My 1st month as a parkour coach

It feels totally surreal that I’m allowed to coach parkour at the YMCA. It feels like just yesterday I was making the case for parkour in Tonya Felhofer’s office in February!

And now we’re here. Just wrapped the 5th class, and this one was special because I invited Joey Kluz from Wisconsin Parkour to guest coach! As Michael Scott would say…

Except, not really 😂 He’s mentoring me by guest coaching, which was super cool of him to do. Him being there showed me things that are hard to teach over the phone. I’ll get into that in a bit. But it was also just great to hang out again!

We’ve been chatting on the phone once a week since early September to debrief me after all of my classes, and it’s helped me a lot in terms of class ideas, class management, and bringing the spirit of parkour to every class. I know it sounds silly that I’d need reminders about parkour culture, but you have to remember I’ve been away from the parkour community pretty much since 2018. That isolation makes you forget things.

This year has brought back a lot of beautiful memories and reminded me to expect more from myself as a practitioner, but also to not expect too much, if that makes sense. Again, I’ll get to that in a moment.

I wrote in my last blog post that I’d met up with 2 old friends to do some training on the UW-Madison campus, but I didn’t name anybody! I was referring to Joey — the same one who came out to this week’s class — and Alissa Bratz, the founder of Wisconsin Parkour and another coach who I trained with back in my early days being involved with parkour. Back then, I mostly saw myself as a student in their classes or at the annual Wisconsin Parkour Jubilee events. Nowadays I see myself more as a peer and a friend of theirs as I begin my coaching journey in earnest.

It was so great to catch up and be reminded of so much of what I’ve forgotten over the years. Parkour really depends on its community to prosper, and parkour practitioners depend on their community to stay strong in spirit. It’s fine to train alone but it’s not the same, and honestly every time I meet up with someone in the community, I’m reminded of how much more there is to parkour when we’re experiencing it together.

I’m so glad I’m coaching at the Y and helping to build the parkour community here in Door County. It’ll take time to bloom, but the seed has been planted and it’s already beginning to grow.

From Gym Member to Coach — a transition

It was kinda weird showing up to my first class.

I’ve been going to this same YMCA for over a year, and suddenly they’re giving me keys to the gymnastics gym and permission to mess with all the equipment behind the curtain. And coach 7 kids! It felt like a massive responsibility and I wanted them to see their investment was worth it. A small voice kept telling me on my first day not to let everyone down, but I told it to scram because I had a class to run.

The first class was messy. I did a lot of things right, though:

• I showed up early

• I made a lesson plan

• I tested the equipment

• I greeted all the students and their parents at the door

• I ran a warm-up, skill drills, and a cool-down

• We played a game!

But the class management part was something I knew I’d have to get better at. I knew that going into this, but now I really knew because it was officially time to see if I was up to the task.

Kids are wild if you don’t impose order in the class. They wrestle each other, throw foam blocks at each other, exit the room without asking, use equipment they’re not supposed to use, make up their own activities, etc. I’ve seen a lot already and I’ve only run 5 classes 🤣 And honestly, none of it is the dealbreaker I thought it would be when I was scared to be a classroom teacher in my 20s. It’s just a new game I’ll learn to play.

Even with my struggles to manage behavior, I’m loving it. And I have a great support system of ADAPT-certified coaches ready to give me advice when I need it, from Wisconsin Parkour to Parkour Generations to Parkour Generations Americas. And the YMCA staff has been helpful in their own way! Paul, the Executive Program Manager at my Y, has been a great mentor to me. He’s had the benefit of seeing a lot of the kids in my class be involved in that YMCA for years now, so he knows their quirks pretty well. He’s also been a stellar advocate for me with the other leadership staff.

