25th May 2016: Hadleigh Parkour Park opening and tips for learning.

Ahead of the official opening of the Parkour Park in Hadleigh, I wanted to share a few thoughts for people who may be new or who have had little or no Parkour coaching. For many, this Park will be a first exposure to Parkour, so understanding more about the practice, it's training and how to use these types of environments, may help to learn safely, reduce risk and have fun.

In a positive learning environment; No-one would expect that because you have a bike and can ride it, you're ready to take the most difficult mountain bike route, on the same note, Parkour also needs time from its practitioners to learn, developing skills to prepare safely for the challenges ahead.

In order to aid safe learning and progression accessing the site, here a few points which should aid in keeping you safer and help you develop the fundamentals of Parkour movement: 

• Low: Staying lower to the ground greatly reduces the risk related injury. Working on moving under obstacles develops spatial awareness, hand-foot coordination and controlled movement skills, essential for all other movements.
• Slow: Reducing speed allows for you to have an ongoing feedback loop, able to learn and adapt your movement as it happens. Moving too fast, too soon often ends with movement with little understanding of what happened; reducing possible learning opportunities. As an example, running, jumping and swinging are high momentum and generally faster movements which automatically increases risk.
• Keep it simple: Parkour is about doing simple things very well, get from one point to another and work to make that more effective. Being able to do simple movements well and consistently will develop the physical skills and understanding to progress onwards safely. 

Each single effective movement may just last a second, but is made of hours and hours of high quality practice.

We will be working closely with Hadleigh Park to provide beginners coaching sessions to help those new and interested across all ages to learn Parkour, alongside content to help learning both in and outside of coached sessions, keep up to date via www.southendparkour.com/news and www.hadleigh-park.co.uk - You can also sign up to our newsletter for news straight to your inbox here: https://goo.gl/1RSkmW

Be safe and train smart and see you at the park!

18th May 2015 - Update!

Hi all!

Quick update with what's going on at SP-HQ this week!

Classes:
Meetings and setting up new options for both adult and junior classes, both indoor and out! The aim is to have these ready for delivery and launched together in one schedule update.

As soon as they're good to go, details will be up on the website and shared via social media, so make sure you're following "Southend Parkour" on facebook, twitter, instagram and youtube.

Video:
We have a new video up, showcasing our Junior Indoor Classes and what happens in them! 

As mentioned, we are very busy at the moment with classes being booked up to a week in advance. With new class options available soon, this should improve and lead to better availability. Again, thanks for your patience,  Click here to book online in advance to avoid missing out! 

Subscribe to the youtube channel and don't miss a video update!





Shirts and Merchandise:
We will have a limited supply of adult and junior size Southend Parkour T-shirts available this week. Shirts will be black fabric with white print and yours for £15. Very limited quantities available to both junior and adult students, first come first serve at classes this week. Working on a few other cool bits of kit too, and again, will be shared as soon as available.

Ninja Warrior UK Semi-Finals:
This coming Saturday (23rd May) my semi-final heat for ITV's Ninja Warrior UK will air at 7pm, see how I get in when I take of the "toughest obstacle course on TV!".

It was a great experience and a fantastic opportunity to challenge myself with like-minded individuals, sharing a passion for obstacles and movement!

I'll be training hard for next year and who knows.... hopefully I'll be joined by a few students who've been developing their skills through the classes!



Be sure to tune in at 7pm on Saturday!

22nd April '15 - James' story, so far...

Below is a short piece from one of my regular outdoor class students who's made some fantastic progress over the last 6 months.

Great work James!

"Two years ago I was in an accident which ended me with a broken collar bone, since then I've not been able to get back the strength I once had in that arm and it affected my every day life. Since I've been practicing parkour with Brad and Southend Parkour, I feel my muscular strength, endurance and overall fitness has sky-rocketed. I'm now able to hold my entire body weight with my injured arm and last sunday I completed my first OCR.

Brad has been a huge supporter in helping people reach their targets and he is a great influence to better myself. A year ago today I would not have dreamed to have finished a 7km run and the only reason I hit the finish line is because Southend Parkour has helped me to push myself harder and has given me confidence in myself to do better."

‪#‎success‬ ‪#‎parkour‬ ‪#‎ocrchat‬ ‪#‎ocr‬ ‪#‎givePARKOURaGo‬ ‪#‎parkouruk‬ ‪#‎southend‬‪#‎essex‬ ‪#‎fitness‬ ‪#‎goals‬ ‪#‎motivation‬

6th April 2015: Ninja Warrior UK

This week I've been away in Manchester, one of the 250 contestants on Ninja Warrior UK, which starts on ITV on the 11th April (This coming Saturday!).

For those of you unfamiliar with Ninja Warrior, it's been running for many years in Japan, known as "Sasuke", attracting both serious and not so serious competitors to see how they fair at a challenging obstacle course which increases in difficulty and complexity each year.

As the series continued, people from around the world have ventured there to try themselves against the courses and other countries, now including the UK have recreated their own courses to challenge and test people in their countries.

Here's a classic clip of the Japanese course and Makoto Nagano with one of the only 3 or 4 people to have ever completed the course:

After auditions alongside 6000 others from across the UK, I was selected and joined 250 contestants on the UK version this week trying themselves and their training against the course. I am unable to share how the show and my attempts went, so you'll have to watch the show which starts on the 11th to see how we all did.

It was a fantastic opportunity to test my own skills against the course and the camaraderie throughout the show and participants was amazing. My heat airs on the 18th April but if you want to see what I'm certain will be a great show, record or set a reminder for this Sat at 7pm!
- Public thanks to my girlfriend for joining and supporting me throughout training and the show, thanks Jenna!

Photo Courtesy of Jenna Core.

Want to find out more? Visit:

http://www.itv.com/presscentre/ep1week16/ninja-warrior-uk
https://www.facebook.com/NinjaWarriorUK