Descended from monkeys

This weekend I went and did parkour with some other people. I hadn’t used my hands in weeks, so they got pretty blistered. It was fun.

Here are the awesome training exercises I learned.

The Monkey Walk

It’s called the monkey walk because you are walking on your hands and feet, but if you ever used to pretend to be a cat as a child, that’s a way more useful image.

Start on your hands and knees. Come up to the balls of your feet, lifting both knees about an inch off the ground. Keep your butt down and your back parallel to the ground. Reach your Right hand forward about 6 inches, and step your Left knee right behind your Left hand. Reach your Left hand forward, and step your Right knee right behind your Right hand. Etc. Take short deliberate steps.

It looks like you are climbing a horizontal wall.

The Backwards Monkey Walk

Then you do it in reverse.

The Sideways Monkey Walk

You start on your hands and balls of your feet with your knees close to the ground and back parallel to it, same as the Monkey Walk. But this time, imagine that there are two parallel lines going off to your right: one under your hands, and the other under your feet. You are going to hop and sidle your way down these lines. Place your hands off to the right along their line. Put your weight on your hands, and with your legs, hop to the right, landing in a squat with your feet behind and to the right of your hands. Pick your hands up, place them to the right of your feet, and repeat. Again, try to keep your butt down – definitely not higher than your shoulders. When you’re done moving to the right, do it again to the left.

The Sideways Monkey Walk with a Twist

This time there are three parallel lines. Your feet stay on the center line, but you move in half circles, placing your hands first on the line to the left, then on the line to the right. Again, hop and sidle your way down the lines.

The Ridiculously Hard Monkey Walk That Looks More Like a Lizard Walk

This is exactly the same as the original Monkey Walk, with an intermediary step. When your Right knee and Right hand come close together, instead of bringing the knee behind your hand, place your knee on top of your elbow with your shin parallel to the ground. Bend your elbows and do a little pushup. Step forward and do the same on the Left side.

Again, if you try to take big steps you will fail.

These exercises get pretty much every body part, but they especially got my quads and shoulders.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that in America if a dozen 20 somethings got together to do parkour, this is how it would go. They’d show up a few at a time, and they’d probably stretch and warm up independently while chatting. Then one by one, they’d start doing their own thing. Some people would be working on the same thing, and they’d give each other advice and feedback and try to put their own spin on things. There would probably be several things happening at the same time.

Well, that’s what happened eventually. But this is what happened first:

Once everyone was there and ready to start, we stood in a big circle. The leader outlined 3 points that we should all hold in mind. Be aware of your surroundings and don’t be a nuisance to people walking by. Be aware of your own physical limits and take a break or drink some water when you need to. You might get injured, so keep that in mind and remember that if you do, it’s not just sucky for you, it also burdens the other people in the group. He listed these points in formal Japanese. Then we all said Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.

When we moved into stretching and warm ups, it stayed pretty organized. When we were stretching we stood in a circle. When we were running or doing the monkey walk, we moved in two lines. If someone ran off to go to the bathroom, we all stopped and waited for them to come back. People chatted and joked, and occasionally someone would wander off for a moment, but overall it was very structured.

Japanese children are trained from a young age how to behave as a group. In school, each class begins with formalities: Everyone stands and greets their teacher in unison, and usually the class representative will say a few words about how the class should behave for the lesson. “Let’s listen quietly to the teacher and answer questions with a big voice!” If a student is slow to stand or put their things away, these formalities are postponed until they’re ready. If one kid runs off to the bathroom, the class doesn’t start until they get back. And if one kid makes the class start late, everyone gets scolded.

This education seems to give them a template for how to carry out group activities for the rest of their lives in a way that would not occur to Americans. I don’t know if the average American 20 year old could follow the order, “Let’s line up!” without a sense of irony or irritation. But when you grow up with your classmates being assigned the task of keeping order or starting the class, being the leader doesn’t have to mean being an authority figure. It’s just the person who’s responsible for making things run smoothly.