How to Become an Expert at Parkour

As with any extreme sport, the difficulty level in parkour increases exponentially as you get better. Fortunately, the thrill and skill levels also increase dramatically with practice and time, making it worthwhile to become an expert at parkour.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

1. Get your basic vaults, jumps and landings to an expert level by increasing the height, distance and difficulty of your present inventory of moves. Challenge yourself by doing relatively simple moves like a lazy vault or monkey vault across distances that seemed impossible before.
2. Increase your parkour strength and flexibility with daily training that includes the monkey walk, muscle-ups, planche and regular push ups and specialized handstand work. Also work on lots of dynamic and ballistic stretching and warm up with a foam roller to get yourself loose for your parkour session.
3. Train at parkour schools and with experts in the sport to fix problems and become better at the overall sport. Head to the Colorado Parkour Academy or another school like it to train with some of the leading experts. If you don't have access to a school, watch videos of top traceurs such as Shaun Wood and Rhys James to improve your technique.
4. Become part of a local team or form a team if you don't know of one so you can work with traceurs at various levels. Get the team into group parkour sessions (since competition is highly frowned upon in parkour circles) so you can exchange tips, moves and criticism with other parkour experts and up-and-comers in your area. Head to the American Parkrour website to make contacts for these purposes.