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Parkour Fundamentals Videos

This series covers all the basic parkour techniques (like jumping, vaults, ukemi, and rail balance). Brandee Laird has been studying parkour teaching methodology for over a decade. Brandee's detailed teaching style benefits beginners, coaches, and long-time practitioners alike.

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Quadrupedal Movement Basics

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 8 min

Walking on all fours supports our strength, coordination, and ability to move. Especially useful for vaulting, climbing, falling, and going under obstacles, QM is the foundation of parkour. This class covers all the basic types of QM: forward and back, side monkey, the scramble/gallop, ground kongs, and applications. Go explore!

Basic Ukemi & Falling Safety

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 9 min

Ukemi, or falling practice, is a martial arts term we’ve adopted in the parkour community. We fail a LOT in parkour. But falling can be fun and safe! This video covers the basics of bounce backs, breakfalls, rotating falls, and scrambles.

Complete Step Vault Tutorial

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 13 min

Also called the safety vault, the step vault is the most versatile vault in parkour. Starting from the ground up, you’ll learn detailed drills to perfect your step vault technique, how to overcome a variety of obstacles, and many other fun and useful variations and applications.

Chest and Gate Vault Basics

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 7 min

Chest vaults and gate vaults are essential, low-impact vaults for all parkour athletes. These vaults have surprising applications, such as descending or carrying a backpack, or learning fall safety and creativity.

Jumping and Landing Basics

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 16 min

In this technique-focused class, you’ll learn how to jump and land with control. Class includes a discussion on proper alignment, the no-impact jumps drill, initiating a jump, landing with precision, and bounce backs. By the end of this class, you’ll know how to progress safely by jumping to various obstacles.

Flatland Balance Drills

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 11 min

In this class, you will hone your balance to become more intuitive, responsive, and resilient. No obstacles needed! Class covers four balance drills you can do anywhere, plus progressions to make them as challenging as you need.

Parkour Pushing Progressions

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 11 min

Build your pushing strength for parkour. Pushing is integrated into many techniques: vaulting, climbing, mounting obstacles, and falling. This video covers the parkour push up, all essential push up progressions, progressions and drills for wall dips, and injury prevention.

Forward Parkour Roll

Coach: Haley Richardson
Length: 2 min

Learn the basics of the forward parkour roll. Rolling properly will lighten the impact of a fall or landing during your run, decreasing or eliminating your chances of getting hurt. You can also use them to add flow to any line.

Ultimate Parkour Roll Tutorial

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 16 min

Rolls are crucial to parkour training. They reduce impact when landing and falling, and can be used to traverse distance or navigate obstacles. But rolling on hard surfaces can hurt if you do it wrong. In this video, Brandee will help you perfect your technique for forward, backward, and side rolls.

Complete Lazy Vault Tutorial

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 9 min

In this video, Brandee dives deep into lazy vault technique. You'll learn drills and progressions for fluid, confident vaulting in any situation. This lesson also covers the outside lazy or thief vault, vaulting at different heights, and how to lazy vault down from an obstacle.

Reverse Vault Basics

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 12 min

Learn the reverse vault for moving over, up, down, and across obstacles. The reverse vault has a unique twisting, turning movement that's also useful for falling safety. This video will teach you fundamental techniques, multiple different progressions, focus shifting, and basic applications.

Rail Balance Basics

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 12 min

Rail balance is the ultimate way to practice focus. With dedication, you will learn incredible control, which will benefit all of your other movement techniques. This class covers mounting and dismounting the rail, basic rail balance positions, rail walking, basic balance challenges, and quadrupedal rail balance.

Fundamental Ground Flow

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 22 min

In this class, you’ll learn how to flow through several quadrupedal movements. Class includes wrist warm-up and covers in-depth technique. Perfect for beginners and anyone looking to improve mobility, stability, and ability in parkour.

Forward & Reverse Basics

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 8 min

Underbars are fun and useful in helping you get through small spaces. This video will teach you drills and progressions for learning and improving your forward and reverse underbar technique (also known as 360 underbars). You can use tree branches, ledges, bars, or anything you can hang and swing on.

Slip & Fall Ukemi Tutorial

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 5 min

What happens when your foot slips out? Learn how to fall safely on the ground and get back up as quickly as possible. This technique requires basic understanding of a single leg squat and the step vault or sit through movements. With practice, you will learn to trust your body in more dynamic, improvised situations.

Parkour & Movement (live class)

Coach: Brandee Laird
Length: 25 min

This class covers jump training, pistol squat progressions, pistol squat into a break fall then step up to standing, glute bridge technique for gluteal activation, and the couch stretch for quadriceps.

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