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.

The event was my first time participating in a parkour competition and aside from getting to hang out with a ton of cool people, it was a great learning experience. The event was organized around 3 different obstacle courses, that you ran twice. Anything not designated as “on the course” was out-of-bounds and if you touched it you had a “scratch” that counted against your time. It was basically a game of hot lava, with some walls and horizontal obstacles that you couldn’t touch.  Fun features included rings, a lava boat (to ride across), gaps, tic-tacs, a bouldering wall, and even a tomb.

I’ll spare you the suspense: I got last place in my division.

Scoring was based on your aggregate time for the three runs, mediated by how many scratches you had. Justin Sweeney took first place in the highest division, stealing the show with his blistering speed.

Prior to running the course, Tyson Cecka encouraged everyone to approach the event as a way to expose weaknesses in their training. Rather than placing emphasis on your time and how you place versus other runners, he advised us to view the event as a learning tool to see how you operate under pressure, across a series of obstacles. By paying attention to our shortcomings during the course, we would know what skills need more attention in our daily practice.

His message really resonated and I think it is the single best argument for why parkour athletes shouldn’t be afraid of competing.

Okay, so what did I learn from my experience on the courses?

• Visualization is key. With only 2 chances to run each course, there really wasn’t an opportunity to practice how you would move your body in space. My first scratch came because I didn’t hold my knees forward when swinging across the rings. Had I visualized my body in space better, it would have been obvious that my legs needed to be held forward, flexed at the hips for floor clearance. 
• The power of creative sight. When presented with what was on-course versus out-of-bounds, it was easy to just pick the most direct line from A-to-B. Yet, given the skills that might be needed to get you from here to there, it was likely that there was an even faster route if you opened your eyes up more. This was seen by people who chose to lache from bar to bar rather than take the time to swing across the rings. By seeing all the creative possibilities on the course, more experienced traceurs were able to cut significant amounts of time from their runs.
• Collaboration. Immediate feedback from other competitors about conditions on the course was priceless. If someone was able to tell you that X obstacle was super slipper or unsteady, you could adjust your plan of attack for a better performance.

  

• Slow down to go faster. Want to know the single best way to screw up your time? Fall. People who fell on an obstacle (myself included), added not just the scratch but precious seconds to their overall time. If you were unsure about making a leap, it paid to take a slower route than risk falling and slowing yourself even more. For me, it was a tac to crane that resulted in a fall. I did it on my first run, but tried to push the speed on the second run and ended up missing it and landing on the ground, out-of-bounds. Had I slowed down a hair, I probably would have made it again and not been so slow!
• An empty mind. We are used to giving a name to each unique move (e.g. safety vault vs kong vault), but thinking in terms of what moves to do on a course can fumble your flow. Instead of thinking about the type of move to do over each obstacle, it was better to trust your training and let your body decide instantaneously. If you get hung up on needing to move in a certain way, your mind isn’t present to respond as fast as possible when things don’t go as you planned. If it sounds very Zen – that’s because it is!

Ultimately, I had a great time at the Obstacle Course Challenge and really enjoyed getting to meet many like-minded athletes. Thank goodness Parkour Visions is going to start doing these events quarterly – I’m hooked and will be going back for sure!

If you get a chance to participate in a local competition, I’d encourage you to give it a shot. Take Tyson’s words to heart and hopefully some of my insights can be helpful as well.