With that in mind, take minute to think about the definition of parkour.

Parkour is the discipline of overcoming obstacles with speed and efficiency. Most people associate it with teenagers and young adults. However, there is no reason you can’t apply it to the entire human lifespan.

Here are five parkour concepts that relate to healthy aging:

Scaling of Abilities

Vaulting a waist-high wall can seem out-of-reach to parkour beginners. However, by training a series of precursor movements, even the most fearful student will be able to get over the obstacle.

You might need to start by hoisting yourself onto the wall, sitting on it, and then swinging your legs over. From there, you might transition to arms and both feet, but no contact with your butt. As you get stronger your level of support decreases, from two feet to one foot, and then no feet. After enough training, you can eventually vault the wall with only one hand in contact.

Scaling is the term used to describe the process above, wherein you work through a series preliminary movements tailored to the level of the athlete. Parkour coaches use scaling to help their students build strength and confidence. The same framework can also be used to help older adults improve their level of functional mobility.

Take for example the difficulty many elderly have with getting out of a chair. It’s not uncommon for some people to be so weak in their lower body that they need to use both hands to push themselves out of a chair. Sometimes they actually need physical assist, like a mechanized lift or the help of a caregiver.

Regardless of the level of impairment, scaling can be used to improve a one’s abilities. In terms of getting out of a chair, a first step can be to raise the height of the seat with one or more pillows. Once the person can confidently stand up from the new position, the seat is height is gradually lowered (over days or weeks) until returning to the starting level.

It might take time, but this strategy is a great way to build the muscle to accomplish any number of challenging tasks. You can scale your way into climbing a flight of stairs, doing yardwork, or even unloading the dishwasher.

Understanding Falls

Falling down is part of life. In parkour, athletes tend to fall when they miss a jump, slip on an obstacle, or simply lose their balance. It is such a common occurrence, that coaches always train their students how to fall without getting hurt.

Beginners are taught to disperse the impact, favor rounded body shapes, and roll when necessary. By understanding when to anticipate a fall, and how to recover without injury, parkour athletes condition themselves for a lifetime of safe training.

Now, compared to younger athletes, when seniors fall down it can often be a matter of life or death. In fact, according to the CDC, falls are the leading cause of fatal and non-fatal injuries in adults over 65-years old. Many factors contribute to an older adult’s fall risk, including poor vision, neuropathy, generalized weakness, and drug interactions.

As a society we have done a poor job of protecting our older citizens from fall-related injuries. Yet, by identifying what factors put an adult at risk of falling, he or she becomes better prepared for the world.

Thus, like parkour athletes, older adults need to understand when and how they are at risk for falling. Once the factors are understood,  steps toward fall prevention can be taken. Likewise, with the help of an experienced practitioner, older adults can be taught to recover from, and avoid an injury when a fall does happen.

Environmental Awareness

Experienced parkour practitioners always perform a safety check of their environment before starting to train. They know that wet concrete, dusty surfaces, and loose obstacles all contribute to the risk of injury. By understanding the hazards around them, they minimize their risk.

This same habit is useful for older adults. By taking a few moments each day to identify the risk factors in your environment, you become much safer. Is the sidewalk in front of your house covered in wet leaves or ice? Could you trip on the many throw rugs or extension cords in your living room? The more you understand the external factors affecting your mobility, the more secure you become in the world.

The Importance of Balance

Tiptoeing across an overhead beam might be terrifying to some people, but it’s childs play to a veteran parkour athlete. That’s because a refined sense of balance is crucial in parkour.

Without good balance, landing jumps, crawling across railings, and scaling high obstacles would be impossible. But note though, that balance is a skill that is cultivated through practice. From low to high surfaces, and simple to complex movements, parkour athletes are always working to improve their stability.

Aging gracefully also demands that you continually work on your balance. For some older adults, simply turning around to see what is over one’s shoulder can lead to a fall. Standing on one leg to put on a shoe can be another tremendous challenge. Fortunately, when you put in the time and effort to improve your balance, the results can be astounding.

Over my 15-year career in physical therapy, I have spent thousands of hours helping 70, 80, and even 90 year olds improve their stability. And guess what, either you use it or you lose it.

I once worked with a 99-year-old woman who, after some training, could balance on one leg for over a minute!

Start working on your balance today, and make it a lifelong habit.

Focus on Power

A high horsepower car ramps from 0-60 miles per hour much faster than a less powerful car. In the same way, a skilled parkour athlete can speed through an obstacle course much faster than an untrained beginner. Power is fundamental to parkour, and without it you wouldn’t be able to clear massive gaps or stride between distant foot placements.

That’s why the best parkour athletes continually work to improve their power generation. They work on sprinting, jumping, and the ability to move with explosiveness.

One sad fact of aging is that your ability to generate power gradually declines over time. The older you get, the longer it may take to hustle across a busy street or get up from the floor. And, the longer it takes to complete these tasks, the greater the obstacle they become.

Hence, one final aspect to successful aging is that you need to make an effort to stay powerful. Without counteracting it, it’s natural to lose muscle mass as you age. The good news is that you can still build muscle through every decade of your life. The more you work to maintain or even improve your speed with everyday skills, the healthier you remain.

Although the tug of time may be pulling on you, don’t slow down!

Conclusion

The role of parkour as it relates healthy aging has yet to be fully explored, but the opportunity is immense. If you want a glimpse of the future, watch the documentary To Be and To Last.

Life presents countless obstacles, and the older you get the more they seem to pile up. Incorporating a few parkour concepts into your routine might not be a fountain of youth, but it’ll at least help you live fully.

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By the way, do you know of other 60, 70, and 80 year olds who are redefining what healthy aging looks like? Post a link below or share your stories with me on Twitter @benmusholt. The world needs more images of older adults staying active!

