, here is where you learn your true strength. Can you muster the nerve to keep pushing yourself, drilling jumps, climbs, and vaults, when your body is screaming to throw in the towel and head home?

If you’ve ventured far and public transport isn’t readily accessible, the need to pace yourself becomes crucial. Rather than end up a mess, dead tired, and unable carry yourself home, you must be smart about energy expenditure. Carrying water and extra calories makes a lot of sense if you’ll be somewhere without a convenience store. Be strategic. Think about it like a mini adventure, with the goal of venturing out for a few hours, but still making it home in one piece.

Personally, I like to run from one spot to another. I enjoy firing up my cardio-respiratory engine, feeling my chest heave, and working to master my breathing.

Running between different training spots on a longer mission isn’t necessary, but it does add to the sense of accomplishment. Non-stop, moderate-intensity motion forces you to dig deep and tap reserves that aren’t challenged in our daily life.

How far you venture, and whether you walk or jog are fun variables to tinker. Could you make it an all day expedition, covering 10 or more miles? What would a parkour marathon look like?

To give you an idea of distances and duration, these two screen captures (via the Map My Run app) illustrate the differences between a short and long form session. For the short mission, I was out and about for under 55 minutes and hit up 2 different spots in that time. The distance covered was negligible, less than 2 miles, but given the obstacle-based conditioning, it was still a solid little workout.

Compare that to the longer mission: In nearly 2.5 hours my training partner and I covered 4.7 miles. Although not a huge distance, it provided enough variety to hit-up about 5 or 6 distinct spots. With that amount of unique terrain, we encountered enough obstacles to almost exhaust our full parkour vocabularies.

And, to be honest, even after 2.5 hours of training, we could have kept on going were it not for other commitments that day. What’s more, all of that movement actually leaves you in a heightened state. Your brain is truly awake and ready to conquer other challenges.

What would it feel like to crush 5 hours of training? How much ground would you cover?

Only one way to find out! See you outside.

It sounds a lot like parkour for a reason. It is the French word for “course” and is undoubtedly the root word for the discipline, as we know it today. You might be familiar with it from the term “parcours du combattant” which is the French military obstacle-training regimen. Or perhaps, you’ve run across a “parcours de santé”, which are the fitness trails made out of wood and metal that you can find in some suburban parks.

Bottom line, for our purposes, a parcours is an obstacle course.

And, if you’re looking to advance your parkour conditioning, you should explore how to set one up as they can give you a wicked cardiovascular and metabolic burn.

I recently attended Revolution Parkour’s Friday evening parcours session, and found it to be an awesome way to end the workweek. Let me try to recount how they set it up, so that you can get a feel for creating your own.

First of all, 3 parcours runs were established that entailed approximately 5 distinct movement challenges.* For instance, one course consisted of a wall run, a height drop, a rope net traverse, a 10-foot bouldering climb, and another height drop. Another course began with a cat leap, to a climb-up, a height drop, vault, and then finished with a precision jump.

The commonality is that there was an equal mix of vertical and horizontal motion, as well as an attempt to hit upon a variety of different parkour skills.

Once the route for each parcours was determined, the participants were split into small groups and were tasked with running through a single course as many times as they could during a designated time period. I believe each interval was 10 minutes, but I could be wrong.

Run, climb, drop, vault, traverse, jump. Loop back through the course.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Over and over again for 10 minutes, this became exhausting pretty quickly. I was able to complete about 7 rounds for each course, and recall that the instructor, Matt, said his elite students could do 10 to 11 runs through.

Once the timer buzzed, we regrouped and rested for a few minutes. Then the whole process started over, twice more through the other runs.

The parcours training session lasted about an hour, including a group warm-up and cool-down. The combination of drilling skills, non-stop movement, and the heavy vertical component resulted in a phenomenally hard workout.

You have probably heard how CrossFit workouts can leave their participants in a puddle of sweat on the floor afterwards?

Well, running a dedicated parcours session pretty much achieves the same thing.

Plus, you get to have fun while doing it!

Whether you are a private coach, run your own gym, or are just getting started in parkour, you should definitely add some parcours-type intervals to your training.

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*When you design your own parcours, feel free to take liberty with however many movements/challenges you incorporate. Try a course made out of 3 different movements versus one with 10 skills. The key thing is that you loop back through it, over and over again.

If you’re like me, and assuming that you can already do a pull-up, you’ve probably wondered  how you can get stronger with pull-ups. More specifically, when should you start to add additional weight to your pull-ups?

Well, I just found a great explanation of when to add extra resistance from the book Practical Programming for Strength Training from Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore.

The rationale comes from a basic understanding of how repetition schemes relate to the different goals of strength, power, and endurance. 

