Lifting Weights for Parkour by Caleb Iuliano.

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Guest article by Caleb Iuliano. If you don’t follow this guy, we HIGHLY recommend it. You can CLICK HERE to follow him on Instagram, and we’ve included links at the bottom of this article so you can find his other channels. We’ve even included his email in case you’d like to write him personally.

At some point in every athlete’s career it’s probably a good idea for them to lift weights. When they lift and how often they lift will vary depending on training age and the needs of each individual athlete. I’ll give a short explanation of when and why you should lift to reach peak potential and last.

Why to Lift

1) Injury prevention and resilience. If for nothing else, everyone should at least build some strength to handle such a high impact sport like parkour. One of the biggest predictors in injury rate is strength. Not only does being generally strong help protect against injury, but strength training also builds resilient tissue for sport and can help to prevent and even rehab tendonopathies.

2) By strength training you train your body to produce higher amounts of force. Given that two athletes produce force in the same amount of time, the athlete that produces the most force will be more powerful.

This is what Caleb can do in Parkour. Trust us – you want to listen to the advice of anyone who can jump like this. Not many can.

When to Lift

1) To reach peak power you have to be able to both produce a lot of force and produce it very rapidly. This means that every athletes training journey will be a little different. Different movements also have different time frames for producing force which gives us even more variation in training.

So if we have 2 athletes and athlete A can produce 400lbs of force in 6 seconds, but can only produce 200lbs of force in .4 seconds (about the maximal time on the ground for a jump) and athlete B can produce 250lbs of force 6 seconds but can produce 200lbs of force in .4s, then they will produce the same amount of power when they jump. Given they are the same height and weight, they will likely jump the same distance.

Athlete A is very strong, but not fast enough to produce all of that force when jumping. Lifting and getting stronger won’t do much for him. He should focus on fast and plyometric movements like running, jumping, and training for sport until he’s able to produce force faster.

Athlete B produces force very quickly but he’s not got much left in the tank. If he does nothing but run and jump it’s not likely that he’ll gain much more power. He should spend some time building up his strength so that he can produce more force and therefore jump further.

Early on in your career, you can likely get better at jumping by just doing as many jumps as possible with tons of variation and a combination of max and sub maximal efforts. Eventually you will plateau and no matter how much you jump, you won’t gain much power. At that time its probably a good idea to start getting stronger. If you start lifting you will see a rapid increase in power at first and over time it will gradually be less and less effective until you keep getting stronger but aren’t jumping any further. At this point you can either go back to just jumping all the time and get faster or you can do a combination of lifting and jumping to continue trying to produce more force in shorter time frames.

In summary, if you plateaued by just training, start lifting. If you’re already strong and it’s no longer helping, start jumping more.

A video of some of Caleb’s training. This is from 2012. At the time of posting, this video has more than 400,000 views.

2) When/why to lift can also depend on performance goals. You will benefit from the ability to produce more force, but how much you will benefit depends on the movements you want to improve. Bilateral jumping is more strength dependent that unilateral jumping. If I do a gather step plyo, or a gather step into a vault I will have about .4 seconds on the ground. This gives me a pretty good amount of time generate force so someone like me who’s quite strong will typically be a good two foot jumper. In general more strength means better plyos, standing jumps, and better anything with gather-step take offs. So if you’re not very good at plyos or two footed take offs and you’re not very strong, its probably a good idea to do some lifting.

Unilateral jumping is much faster than bilateral jumping. A running jump only gets about .1 second or less on the ground so being super strong isn’t nearly as important as in a two footed jump because you just don’t get enough time on the ground to produce all that force. For unilateral jumping, strength training and producing more force will improve your jump, but not nearly as much as it would a two footed jump like a plyo or gather-step. So if you get in the gym and squat a little, you will probably mak your running jump further, but if you stay in the gym and do nothing but squat all day every day, you’re going to get diminishing returns rather quickly.

Unilateral jumping depends a bit on how strong you are and a lot on how reactive/elastic your tendons are. This is why you see high jumpers who can leap over their head height even though they might not be that strong. They usually have very good joint leverages, very stiff and bouncy tendons and have mastered technique that allows them to take all the momentum built in the run up and use it to launch themselves. If your goal is unilateral jumping, you’re probably best off with a little bit of lifting and a lot of sprinting and bounding.

The follow up to Caleb’s 2012 “Goku” video. More weights to inspire you.

So as you can see, strength training can absolutely benefit just about every single athlete. When you should strength train, for how long and how often is all dependent on your training age, your current strengths and weaknesses, and your future goals.

-Caleb Luliano

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