Athletes who have perfected basic bodyweight exercises including pushups and pullups and squats can make the progress to adding on weights to their workout regime. Factually though, Parkour weightlifting training experts say that weightlifting helps increase strength and power like no other form of exercise. When done right, it is a powerful combination with parkour and plyometric training.
Weightlifting combined with parkour will help with increasing your jumps, fortify landings, and boost your climbing. Focusing on the right parkour exercises, adding weights will enhance your athletic ability.
Best Parkour Weightlifting Exercises for Beginners
It is recommended to move beyond the isolation exercises, towards compound exercises, which work more than one muscle group together. For more detail information on compound exercises, take a look below:
1) Overhead Press
For developing upper body strength, the overhead press is an excellent exercise, considered to be more functional than even the bench press. This is a full body, compound exercise, where your shoulders and arms press the weight above your head, while your legs, abdomen and lower back balance your body. For athletes, this is also useful for sport-specific training, leading to an increase in strength and stability in positions like handstands as well as vaults. Overhead Press is one of the best exercises that help develop strong and muscular shoulders. A progression of the overhead press is more explosive movements, including the push press and push jerk.
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2) Weighted Dips
An advanced variation of the chest dip exercise, weighted dips work your triceps, chest, shoulders as well as arm muscles. This is one of the most useful exercises for developing the strength that’s required for climb ups, vaults as well as other movements of the Parkour discipline. If weighted dips are combined with pull-ups, they are one of the fastest ways to gain explosive strength for pushing.
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3) Weighted Pull Ups
One of the most useful pulling exercises for strength development is a weighted pull-up. This pull-up variation exercise is required for developing the strength one needs for climb ups, laches, cat leaps, and other Parkour climbing movements. The weights are an add-on here that can be done by either wearing a weight belt, or by adding weight plates to your body. It’s a relatively easier exercise to adopt and progress on the weight increase over time, based on your pace and performance.
4) Back Squat
A lower-body movement, the back squat can be thought of as a full-body movement, since it works the core, back and the grip. The most common squat variation with weights is the back squat. This exercise helps strengthen your glutes, hamstrings and cords.
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Parkour athletes benefit the most from squatting just past parallel. Parkour climbing movements spread across a complete range of motion squat variations and alternatives, which is why it helps to develop strength in these positions.
5) Deadlift
The deadlift is a full-body pull exercise and pretty impactful when it comes to parkour training. For any serious athlete in the parkour discipline, this one’s an absolute must-do! The deadlift is one of the best exercises, which is a unique way to strengthen your body, head to toe. Specifically for parkour, deadlifts help increase the jump and trains you to better handle intense landings. As per crossfit, the deadlift imparts quick and prominent athletic advantage, which no other exercise does.
Get Started with Parkour Training
That’s all of it. Now that you know everything about the parkour weightlifting exercises, it is time to start training and get better at doing parkour.
