Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Confirmation

I think we all need confirmation in main areas of our lives. It is important in order to know that you are not just loosing your time by doing that things.

Confirmation is possible by
  • persons
    • teammates (compliments, how great I can do sth.)
    • parents
    • friends
    • spectators (while your practicing parkour)
    • reporters (e. g. interviews)
  •  my body
    • fatigue (A powerless feeling means I have given everything in training.)
    • stiffness (the same)
    • Solution: Variety; In other words, different exercises/training sessions mean different strains on my muscles. Thus my muscles aren't ready for that as I am not training them over and over again (because of variety!). The result is fatigue/stiffness and confirmation.
  • goals
    • These are often unconscious, for example, while training you have managed to do a king kong.
    • But you can set conscious goals, too. (100 pull-ups)
By the way, if I am in a good physical condition, I don't feel confirmed or happy, what I actually should be. A probable solution would be to set a goal, like 3 months without injuries or exaggerations.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Inertia

"Every body remains in a state of rest or uniform motion (constant velocity) unless it is acted upon by an external unbalanced force. This means that in the absence of a non-zero net force, the center of mass of a body either remains at rest, or moves at a constant speed in a straight line." Isaac Newton, First Law of Newton's laws of motion.

You can can apply this issue on parkour, too. I believe that my training and one of anybody else proceeds in fact inertially. In other words we tend to train
  • on the same spots (e. g. playgrounds or trees)
  • the same things (e. g. strength training or favourite technique like dash vault) and
  • in the same way (e. g. in a team or alone)
You can call it 'habit'. Nevertheless, in order to become an experienced traceur in all areas of parkour, you must break your habits, open your mind to other possiblities of training and try to involve them in your sessions!

Remind the Newton's words:  "...unless it is acted upon by an external unbalanced force", so it is not easy!

Thanks for reading

Michail

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Balance session on the dark side

Yesterday, I tried out to balance a quite long time in the evening. As having accomplished a one-hour-balance-training two days ago, I felt pretty comfortable on the rail.

Nevertheless it was a completely different feeling as compared with balancing in the daytime. Furthermore I have noticed, that when I went to the bright areas of the rail, my tempo got faster. To the contrary when my own shadow covered the rail, I felt very unsecure on it. As a whole I think it was a much bigger effort as compared with saturday.

Michail
PS: A mysterious white-black cat was observing me on the two above-mentioned days. Perhaps she liked watching me balancing :-)

Motivation

Here come some ideas, how to raise the motivation for doing parkour. Motivation means, I am interested in something or doing a kind of stuff. (Wikipedia: Motivation is the driving force which causes us to achieve goals.) Thus the motivation takes place a long or short time before an event occurs.

In other words there are two main topics on that:
  1. the time before the training
  2. while practicing parkour
to 1)
Motivation with the help of media (often Internet, then TV and at last books or magazines) is one of my favorite.

Watching videos of very experienced people on YouTube, whom I can look up to or even of some amateurs, where I often recognize my real skills and don't understimate them, is a real source of delight, I must admit.

Sometimes a documentary or a article makes me feel comfortable with the thought to be one of that fantastic movement, too.

I have almost forgotten the music. I believe the music is one of the strongest motivation sources. Nevertheless I haven't trained (except only balance-training) with it yet, as I think it can distract me from the stuff in parkour, which requires my whole concentration, in order to prevent injuries. Nevertheless a nice earworm isn't bad from time to time.

to 2) (while practicing parkour)
In other words, how your training proceeds.

Training in the group or alone can be both very inspiring. In the group you just have more fun and alone there is that great atmosphere, where you are alone and no one else, nobody except you and the obstacle...You know that stuff, don't you.

There are two types of keep doing a exercise a certain time. Firstly, I say to myself, to do balancing for example one hour long. That means I determine a certain time, which I want to stay training.
The second, is to determine a certain number of repetitions. For instance, 100 set-ups. So I will stay motivated until I have finished my targeted objectives!

I hope you enjoyed reading and you will keep motivated in parkour now.

Bye

Michail