Mensaje de Agota (Finding your Way 2) INGLÉS

English Version (Original)

Hello ladies

I hope you are having a good time and enjoying the workshop “finding your way”. Daniel has asked me to write something in regards to parkour and conditioning. A short summary of my thoughts is below.

I truly believe that conditioning is extremely important when practising any sport but particularly parkour, as it puts a lot of pressure on our body and includes a lot of impact. The discipline is still fairly new and meanwhile there are already men who have been practising parkour for decades and where we can see that the body can support such a high impact sport, there are no females who have been practising for such a long period, so we do not really know how it will affect the female body.

Conditioning will also enable our body to perform better, protect our body and to feel more confident. However, conditioning can change your body massively. I personally want to stay feminine and have a defined body. Therefore it is important to me how much conditioning and what kind of conditioning I am doing to avoid looking too masculine. It can be tricky to figure out how much conditioning each of us needs to protect our body and to be strong enough to support the impact we experience when practising parkour, so workshops such as this one are great to get advice and gain confidence.

I use my own body weight (press-ups, pull-ups, traversing...) to develop my strength and feel better in the movements. Additionally I include specific cardio training such as skipping, swimming, running which helps the muscles to become longer instead of .. Balance drills such as using the wobbly horse at the playground or a single rope help me to work the proprioception (make your joints solid and stable, particularly the ankles and knees). This helps to land softly and improve the sensitivity and strength when changing directions.

Very important part of my training is also stretching. This can be just some simple stretches or some yoga moves. It helps my muscles to relax and to gain strength from a different angle.

We ladies have different stages in our life that we have to adapt to, one of them can be pregnancy which I have been lucky to experience recently. 3 months ago I gave birth to a little boy, so it was obvious that I had to stop doing parkour. However, during my pregnancy I have not stopped doing conditioning, I just adapted to the situation. I went swimming and joint a fitness class specifically for pregnant ladies( I thought it will be so easy as I was used to a regular 4-5 times training per week, well I was wrong as I did not realise how much my body has changed). One month ago I started again my training which is purely conditioning as I need to get my body ready again to control the impact that most of the parkour moves require.

Parkour is a very enjoyable sport, however it is very demanding and it can be extremely dangerous if your body is not ready for it. You can eliminate a lot of injuries by training appropriately. My advice is” prepare your body and find your way to practising parkour safely J but don`t forget to adapt to different situations in life such as injuries, different expectations, pregnancy etc..

Enjoy the workshop

All the best from Agota