If your goal is to build muscle mass and pure strength, then you should be reaching fatigue at 1-5 reps of a given exercise. If power is your goal, then fatigue  should be met over 8 to 12 reps. Endurance on the other hand is built through rep schemes worked from 15-20+ repetitions.

So… To develop monstrous pull-up ability, your first goal should be to be able to do 15 continuous pull-ups. Once you can whip out 15 pull-ups in 1 go then it’s time to look into adding weight.

How much should you add?

Look to the rep scheme goals for guidance. Pure strength and power are the two things that will help you get up and over an elevated obstacle with the greatest efficiency. Thus, my suggestion is to add enough weight that you are fatigued at a range between 5 and 10 reps. If you can still do 12+ reps with the extra weight you’re venturing into endurance territory and it won’t necessary make you faster at a single muscle-up or climb-up (but it would help you build the ability to climb a tall ladder/tree/cliff face).

Here are a few good ways to add weight to your pull-ups:

1. Fanny pack with weight

2. Dumbbell between your legs

3. Backpack with weight

4.Weight vest

We recently completed this interview, and I’m sure you’ll find his reflections on parkour as some of the most elegant on the planet. He knows his stuff and has been putting out some awesome tutorials. If you’re looking for help take your training to the next level – just keep an eye on whatever Rafe is talking about!

Q: Tell me a little bit about yourself. I know you are the co-founder of Parkour Visions and from what I can gather from Facebook, you have an interest in anthropology. What else would you like the readers to know about you?

A:  Yes, I co-founded Parkour Visions with Tyson Cecka, and I was an Anthropology major in college and have been interested in the subject since I was a kid. I started reading old anthropology textbooks and ethnographies in my early teens and I continue to follow development in behavioral genetics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and human evolution closely. However most of the best information on human nature comes out of other fields at this point.

The study of human behavior and evolution definitely contributes greatly to my teaching of parkour.
 My approach to parkour is also informed by  studying martial arts throughout childhood, including brazilian jiu jitsu, Muay thai, Aikido and Tang Soo Do, and coaching gymnastics and CrossFit as a young adult.

I also grew up in the hippie community at the end of a dirt road with acres of forest all around and the freedom to explore them as much as I wanted. That experience plays a huge part in my parkour practice.

Q: As a coach for many years now, what are the biggest fitness deficiencies that you see parkour-newcomers demonstrate? What sort of strength and conditioning advice do give for the student who is just starting at your gym?

A: Most students who come for their first class are quite weak; it’s uncommon for people to be able to do a single pull-up. They’re also usually very limited in mobility, particularly in ankle dorsiflexion, every aspect of hip range of motion , and every aspect of thoracic extension and shoulder range of motion. The biggest limiting factors for novice traceurs are the strength to pull themselves up and over a wall and the proper mobility and stability to land well and absorb impact.

The basics to get a student up to speed are simple: do low impact parkour focusing on good mechanics complemented by basic calisthenics, squat, push up and pull up working to improve motor patterning and mobility as well as strength. The secret to a really successful program is understanding how deep the basics go and how to scale and develop them appropriately. Most people think they can do a push up but are actually far from doing it correctly and in such a way that it will optimally develop strength and complement their movement practice.

Q: When I visited your gym a few months ago I was impressed by a large area dedicated to weight training with a few power racks, a Roman chair and many kettlebells. Aside from dead lifts and squats, what are a few “must-do” weighted exercises that you encourage your athletes to perform?

A:  I actually don’t think there are any must-do strength and conditioning exercises in parkour that apply to everybody. The only must-do for parkour is parkour. There is a certain mindset from the fitness community that has crossed over into parkour – the lionization of exercise for exercise sake with very little attention paid to the goal of the exercise what it is supposed to train you for. Parkour is conditioning for parkour,  if you’re doing something else to help your parkour it must be more effective for developing towards a specific goal.

Given the set of weaknesses we mentioned earlier, almost everyone we work with needs to squat, hip hinge (deadlifts and similar exercises), do push ups, rows, and pull ups, and that is probably a good list for most novice athletes.  But we need to remember why we are training those exercises. It is too easy for the exercise to become the goal and for people to lose sight of what they are actually trying to change its also too easy to fall into the exercise ADHD mindset and try to do every good exercise. There are 100’s of exercises that are are potentially useful when applied intelligently towards someone’s goals, but any given athlete only really needs to be working on a handful.

In addition to the exercises listed above, with intermediate athletes we start adding in split squats and romanian deadlifts if they have mobility weaknesses 

With advanced athletes we do complex weight training plyometrics and add work on dips, muscle ups, gymnastics levers, planches and handstand presses depending on their goals. 

Finally glute ham raises, back extension, sled drags, farmers walks, and glute bridges, single leg squats, and various mobilizations and prehab movements all make appearances based on a given athlete’s needs.

