Image by sombra e luz

The next time you see a guy running through the town centre and leaping over the couple sitting on the bench, don’t automatically assume that he’s just stolen a purse from a helpless old lady. It could be that he’s one of these new-fangled freerunners.

What is a freerunner?

Remember the opening sequence in Casino Royale when that extremely limber fellow was giving Daniel Craig a run for his money by legging it through buildings, over walls and up a giant crane? That’s freerunning. But freerunning isn’t just useful for running away when you’re hijacked by assassins, bomb makers and the like. It’s also an ideal alternative to paying for a gym membership and having to put up with all those bloody New Year newbies.

So - do you want a strong core, great balance, agility and an amazing ability to make people go ‘wow’ when they see you leap from building to building? All you need is nerves of steel and a pair of trainers. Oh, and clothes are advised too!

The freerunning basics

You may already know that I’m a huge advocate of bodyweight exercise. Well freerunning is all about lifting your own bodyweight and learning to use it as efficiently as possible. There are lot of climbs and jumps, which means your core needs to be carved from stone. Here are a couple of exercises to get you started.

Hanging hip raises

1. Hang off a bar or a high rail with an overhand (palms facing forward) grip and arms about shoulder width apart.
2. Bring your knees up to your chest, hold for a second, and then lower them steadily. Focus on the contraction of the stomach to really work your core.

If you’re starting to feel cocky, you can do this exercise with straight legs too for an extra challenge. This exercise is advised for freerunning because it also strengthens your upper body and improves your grip (which helps prevent you falling to your death from great heights).

Do 3 sets of 8-12 repetitions. Once that’s easy for you, move on the straight leg raises. If even that is too easy for you, add weight to the exercise by holding a dumb-bell between your feet.

The plank

1. Lie on the floor with your upper body resting on bent elbows.
2. Raise your hips so you’re in a rigid press-up position on your forearms and toes.
3. Hold for one minute and repeat three times.

If you can’t manage the full minute, perform mini-sets of 15 seconds with 5 seconds rest between each.

This will strengthen the core muscles needed to support you as you run and swing from things like a gorilla (in the mist).

Muscle ups

1. Hang from a bar or high rail with your arms extended and overhand grip.
2. Pull yourself up, flicking out your elbows so that you can push your torso up and over the bar.
3. Then, lower yourself back down slowly and repeat.

It’s the same principle as when you climb out of a swimming pool. Only drier. And a lot harder.

Aim for 3 sets of 4-6 reps to begin with. If you can’t complete a muscle up, then focus on alternating explosive pull-ups (pulling up so that your chest touches the bar as fast as possible and lowering down slowly) and bodyweight dips on a dipping station.

Another way is to perform what I call ‘ugly muscle ups’. This basically means doing whatever you can to complete the muscle up. Different grips, using your legs, even jumping up to the bar to gain momentum.

Note: because freerunning is done on concrete, it’s essential that your whole body is warmed up before attempting your two-footed urban assault to avoid injury!

The freerunning moves

Jumping

A major part of freerunning is jumping from one obstacle to another. You’ll need to be accurate in your jumps. There’s no Matrix style jumps here so be careful.

1. Start with your feet on the edge of the obstacle you’re jumping from and focus on your landing point. Crouch until your legs are at right angles. Oh and don’t close your eyes, you’ll want to see what’s coming!
2. Push off the obstacle, using your arms as balance and tuck your knees up while in mid-air. Keep the focus on the exact place your feet will land.
3. Try to ’stick’ to the ground by absorbing the momentum by bending your knees on impact. Otherwise the momentum will take you beyond the landing point - which can quite bad seeing as most landing points will be high up with a drop on either side!

Wall Spinning

This move can build explosive power in your legs and can be a lot of fun to keep your momentum going until your next obstacle.

1. