Taylor Carpenter / Ryan Ford / Point Loma, California Intro If you want to clean up your drop/landing skills without taking too much extra impact, consider the low-impact and highly accessible nature of fake drops. Surely others have trained fake drops before but I don’t recall seeing this series of drills anywhere else in my 18 years of parkour and 20 years of strength & conditioning—so please correct me if I’m wrong! Sometimes the best sport-specific movements are so simple and easy to overlook. Fake drops are a useful way to maintain and sharpen your drop/landing skills, without ..read more

After years of training and coaching gymnastics and cheer in Hawai’i, I started tricking in 2014. When I moved to Colorado in 2016, I began coaching at Apex Fort Collins––helping to build the acro/tricking program with my friend Sean Ingel. I spent the last year helping to build up the acro program at Apex Louisville, and have recently started mapping out our new Apex Remote acro program. Tricking started as something that I did mostly because my friends tricked. It was fun and challenging, so I stuck with it. Coming from gymnastics where you’re told exactly what to do and how to d ..read more

Shrimps, pistols, and other single-leg squat variations are not for strength and power. There are better ways to get truly strong and bouncy (e.g. deadlift, back squat, split squat, power clean, sprint, jump/land, etc). But with greater levels of power come higher amounts of impact. To be truly high-performing and long-lasting in high-impact sports, you must survive this impact time and time again. All of your squatting/landing/falling skills need to be on point. To further complicate some of these key skills, a certain amount of mobility is required in order to do them well (e.g. spinal fle ..read more

PREFACE: In 2016, we partnered with the Division of Kinesiology and Health at the University of Wyoming to deconstruct various parkour landing techniques. The study was just published by the Journal of Human Kinetics—and with free/open access for all! In this study, landing forces and techniques by 20 parkour coaches and athletes from various Apex School of Movement locations were analyzed using high-speed cameras and 3-dimensional coordinates set up at Apex Boulder (now in Louisville, CO). Special thanks to Amos Rendao, Boyi Dai, Jacob S. Layer, Taylour J. Hinshaw ..read more

When I first stumbled upon The Foot Drills by Russ Ebbets, DC, I was impressed by the elegance of the idea. Six foot drills can be done anytime/anywhere, making them a highly accessible and effective way to strengthen your feet and ankles. This makes it easy to do in all kinds of ways (w/ weight, barefoot, fast, slow, turning, etc.), and by all kinds of people (healthy, stiff, hypermobile, old, young, etc). After years of tinkering, the six foot drills and variations are now staples in my own training and for many of our students. The drills are simply so easy to do *and* they are ..read more