Saturday, 18th October 2009
by Carolynn Grigsby
Location: Apex Movement , Denver, Colorado
Although I have been doing parkour for the past three years, I’ve found that teaching it is an entirely different thing; it’s not just giving a skilled traceur/traceuse advice on how to do a trick/movement better, it’s taking a beginner or intermediate through the progressions of how to simply do the move. At the women’s workshop that we recently had, as one of the instructors, what I found most challenging was introducing the basic moves of parkour, but having to change my advice to each person depending on their skill level and background.
I taught the two hour workshop alongside two other women, Risa and Brenda, both active members of the COPK (Colorado Parkour) community. We had a fairly good turnout of women from the Boulder/Denver area with three women, Adrianne, Heather, and Shannon, who had been taking the classes that COPK offers, and three newcomers, Kourtney, Lindsey, and Holly.
We started out with some fundamental movements, such as QM, broad jumps, rolls, simple rail work, and basic vaults. All of the participants picked up on the moves fairly quickly; backgrounds ranging from dance to rock climbing to firefighting definitely helped. The only difficulties we had were with the vaults, which were hard for both the participants as well as the instructors. The only thing holding most of the women back from the vaults was their fear of crashing into the vault box. As instructors, it’s very easy to tell everyone to just run a little faster and jump a little higher, but as participants it’s not quite that simple. As a result we backed up a little, and went through the progression of the vaults. For example, for a speed vault, we started with a two hand safety vault where you tap your outside foot down on top of the box and then, once people got comfortable with that, we moved on to not tapping a foot on the box and then finally using only one hand.
After the learning the basic moves, we split the participants up into two groups and one did the 10-second drill while the other did add-on. The 10-second drill is where there are a bunch of different obstacles in a small space and you just spend 10 seconds moving through the environment as smoothly and efficiently as possible. We had two areas, one with a bunch of scaffolding and the other with a few boxes set up, and both groups got to do the two drills with both sets of obstacles. I was really impressed with how well the women executed various movements; even the women who had just started parkour were coming up with creative and smooth combos.
Lastly, we set up an obstacle course and ran through it for practice and then for time. It started with some rail precisions, then you had to climb over a rolled up mat and then vault two 3 ft. boxes (they were about five feet apart). Next, you sprinted back to the other end of the mats and, without touching the ground, got through the scaffolding as efficiently as possible.
To finish up the workshop, we had a discussion about what everyone liked about parkour, what makes women so hesitant to try it, and how to get more women involved. Overall, I think everything went very well and we successfully introduced a few more women to parkour. As for the instructors, we all learned a lot about teaching parkour, especially to other women, and we can’t wait to do it again!
Apex Movement is Colorado’s first and largest Parkour, Freerunning, and CrossFit gym. Located in downtown Denver, with satellite programs in Boulder and Colorado Springs, we offer professional training centered around natural, functional movement.
Colorado Parkour is an organization in which traceurs from Colorado can come together to share ideas and plan events.
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