This Week’s Class — a trip back in time ✨ 🕰️ 

The Logistics

Joey showed up right on the dot and we did some conditioning to warm up for the day before we got into planning. Our phone call earlier covered the high-level plan for the day and we already knew the schedule that was agreed on with Paul:

5:00 - 5:30 — Prep

5:30-6:00 — Parents Meet & Greet

6:00-7:15 — Class

7:15 - 7:30 — Cleanup

7:30 — Lock up & Leave

The reason why 7:30 was a hard stop was because 7:00 was the actual closing time at the YMCA, so we were the last people in the building aside from cleaning staff and any Y members with the 24-hour access key fobs. Typically no classes ran this late, so we were trying to be respectful and get out at a reasonable time after closing.

We expected the meet & greet would be pretty short and that the kids would be primed and ready to start moving, and that’s exactly what happened. We started class at like 5:40, and it ended up running until just about 7:30! Paul ended up seeing the tail end of the class and I got to introduce him to Joey, and he seemed cool about the class going a bit later than expected. All the kids had left by just about 7:30 so we were technically still on schedule.

5:00 — Prep

When we got into the gymnastics gym, I completely forgot how I typically prepare for class and expected that we were just gonna start chatting about class ideas.

Nope. Conditioning 😂 And then I remembered: yeah, I do usually warm up as part of my prep so I’m not cold when the kids arrive. But I learned this part of class prep served another very important purpose:

And I totally underappreciated this aspect of class prep, but Joey reminded me it’s important to get into a mindset of play and reactivity, rather than being stuck in my head. I needed to get out of my head and into my body. And thank goodness we did that conditioning and those reactivity exercises because I didn’t realize how often I’m in my head when I’m coaching. But in retrospect, obviously I was always in my head.

5:30 - 5:40 — The Meet & Greet

Speaking of being in my head, I have a lot of social anxiety in “cocktail party” settings. I had only had brief chats with some of the parents before, and some showed up who I hadn’t met before. I think everyone was a bit shy because nobody approached me or Joey. The vibe was that everyone seemed ready for class to start so the parents could watch and the kids could get moving. So that’s what we did, fairly quickly.

I had hoped to meet more of the parents, but I suppose if they were really curious about anything they would’ve approached me. I forget not everybody has my anxiety 😛 

And I’m glad we started class early because we covered so much with that extra time. And that means the parents got to see even more of what parkour has to offer. The best way to learn about parkour is to do it. The second best way to learn about parkour is to see it being taught. It’s not like any other discipline or sport in the way it’s taught. It’s a unique experience.

5:40 - 7:25 — The Class

The class started off with a standard warm-up: joint rotations, cardio, dynamic stretches, QM. Then we started moving into more games and drills. But most of the drills also felt like games.

I’d forgotten how much of the parkour I did in classes and at Jubilee events had felt like a long series of games. Conditioning was turned into play. Technical training was turned into group challenges. Nothing felt like “working out” or “doing reps”. Whereas normally I only play 1 game with the kids, we played about 5 games during this class. Sure, it was almost 2 hours instead of the typical 1 hour, but that’s still a stark contrast.

The theme of the class was originally going to be “kongs”, but it ended up being “focus”.

Why focus? Because focus is a prerequisite for responsible parkour practice. If the students aren’t focusing, they have a higher risk of injury. One of my takeaways from this class is that it’s better to have a day where all we do is conditioning and don’t have any fun, than to have a day where all the kids are unfocused. Learning to focus and applying it to our training is what gives us “superpowers” as parkour practitioners. Without this disciplined focus, we cannot achieve much in parkour and risk ending our parkour careers prematurely.

Many kids who come to parkour are kids who have trouble focusing or whose undisciplined behavior gets them in trouble at school. The kids who come to parkour are also usually quite smart and are looking for a challenge. I came to parkour as someone who fits the typical student profile, and I’ve benefited from parkour financially, socially, physically, and mentally. I’m better equipped to handle my ADHD symptoms because of parkour. But it wasn’t because my coaches let me do whatever I wanted. They instilled in me the value of focus and discipline, but also in challenging myself through hard work that felt like play.

