Friday 29 April 2011

Nin nin! ♥

Birmingham has a surprising amount of vocal Free-Runners and Parkour enthusiasts. By a surprising amount, I mean two.  It surprised me.

They like to talk about it loudly at bus stops or on buses. A few weeks ago, a young man was showing off his parkour skills to his girlfriend, with the memorable line "I'm basically a ninja!". They were being loud, so I felt able to join in with, "to be a ninja, you'd want parkour and krav maga". (There was a lot more conversation before this point, I didn't just randomly dive in).  So then we chatted a bit about PK and Krav.

Anyway, yesterday, I was on the bus home from krav, and this girl got on, talking loudly about free-running. So I said, "excuse me, I'm really nosy, have you ever tried Parkour?"

She hadn't heard of Parkour, so I described as being like the next step up from free-running, and she said she'd check it out.  That description wasn't entirely accurate.  Free-running is a competitive form of movement, and so involves moves aimed to confuse or distract your oponent, while Parkour is more about efficiently getting from A to B, using the power of your own body.  I like to think of it as the Krav Maga of movement (the point of Krav Maga being, of course, for A to disable B as quickly and efficiently as possible, normally with a kick to the balls).  Both emphasize the use of training with your own body, rather than machines.  Nerd Fitness is quite big on Parkour, and on calisthenic training.  I've used some of his fitness plans to help raise my strength for Krav, as the drills can be quite similar.



Ryan Doyle makes some excellent PK videos.  I use the one above to practice rolls, as that's something I want to be good at before it comes up in class.  I don't fancy getting stuck ass up, thank you very much.  Plus, it's a pleasure to watch someone so graceful and well-practised.

Then we talked about ninja skills, which got us on to krav, before I had to get off the bus. Apparently, I look far too sweet and innocent to go around talking about kicking people in the balls with so much clear enjoyment. Heheh.

Nin nin! ♥

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