Q: Can you give some key advice for people who are looking to improve their standing broad jump? 

Start by training the standing broad jump in an intelligent way. I see lots of traceurs advocating doing 100 reps of precisions and the like. A better idea is to train 5 to 10 sets of 3 jumps with full rest between sets, focused on jumping as far as possible on every jump. If you are getting less than 95 percent of your best jump for 2 reps in a row, stop. 

The next question is what is the limiting factor on your jump? Film your jump; are you consistently co-ordinating your arm movement with your hips? Are arms fully extended behind the body at the peak hip depth? Are they fully flexed overhead at full hip extension? Is your angle at take-off consistently 45 degrees? If not, then work on technique.

Next look at the movement signature. How fast are you dropping down through the eccentric? If it is slow, focus on squats and depth jumps to build up your ability to load eccentrically and produce a stronger reflexive contraction. Next, look at positioning at the bottom of  the eccentric; is your back rounding, are your knees collapsing inwards? If so, work on deadlifts, glute activation, and lateral stability; to improve your ability to hold neutral positions during the amortization phase (the transition between the downwards and upwards part of the jump). Finally, look at how deep you can get in your setup and how much hip extension you get at the end of the jump. To improve that, work on split squats to open up your hip extension and strengthen your glutes and work on your squat mobility. This will also help you get distance at the end of the jump by improving your compression.

Vince Cossette is an example of an athlete who loads quickly, holds good position and has great depth and hip extension. Particularly pay attention to how deeply he loads and how far into hyperextension his hips go.


Q: We all know that using a weight vest is a great way to add resistance to classic body-weight exercises. What do you think of actually training while wearing one, i.e. running obstacles with a vest?

A: I have not experimented much with the use of a weight vest in parkour skill training. I would be worried about negative skill transfer and developing competing motor programs for any full on course work or more complex skills like kongs, cats, hurdles, speed vaults etc. I would use it solely for training simple jumps and only when the skill is mastered. If your standing broad jump does not have a consistent take off angle, you have no business trying to do it while dealing with the extra problem of a weight vest.

Q: Do you subscribe to any particular programming schedule or philosophy in your weight training? 

A: My biggest influence right now is Sparta Performance Science. For our higher level athletes we do weight training and plyometric complexes progressing both in weight and density like Sparta advocates. So my training for instance looks like this:
 3x 7 Split squats, 6 bounds x2 progressing in autoregulated fashion by either doing it in less time, 4 minutes per set to 3:30-3:00-2:30 or by adding weight.

 I weight train 2 x week when I can, for about 45 minutes. The rest of my training time is devoted to sprinting, jumping, practicing parkour skill and mobility and recovery.

Q: Are you currently focused on improving your skill in any movement in particular? What is it and why the emphasis?

My last real focused training cycle was in preparation for the Origins Parkour NAPC competition. I worked extensively on diving kongs and kong to precisions. I got up to an 8 foot kong to precision and 10 foot double kong in the gym. My next goal is to nail down my approach run ups and my long jumps and strides

Q: Who in the sports or fitness world has had the greatest impact on your thoughts about athletic performance?

A: Most recently I have been inspired by and influenced by the aforementioned Sparta Performance Science for strength and conditioning, Ido Portal for mobility, movement complexity, and training method, Kelly Starret for mobility and understanding of movement, Bo Schexnayder for understanding jumping and a local track coach Mike Cunliffe on understanding sprinting technique. In the past I have gotten a lot of value out of Steven Low, Mark Rippetoe and Vladimir Zatsiorsky.

Q: Ryan Ford and APEX Movement have promoted the 5-rep climb-up as an epic measure of power and efficiency. Do you have a favorite performance test for your athletes?

A: My experience with tests is that the major value of a test is taking the time to really look at a movement in depth and learning to look for the various elements of movement quality. Then you take that back to observing athletes do parkour and you find you can see the same things by just watching them train that is the best performance test. I can watch someone step vault and learn a lot about their mobility, stabilization, strength and coordination. A handstand or swing tells me a lot about someone’s shoulders, etc. 

The big test we are using recently is just the standing broad jump to look at different elements of force production the rate of eccentric force production stability during amortization and ability to dig deep and drive fully through the hips that I mentioned earlier.

Q: I love the video you did for Prana, demonstrating parkour in a forest setting, and I’ve also heard that you’re an epic tree-climber. Would you expand your thoughts on training in nature versus the urban environment? 

The short version is
:

• Nature is what we evolved to move through.
• Being in nature makes up happy.
• Natural environments are usually easier on the body.
• Natural environments offer a more complex environment, which develops more intelligent, sensitive, and transferable movement capacities.
• It’s the forgotten aspect of parkour and it needs to be rediscovered.