So in this class, Joey and I worked together to give that same gift to the students. We turned everything into a game and made sure they were all adequately challenged. I got to see what it looks like to get the students to focus, how to use nonverbal communication to command attention, and a bunch of other useful coaching techniques. It was incredibly educational for me.

We taught students how to break a jump, how to improve their tic-tac technique, and how to sit in “rest position” (iykyk, but basically it’s a sitting position that engages the core). We also taught them how to listen to their body, how to focus, how to wait patiently in line, and how to hold themselves accountable using “standards” (e.g., 10 jumping jacks if you fall off the balance beam). These are things I’ve shown the students before, but I saw more effective ways to teach them during this class, and I think the message was better communicated.

The kids also learned that parkour’s recent historical roots began in the 1970s, that Joey was one of the first parkour pioneers in Wisconsin, and that the kids likely know what parkour is in part thanks to him and Wisconsin Parkour’s actions. They got to see more examples of “We Start Together, We Finish Together” during this class than during the 4 previous classes combined. And at the end, they got to give Joey the parkour handshake. They definitely earned it! It was inspiring to see how hard the kids worked during this class.

And it was inspiring for me to see so many examples of how I could grow as a coach.

7:25 - 7:30 — The Cleanup

It might seem silly, but I learned a lot from watching how Joey handled cleanup at the end of the class. This entire time, I’d been putting the responsibility for cleaning up and putting away equipment on myself after the students had left.

Nope. Joey had the students work together to put all the equipment away. It’s crazy that I’d forgotten that this is how it always worked when I went to parkour classes. I was always helping the other students put away equipment. We never left class and said, “have fun picking up after us, Joey!”. That’s not the parkour way.

In the future, every class will end with a group effort to clean up. It’s the first and last lesson every student should receive at every class: we start together, we finish together.

7:30 — Lockup & Leave

I very nearly forgot my gallon jug of water on the way out, but thankfully my Spidey Sense was tingling halfway to the door.

We went to Culver’s to grab some food and talk about how class went. I had a lot of questions, and he had a lot of comments. We swapped ideas about how certain elements of the class could’ve been executed better, and I learned more about the “why”s behind many of his coaching decisions in that class.

By the time I got home, I was freshly inspired and felt determined to make next class 10x better than all of my previous classes. I had so many more tools than I did before, and some things I saw during this class fundamentally altered how I wanted to coach. I was reminded how parkour class should feel, and I no longer felt like the kids were going to rule my classes.

What’s Next?

I’m going to have 1 more chat with Joey about this class before Class #6 rolls around.

Then, I’m going to make sure I get some more training in before Friday, especially upper body pulling exercises like climb-ups and wallruns.

My wife and I went to a wedding on Saturday and all that dancing coupled with the more-intense-than-usual Friday class has given me an inflamed patellar tendon. But I know better than to rest it too many days in a row. As a new friend from the ADAPT Level 2 course mentioned, “Motion is lotion”. And I’ve found that to be true.

Fall 2 is coming up fast, and that means potentially 2 parkour classes every week instead of just 1. Or maybe it’ll be just 1 again. Regardless, that means I’ve only got a couple more classes with these kids before I potentially never see them again. Some of them may rejoin, but I know that’s not a guarantee.

I want to start planning where I want this parkour thing to go in the next year or so. I have this idea that I want to start offering outdoor classes in the spring, but I haven’t firmed up when. I don’t have deadlines, and so I don’t really have a concrete plan. I need to decide when I’m going to buy liability insurance, when I want to launch a website and newsletter, and what these classes are going to look like, and when I’ll start offering them.

I’ll also want to decide what role a free Door Parkour Community can play in all of this. The classes will be paid, but there should be a way for students to find each other organically and schedule meetups with each other. Maybe that’s all it’ll be, but maybe there’s more we can do with it.

We’ll see. Lots of questions to answer.

For now, I’m just grateful to have the opportunity to shape parkour in Door County and to have such a supportive parkour community to lean on for mentorship and inspiration ❤️