How Parkour Builds Skills That Transfer to Every Sport

Cross-training is a practice used by athletes of all ages that involves using different exercises and sports to improve their performance in their specialization. Cross-training is an important part of your young athlete's growth and development because it balances each workout with movements that can add to a more rounded skillset. 

Parkour can be used as a beneficial cross-training activity to complement many sports due to its ability to work out each muscle group. Parkour utilizes several movements that can enhance overall athleticism in basketball, track, martial arts, gymnastics, and more. With its mix of strength, agility, and focus, it can help your child get ahead of the competition while still keeping each exercise fun. 

Vortex Freerunning is a youth parkour gym dedicated to using parkour to up the physical development, mental growth, and confidence of kids. We use parkour as a tool to improve strength, agility, and flexibility in a way that translates across different sports. Our coaches work to personalize every experience, securing a strong foundation for a more well-rounded athlete. 

To sign up for a free trial class and learn more about what we have to offer, please contact us online.

About Using Parkour as a Cross-Training Sport

Parkour is a sport that uses natural movements to get from one point to another in the most efficient manner. This sport utilizes motions such as propelling, jumping, and running to navigate through various obstacles, often in an urban setting. Unlike many traditional sports, parkour includes high levels of problem-solving, unpredictability, and creativity, which can directly contrast with those of repetitive drill patterns. When paired together, parkour and traditional training can create a balanced and well-rounded athlete.

It has also been found that utilizing certain parkour actions can help young athletes explore their ability to land from jumps or falls safely, quickly change direction, generate force, and deaccelerate. When strength training, such as parkour, is introduced alongside natural growth, a concept called “synergistic adaptation” occurs. This means that this training can improve your child’s muscular output as they develop, as well as the versatility of their movements overall. (Williams, et al.)

Parkour as a Donor Sport for Young Athletes

Parkour offers a blend of exercise and excitement as kids master challenging new lands and flips. These skills help improve their strength, coordination, and motor skills. Each of these skills can be translated over to other sports, which align with the concept of the athletic skills model (ASM). This is a concept used to guide long-term development in young athletes. ASM encourages young athletes to explore other sports outside of their specialization by proposing that “donor sports” can “donate” elements of functional movement skills between sports through transferred skill learning. Parkour has been found to be a suitable donor sport for team sports players. It can help athletes become more agile by teaching them how to react and move quickly to achieve a certain intention, an essential skill needed in team sports. (Strafford, et al.)

Parkour As a Full-Body Workout

Parkour is one of the most effective ways to train the body as a whole. Parkour utilizes natural movements such as running, climbing, and jumping, each of which works various muscle groups throughout the entire body. Pairing these movements together in sequences requires the constant use of both the upper and lower body muscles at the same time. Parkour athletes use a combination of functional movement skills, coordinative abilities, and spatial orientation when performing each speed run. They must rapidly change direction and speed using planned stop-and-go movements that require the body to move in multiple directions through a certain space. (Strafford, et al.) This forces the body to continuously engage each muscle group to maintain its balance and coordination. As a result, your child can not only build up their total body strength, but also develop endurance and strength that can carry over to other sports, making them more well-rounded athletes. 

How Parkour Builds Flexibility and Agility

Parkour is a sport built around agility. Each run uses a wide range of motions, naturally improving mobility over time. To help support this, parkour athletes often add movements, such as leg swings or shoulder openers, to their warm-ups. These movements help improve the flexibility within your shoulder, hips, and knees, which can help make landings and impacts smoother and less straining. For children enrolled in other sports, this can help reduce the likelihood of injuries, as well as improve directional changes and reaction times, skills that benefit each sport well. 

Cross-Training with Parkour for Injury Prevention

One of the major advantages of incorporating parkour into your child’s cross-training is its role in preventing injuries. This sport can strengthen the muscles, improve landing mechanics, and enhance body awareness. One study found that the habitual landing techniques of parkour athletes were found to be safer than those used by recreationally trained athletes. Parkour athletes learn to decelerate their landing velocity, allowing them to land jumps with larger forces and shorter amounts of time, which have been associated with a lesser likelihood of injury. (Standing and Maulder) Incorporating techniques like these into the training of recreational athletes can help promote safer movement overall. 

Finding a Parkour Gym for Cross-Training in Thousand Oaks and North Hollywood

If you are looking to grow your child’s athletic ability, look no further than Vortex Freerunning! We offer flexible membership programs that include weekly drop-in sessions, personalized skill tracking, and coach-led classes to help your child develop skills that can benefit performance in any sport. We offer age-specific classes for children starting as young as four years old to help build up their physical and mental development through fun and engaging exercise.

References

Standing, Regan J, and Peter S Maulder. “A Comparison of the Habitual Landing Strategies from Differing Drop Heights of Parkour Practitioners (Traceurs) and Recreationally Trained Individuals.” Journal of Sports Science & Medicine, vol. 14, no. 4, 24 Nov. 2015, p. 723, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4657414/. 

Strafford, Ben William, et al. “Effects of Functional Movement Skills on Parkour Speed-Run Performance.” European Journal of Sport Science, 13 Feb. 2021, pp. 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/17461391.2021.1891295. 

Williams, Mark David, et al. “Parkour-Based Activities in the Athletic Development of Youth Basketball Players.” Frontiers in Physiology, vol. 12, 15 Oct. 2021, https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2021.771368. Accessed 22 Apr. 2022.