Parkour for the course

A few years ago, an old friend from my rugby-playing days started telling me about his new workout ideas. Henry kept on playing rugby union long after I stopped, and had gotten to semi-professional level in England. Whatever sport he was doing he always worked out a lot in the gym, and had started doing so back when it wasn't yet seen as an automatic thing for rugby players to be doing. Now Henry had left the gym behind for a looser routine of kallisthenics in the park on the way home from work. He'd started making fitness videos based around some of the new moves he'd been practicing. And he talked about how his wife, a yoga and pilates instructor, had helped him think more about 'mindful movement.'

Now, if all of this sounds like a bunch of hippy horseshit to you, let me me just up the ante before I explain why I think there might be something to it. Another person I remember using some of the same language was a yoga instructor on one of the unreasonably pricey and slightly cultish places on Valencia in San Francisco. He talked about how he used to do a lot of cycling, and how that had taken a toll on his body, so he gave it up for yoga. I thought at the time that it made very little sense: there was so much good evidence for the benefits of aerobic and resistance exercise (both of which are offered by cycling), and, actually, relatively little for the benefits of yoga.

With a crick in the my neck from doing more cycling than usual because of the lock-down, I've started to reconsider. That's partly because of the former massage therapist Paul Ingraham's admirably skeptical and empirically-focussed blog Pain Science, which is slowly bringing me round to a slightly new way of thinking about muscular health and sickness. (Ingraham sees a lot of chronic muscular pain syndromes of the sort I've long had in my neck and shoulders as caused by 'sick muscles' - muscles in dysfunction either because of over-use or under-use).

It's not entirely clear what's going on when people get the kind of muscle knots that are associated with long-lasting muscular aches and pains. What does seem relatively clear (as far as I can tell) is that overuse of particular muscles correlates with more of these 'knots.' At the same time, as Ingraham points out, under-use of the muscles can have equally unpleasant effects. One point he makes is about static-ness, at work or at home - that is, keeping the same position for hours on end. He's skeptical about workplace ergonomics programmes which, for him, encourage people to try to find the 'perfect' posture, where what causes discomfort and pain isn't really what static position you're in, but the fact that you're in any static position for big chunks of each day. The solution is to engage in a regular series of 'mobilizations,' moving and stretching your limbs and joints through at least forty or so repetitions.

The point Ingraham makes about immobile postures made me wonder about mobile ones as well. Is spending a couple hours in the same position on a bike any better? Sure, you're moving, and you will get all the benefits of the exercise involved in spinning your legs (which are considerable). At the same time, the rest of your body is basically immobile. Running is a bit better, but your body is still going through a reasonably restricted range of movements. Using the weight machines in the gym will get you moving through a variety of shapes, but only a set number. Even yoga classes can focus on only a few classics poses, powerful though these classic poses can be. Squash is probably the most dynamic thing I do, but that, too, ultimately involves a set palette of movements, and it's quite one-sided (something I very much feel down one side of my body after a long match).

Ingraham's 'mobilizations' are apparently just his version of a new line of 'mobility drills' that physios are getting into at the moment. One of the key things about them, though, is their looseness and freedom. He suggests that they're 'exploratory.' And that's where the mindfulness comes in - not, in this case at least, as hippy horseshit, but as a kind of fine-grained empiricism. The idea is just to be aware of where the muscular pain and discomfort is and to move and stretch there, in whatever way you feel like moving and stretching. (Assuming, of course, that it's the chronic, tiring-feeling kind of muscular pain we're talking about, not something like a tear.) No need to do things that have a name or a history - you can do whatever the hell you want, as long as it involves moving and stretching, and you'll be doing a mobilization.

All of this explains why I've become a late convert to parkour. The lockdown has meant the gym and the pool -  two of my weekly standbys - are no longer a noption, and neither are yoga classes. (For some reason it's always harder for me to have a good yoga session at home - I need a third-party enforcer to take up a series of awkward postures and take five sounding breaths in them.) That's led me to wander around town doing pull-ups in scaffolding, climbing trees, jumping off concrete ramps, throwing large rocks a short distance into the harbour, jumping up and down onto plinths, swinging on lamp-posts, doing one-arm push-ups on bollards, doing two-arm pushups on bits of grass (34 is my current record), doing leg lifts on bits of grass (34 is my current record), going up and down any ladders that cross my path (3 or 4 is my current record), and occasionally even engaging in 'jumping-jacks'  (7).

You can see a picture of me engaging in hyper-legit urban-jungle street-running above. I'm too old and wise to go in for any of the actually risky parkour that the cool kids do (why bother?), but I can see why they like running around and swinging onto things and jumping off them. They're going through their exploratory mobility drills in just the right spirit, of creative freedom and fine-grained empiricism.

Speaking of empiricism, my theory of why unstructured exercise might be better for keeping aches and pains at bay may of course turn out be complete bollocks. I don't know of any studies that compare more unstructured forms of exercise with more regimented types. If you do, feel free to put them in the comments. Paul Ingraham often talks how most doctors and research scientists are too busy thinking about the really harmful stuff (major diseases) to have much time to spend on aches and pains. But chronic pain can be a major downer, and it's surprising from the economic standpoint if no other how little research seems to have been done even on such widely-used concepts as muscle-knots. After all, people spend a lot of money on massage and various sorts of complimentary therapy, even if even the less wacky-sounding ideas they depend on (smoothing out muscle tissue, say) don't have all that much research behind them. So surely it's time for us to start running some tests on the free-runners.