Parkour is brilliant because it is a meme that has conditioned our brains to be triggered to play in the urban environment in new and powerful ways, which is a  wonderful and empowering thing. I think though that that association between parkour and urban has become too strong and people are missing an element of the practice that can be intensely rewarding, that really is innately more rewarding. So, like the title of my video, I believe that doing parkour in nature is literally returning to the source of the movement. 

The Yamakasi say that the body of L’art du deplacment (the other term for parkour) was born in Evry (which is urban) but the spirit was born in Sarcelles (a forested area). However, that aspect is forgotten by most of the community.

I personally like training in natural environments better and I would guess that actually most people would if exposed to it. We watch videos of people jumping between buildings and vaulting concrete walls and so that’s what we think parkour is.

To me, parkour is rooted in the movement play that is innate in all of us and that children especially will express given a chance. We want to climb, jump and run for a reason; those skills were vital to our survival as a species through the vast majority of our evolution. We are built with psychological triggers to engage those play capacities when given a chance, and natural environments are more potent triggers because thats what we evolved to respond to.

Being in nature in general is just good for us it engages our attention in distinct way that is restorative; for instance, when we are tired a walk in the woods has been found to be as good for the brain as a nap. Parkour in nature offers us the psychological benefits of being in nature plus the benefits of parkour. That’s the recipe for happiness for me.

I have found that the softer surfaces in natural environments also  allow me to practice more and more intensely without breaking down my body.

My last big argument in favor of Natural environments is that they are inherently more complex than urban environments, and complexity in movement is what parkour is all about. It’s what being a good mover is all about.  The city is very uniform in shapes you encounter in the degree of grip, dampness, penetration into the substrate. In the woods, even the visual field is far more complex.  That complexity is good for your nervous system.

Q: How does MovNat intersect with the training that we already do as parkour athletes?

A: I was fairly deeply involved in MovNat at the beginning of the MovNat project. I was the first certified MovNat coach in 2008, but I parted ways with Erwan soon after.  However, I continued to believe in the need for a model of fitness based on our innate nature. I wrote down my general synthesis of my thoughts about an evolutionary approach to human movement on the Evolve Athletics Blog. 

I chose to focus on parkour because I believed that fundamentally moving your own body through space was the most basic task of any model of fitness and having a deep understanding of it would inform all other elements. I believed it was necessary to specialize in understanding one area first to really reach a level of mastery in teaching and I believed that the parkour community offered an amazing window into our innate play drive, our creativity, and many interesting thinkers to learn from. 

To me a complete physical culture would include not just overcoming obstacles but controlling the body in the air and on the ground, moving and manipulating objects, dealing with combat situations and dancing and it would understand the need for humans to move in nature and would place a high value on this.

In that sense MovNat is more complete then parkour and I would like to see more practitioners take up that broader scope. Right now I am in middle of expanding our method at Parkour Visions to include dealing with moving objects and combatives, and getting people out in nature more. That has always been my goal. We are evolving towards offering our own model of an evolutionary approach to movement and fitness.

It always comes down to your goals but I think many people who enjoy parkour could benefit from expanding their movement horizons to include combative movements, strength and conditioning dance and of course acro which most traceurs already do.

Q: Given the huge popularity of obstacle course races, like the Spartan Race, Tough Mudder, and Alpha Warrior, do you see this as an opportunity for parkour training to reach a wider audience?

A: Yes, the show Ninja Warrior always brings in a crowd to our gym and we get people prepping for Tough Mudder and Spartan Race regularly too. The mindset of the two groups are rather different though. Traceurs do not generally enjoy running for long distances and philosophically favor the development of explosive strength capacities which is at odds with high levels of aerobic training, so the transfer between the two communities is often less than perfect. I am not sure what to do to bring them closer.

Q: Parkour Visions was founded in 2007 and last year you underwent a large expansion of your gym space. Do you have any cool news about upcoming Parkour Visions projects or other personal developments?

A: We made it a goal this year to not do another expansion, but we have lots of other fun developments. We are splitting up our summit event into a Summer Competition and Jam, on the 18-21st of July.  We are calling this event the Classic, and already have a bunch of top traceurs committed, including our first Mexican athletes, Daer Sanchez and Danee Marmolejo, as well as Brian Orosco, Jesse la flair, Paul Darnell, Brandon Douglas, Jake Smith, Amos Rendao, Joey Adrian, Max Henry, Elet Hall, Paul Whitecotton and more.

We will also be co-hosting a pure teaching parkour summit with APEX Movement in Denver this October. That is just in the beginning phases of development though, so keep tuned to our blog and YouTube channels to hear more about that. 

And we will soon be announcing the official details on some three-day nature training seminars this summer.