Travelling To Train

First off, I'll explain that I love travelling to different places to train Parkour. I love seeing new places, meeting new traceurs and seeing how they train. After you go to a couple of jams in different cities you'll notice loads of differences and similarities between the groups, the people, their techniques, everything. Every city has a different lay out and different challenges and as such, you'll see that the majority traceurs in a city will progress accordingly.

As well as this, every city has its own little preferences and tendencies because of the different people and architecture. Some cities might progress in some things like fluidity on rails or cat to cats whereas others don't even think about that kind of thing. These little things make different groups develop different techniques for certain movements, and one of these will be the best in general, or for you. The problem is in your home city you won't see all the different techniques because you will be limitted to one view on parkour, no matter how varied that view seems at first. I should also point out here that when I talk about groups of traceurs, I'm talking about the mature ones that have been training for at least a year and have settled into a little community.

Traceurs of Lincoln, Grimsby, Cleethorpes and me from Nottingham, in Lincoln

My home town is Nottingham, and as cities go it is one of my favourites, probably because this is my hometown and I know the area and I have developed the most in parkour here, and that has shaped my training like I said. In Notts there are loads of big, wide walls. That may seem a stupid thing to say, but it meant we had loads of great precisions and cat leaps when we started, and that shaped our training from the word go, and now the general Nottingham frame of mind is to look for bigger things and bigger challenges in all movements. On the other hand, we have almost no rails here so in general we lack confidence and fluidity with rails, and have relatively poor balance.

This is just an example, you will be able to see for yourself the strengths and weaknesses of your own group. Anyone can find their weaknesses and work on them, but as you probably know pushing through your weaknesses yourself is hard. As a group of traceurs who train as friends and have fun, you'll find it even harder because it's tempting just to settle into the same routine of everyone else and just not work on your own targets. This is why I think its important to travel to other cities and meet other groups of traceurs. They will open your eyes to possibilities you hadn't seen before, and show you things that, at first, you will probably suck at. But likewise, you can do the same for them and show them your strengths.

Traceurs of Coventry, Nottingham and Birmingham in Coventry

At the end of the day, parkour is an art which requires lots of different skills, and an ability to adapt the skills you do have, because you will very rarely find two identical movements in two different places. The best way to progress is to keep pushing yourself in learning as wide a variety of skills as possible, and taking advice from as many people on everything. In doing this, you can use all the best advice to progress in the best possible way, and become the best traceur you can.