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!