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?

I trained there for a few months, while grinding through my physical therapy pre-reqs in Albuquerque. I LOVED stress-release of those workouts. The sparring boosted my confidence, and it was one of the few times in my life when I could boast of a chiseled six-pack.

Having stacked abs was a cool side effect from all of the crunches, the intense cardio, and the limited diet of a college student. Yet, that was not the reason why we finished our training with such a gawd-awful amount of calisthenics.

By toughening our trunks, we were conditioning ourselves to take blows without getting hurt. Internal organs dislike blunt trauma. Our ripped abs became the shield that let us spar without injury.

The benefits of additional muscle mass are well established within the health and fitness world. More muscle yields more brute strength. It allows for better power generation and postural support. And, of course, it also helps boosts your metabolism to promote fat loss.

However, less often discussed, is how muscle can act as protection for the more delicate parts of your skeleton and organs.

Martial artists pay heavy attention to strengthening their midsections, but every athlete can use the idea of muscle as protection. Skateboarding, trail running, and parkour are some of my favorite pastimes. Needless to say, I am a little too familiar with falling down. And, in case you have not taken a spill in a while, let me remind you that it hurts. Multiply that tenfold if you strike a bony part of your body on the ground.

If you are an athlete that crashes to the ground with any frequency, listen up.

Putting more muscle on your body can make your falls less painful.

In PT school, we were taught that bed bound patients and others with limited mobility were at risk for skin breakdown wherever a bone is close to your skin. Because of the limited padding, skeletal prominences are more likely to develop pressure sores than other, fleshier areas. Those bony landmarks are also the parts of your body that hurt the most when they strike anything hard. Think of hammering your elbow into a doorframe or tagging your knee against a car door.

Strike a muscular part of your body against something solid, you can generally shake it off without injury. You might have a bruise and some brief discomfort, but it is nothing like the howling pain of hitting a bony body part.

Everyone knows to protect your skull during a fall or a roll. Other parts of your skeleton that need protection include your:

• Lateral malleolous – the outer part of your ankle
• Patella – your kneecap
• Greater trochanter – the bony prominence of your lateral hip
• Olecranon process – the tip of your elbow
• Acromion process – the tip of you shoulder
• Spine of scapular – the ridge of your shoulder blade
• Spinous processes – the tips of your vertebrae
• Coccyx, sacrum, and iliac crest – the bones of your pelvis

In terms of injury prevention, your first line of defense during a fall is learning to strike the ground in a way that you do not hit these landmarks. Improving your kinesthetic awareness and proprioception are useful. Learning to break-fall and roll with good technique are also essential.

After that, your next line of defense is simple: Put more muscle on your body!

Increasing your muscle bulk provides cushioning against any unplanned-for-impact. It is like strapping pillows to your body. The extra girth makes it harder hit your more sensitive parts.

There is no need to bulk up like a sumo wrestler or strongman competitor. All you need to do is focus on a few key muscle groups.

Which muscle groups should you focus on? Target these three:

• Shoulders
• Back
• Butt

Does this mean you should neglect the rest of your body? Of course not.

Strong calves, quads, pecs, and biceps, all contribute to better athletic performance. But, compared to the three groups listed above, they are much less likely to help cushion your falls.

If you need proof, try out this quick test. Go stand in a grassy field and let yourself crumple to the ground.

I am going to venture that you did not drop to your knees, and then roll onto your thighs and belly like a deranged rocking horse.

You probably went slack through your lower body, started tipping sideways, and then dropped onto a butt cheek. From there you likely rolled sideways onto your back and shoulder.

Maybe you also extended an arm to take some impact.

The broader the area that you make contact with, the less force any single area takes. Having more surface area in contact with the ground, makes for a less painful, and less damaging landing.

By the way, your forearms and triceps are two smaller muscle groups that could easily fit within the muscle-as-padding paradigm. Bulk those puppies up and you basically add two more bumpers to your body’s frame.

Now, imagine for that some reason you were stripped of 90% of you muscle mass. Consider what it would feel like to crumple to the ground via the same sequence.

What would it feel like to do it on the sculpted concrete of a skatepark?

That would be a world of hurt, would it not?

A muscular butt, back, and shoulders are protection for your skeleton.

Fortunately, the way to build these muscles is simple.

Multi-joint upper body pushing and pulling exercises, along with compound lower body movements are the key to athletic development. They are also the key to building muscle as padding.

It does not need to be complicated. These are some multi-joint exercises that can help pad your body:

• Dips, push-ups, and shoulder presses
• Pull-ups, chin-ups, and inverted rows
• Squats, deadlifts, lunges, and step-ups

When your goal is to add muscle as padding, you need to be sure to use a repetition scheme that favors muscle hypertrophy. You want to actually grow the size of your muscles, not just get stronger. Pure strength is achieved at high load and lower repetitions, but that is not what you are shooting for. Instead, target a higher volume of sets and reps at a slightly lighter load. You are trying to provide a stimulus that tells your body:

Hey, let’s add some bulk to these specific muscles.

Once you have built a level of  padding that you are happy with, go ahead return to a workout structure that benefits your sport-of-choice. Depending on what you do, that could mean more endurance, more power, or some hybrid of the two.

Gravity snags everyone sooner or later. Whether you trip on a root, slip in the mud, or bail on trick, it is just a matter of time before you go down. You can either take it like a warrior, and walk away unscathed. Or, you can lie writhing in pain.

A well-developed butt, back, and shoulders, can act as cushioning for your crash landings. Be proactive. Build your padding, and play as hard as you want.

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Are you athlete with lots of falls over your lifetime? I would love to hear from you. What strategies do you use to stay injury-free?

Please leave a comment below.