From here to Traceuse

With one thing and another, I carelessly googled 'London Parkour' and found Parkour Generations. If you see this, guys, you gave me insomnia because I was so inspired and keen I couldn't sleep.

I'm realistic enough to know that going along to one of their classes would probably be a bad idea, since I'm in no condition to actually do anything except hurt myself. I will be emailing or phoning them to double-check this, of course. When they say 'all abilities', they may actually mean it. Some internet resources tell me I should be able to do 25 pushups, 5 pullups, and 50 full squats before starting, and that's a ways away yet.

Even so, at one class a week close enough for me to get to, it's probably not enough for me to really make my fitness/strength/skill increase much.

I need some kind of conditioning program to take me from where I am now to there. It has to be able to be done in my home or at my gym. Both have limitations - my home has very little in the way of space or sturdy surfaces aside from the floor, and my gym is ... well, it is definitely a fashion gym, in some ways.

I also need a pair of gloves - partially to protect my skin, partially to protect my rings. They need to be tight, flexible, thin, and fingerless.

I need clothes. I mean, I have one pair of jeans that are suitable for outdoors work, but they're my favourite jeans, and I don't want to bust them. I don't really have a lot of indoor exercise wear at present either, which is annoying. 

I need to drastically increase my flexibility. It's really, really, really bad.

So, I really have two lists: gear, and exercises. Gear involves the dreaded shopping. Ugh.

Exercise wise, most of the advice I've seen concentrates on getting the basic bodyweight strength moves happening first - full squats, pushups, pullups, and ab work. Well, that's okay; I've got a lot of that incorporated into my workouts now, so I'm on my way there. Still, I'm probably also going to throw in some balance and jumping work, to improve my precision and explosive power. For flexibility, I found this parkour flexibility article on post workout flexibility routines. I did some of it today (sans workout, while waiting for deliveries), and it felt awesomely win. It isn't quite sufficient for addressing a couple of my problem areas, but that's alright; I know about those.

That's what I'll concentrate on for this cycle - incorporating the specific flexibility exercises on a close-to-daily basis, focussing on those movements (or foundations for the movements) in my workouts themselves, and go look at the abovelinked Parkour Generations website for ideas on more specific parkour skills and techniques. With luck, I'll be well on my way to starting classes by the end of this cycle.

Now to go think really hard about how to incorporate a few more of these kinds of things in my goals.