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We are a crew of experienced parkour practitioners that train, teach and promote parkour in the Charlotte, NC area.  Check out the links in the menu to the left (or if you’re on mobile, the drop down menu from the arrow above) for more information on things such as what parkour is, who we are, how to get started with parkour, classes we teach, services we provide, and how to connect and train with the local community.

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Training Tip: Butt Power

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Your glutes (butt muscles) are big and powerful.  They play a large role in power transfer through the kinetic chain used when you jump, land and lift.  When the glutes don’t perform properly the body makes unwanted compensations in the lower back, knees and other joints that lead to reduced power output and eventually causes pain as well as injuries.

When you perform a movement, your muscles don’t simply get an ‘on’ or ‘off’ signal from the brain.  Instead they are fired in a complexly coordinated dance of individual signals to muscular fibers that results in the desired movement.  Something as simple as a push-up requires a magnitude of different signals.  When you exercise you don’t just train the muscle fibers, you train these signal pathways as well.

Unfortunately, many of us have uncoordinated butt muscles thanks to too much sitting.  When you sit your glutes are put in an extended position.  When held for too long, that extended position starts to hinder those nervous system pathways, leading to uncoordinated butts and the deficiencies mentioned above.

Luckily there’s some simple exercises you can do to get your glutes back firing properly that take very little time.  This medium length post on T-Nation features an artillery of movements you can do: T-Nation: Dispelling the Glute Myth.  However, if you just want to get started with something simple the “glute bridge” exercise demonstrated in Parkour Visions’s Training Progression below will help you tons by itself.

Safe Training!