Fat Matters

By Will Wayland
www.powering-through.com

Parkour/Freerunning….arguably a sport, art, discipline for everyone. It has some definite benefits such as body awareness (kinaesthesia), an increase in strength and power, plus  doing it will make you fitter and leaner. The leaner part being the focal part of this article….

Being a sport where you are trying to move your body through space as quickly and as fluidly as possible, the only real resistance to making that possible is you.  Imagine trying to do move about while carrying a few bags of shopping strapped to you….All it’s going to do is slow you down and prevent you for jumping as high or as far as you normally would.  With this in mind, many professional athletes in other disciplines view weight reduction as being an effective means of improving their overall performance. While height and weight shouldn’t really make a huge difference to your ability to train in Parkour/Freerunning, excess body fat could actually hinder you.

An athlete who is carrying excess weight especially in PK/FR may be more prone to injury when performing jumps, landings and difficult techniques versus the practitioner with more optimal body composition.  Imagine trying to land softly while carrying a few 5kg bags of cement strapped to your waist, your knees wouldn’t be particularly happy would they?

Ultimately what you should be aiming for is an optimal strength to weight ratio. All of the studies in sports such as gymnastics, skating, cycling and marathon running view good body composition as something that can be a good indicator for performance. The place most people notice a significant improvement after dropping some excess  body fat, is in their ability to do press ups and pull ups.

Generally healthy males should carry between 10-20 percent body fat and females percent. Performance benefits occur between 7-18 percent body fat depending on the sport. Ideally I would say most PK/FR practitioners should fall in at around 7-14% body fat. This is based on the idea that gymnastics, sprinting and jumping sports are the closest parallels in current sports. Until someone takes the time to assess the body fat of PK/FR athletes in the wild, we can only make an educated guess.

How Do You Approach This?
Well a lot of time people assume dieting and training more and more intensely is the answer but quite often this can be counter intuitive and actually lower muscle mass and increase fat mass, which can then spur someone on to training even harder ending up a square one.

Strength Train
A better way would be to work on a sound strength training program to improve your power output and increase muscle mass. Increasing lean mass at a given body weight is always a good idea. The idea being that less of you is dead weight (fat) and more of you is functional weight (muscle).  A program composed of bodyweight movements and compound exercises should do the trick.

Have A Plan
I’ve yet to meet a single person who has been successful at losing and maintaining weight who didn’t have a plan and a means of measurement. A lot of people approach their diets haphazardly making the decision of what to eat maybe minutes before they do. Ask anyone who has ever been successful in maintaining or losing weight what they are eating today most would be able to tell you. Another proven method is keep a food diary this allows you to look back and analyze what you’ve eaten, how often and how much. Surprisingly, most of us just stuff our faces without thinking about it.

Eat At Regular Times
One of the main areas where people make the biggest mistakes. The typical day for a lot of people goes like this; little or no breakfast, light lunch, HUGE evening meal and then an assortment of snacks until bed. This will lead to fatigue, tiredness and worst of all gradual weight gain. The best option is to eat smaller meals with 3-4 hours between each meal. But keep in mind your body doesn’t have clock that tells you to eat at a certain hour/minute/second, so if you are out with your timing, don’t stress.  Eating smaller amounts regularly will boost your metabolism and you will find you can’t go longer than 4 hours without eating something.

Weigh Yourself
But not too often. You would be surprised the amount of people who don’t know their own weight or height for that matter. Monitoring your weight is the simplest method of monitoring your body composition, while it’s not completely accurate because fat and muscle weigh different amounts and your weight can fluctuate each day, it can help you track changes. If you are worried about your body fat percentage, you can always get it measured, either electronically or find someone who is skilled in the usage of skin fold callipers.

Bodyweight should not be a limiting factor for most people involved in PK/FR, but using the advice above with monitoring, managing and eating a healthy diet can go a long way to helping improve your ability and your overall performance levels.

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