Originally Posted by
mwah
always wanted to try freerunning, what would you say is the best advice for someone wanting to get started freerunning? / what do you feel is the best training to do in order to seamlessly get into freerunning? - my cardio is really poor nowadays, I'm still training and working out but I rarely run anymore and I smoke a lot oregano so I wouldn't even know how long I would last running min 3 miles.
I can only really say what worked for me, but getting a basic safety vault (outside hand and outside leg up on the obstacle, stepping through with inside leg) over a railing is where I personally started. It's probably the easiest and safest movement there is. From there I progressed to more difficult vaults (kong, 360/reverse vault, speed vault) and got a feel for traversing over an obstacle at a basic level.
Here's some other fundamental stuff I thought of that you should find tutorials for easily that will help you get to a good basic freerunning level though-
Precision jump- from both a standing and running start, jumping from one surface to another, sticking the landing on the edge with the balls of your feet, allowing your ankles to absorb impact and avoid sending the shock up your poor joints. This is the one that'll take the most drilling and be most important to your ability to judge distance and land in a controlled and safe manner.
Basic flips- sideflip, frontflip, backflip (these are intimidating but will feel very easy once you drill them enough, crashmat or mattress necessary for learning backflip).
Cat leap/arm jump- jumping to a hanging position on a wall, leading with feet on the wall and then grabbing the ledge
Climb-ups- cleanly getting on top of a wall from a hanging position without the assistance of knees and elbows, sort of like a muscle up on a wall
Parkour roll/height drops- you definitely have to learn how to disperse impact when you're falling from a height because I personally know people who got tendonitis from training all the time while neglecting this
This isn't at all set in stone either since you pretty much have complete freedom over what you wanna do in freerunning. As opposed to parkour which has a focus on traversing efficiently, freerunning is just about style and self-expression, borrowing from literally whatever sports the athlete wants to incorporate. So if you find something you wanna learn from tricking or breakdancing or whatever the fuck just figure out the progressions and drill it.
Conditioning-wise, consistent stretching is the best way to avoid injury when you're doing this stuff. Otherwise, drilling the movements themselves at a comfortable level of difficulty is the most reliable way to get your body accustomed to them. There's also some parkour athletes who do lots of large gaps and heavy impact stuff that swear by weight training legs with squats and lunges, so maybe you already have a better physique than me for it. Lots of people also like to do box jumps to get more explosive power.
In practice, freerunning is far less cardio-heavy than soccer since the training largely consists of a lot of mental prep time followed by short, explosive bursts of power. You'll spend a lot more time looking at something you're about to do and visualizing it than actually doing the movement. You might get more worn out from it once you get into longer lines with lots of connecting moves, but you'll still have time in-between to rest, so it's still not the most demanding sport on the cardio front (at least at a beginner to intermediate level). I also enjoy my oregano but never had much trouble with this.
hope this gives a good starting point to start researching stuff