Archive

I had a plan in the loosest sense of the word. My training generally starts with the idea of ‘I’ll go there and start moving and see what happens’. The backdrop of Fiesta Island in the distance, blue skies and a sun that would soon set provided another beautiful evening at the Tecolote Shores calisthenics […]

Regardless of all the different parkour philosophies and backgrounds, I’d like to think that some things are just a given when it comes to parkour people. Surely, there ought to be achievements we strive for that unite us together. Of course it is not how baggy your pants are nor what types of shoes you […]

I am in the 4th decade of my life and it’s a great place to be. Not because “40 is the new 30, and soon 50 will be the new 40” or any other click bait headlines that appeal to our existing ageist notions of what it means to be young or old, but because I […]

Laurent Piemontesi, one of the Yamakasi founders is infamous for his crazy and long physical conditioning sessions. It’s not unheard of for Laurent to run for several hours, then begin his other physical preparations of quadrupdeal (crawling) variations, handstands, then leg raises in the realm of 1001 repetitions on each side, forwards and backwards. When […]

I’ve never seen the need for parkour brands. You want something cool on your t-shirt? Get a sharpie and draw it on there. And then get back to training. One of the attractions of parkour for me has always been that we don’t need kit; we don’t need to spend money. Right off the bat, […]

The importance of breaking habits and how they can age you. By the time I started filming the London Parkour scene in 2004, as part of a practice based Ph.D into Parkour and documentary filmmaking (yes such a thing does exist), I still considered myself ‘sporty’. The truth was that I hadn’t done any kind of real […]

By the time Chainstore opened in February 2013, my friend Emmet had finally persuaded me that weightlifting would be a fun thing to try. While almost everyone else was swinging on the scaffolding on opening night, I was first in line to try the squat rack, and I pretty much fell over myself to sign […]

I am a slow learner. I don’t pick up new physical skills quickly. I take a very long time to learn new movements, and I have enough coordination issues that I was diagnosed with dyspraxia as a child. When I say I am a slow learner, people rush to reassure me that I’m not. “No, […]

It’s a catchy title, but when I say ‘size’ I really mean ‘size and/or ability’. And even that should come with a ‘vaguely’. Really, this post is about how training with others who are similar in size, strength, and overall ability can inspire you in ways that training with people very different from yourself often […]

How to encourage and broaden participation. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution to the question of how to broaden the demograghic of who is training. Local contexts matter, what worked in one place may not work elsewhere but some ideas maybe worth thinking about and trying. In my experience it is the entry point […]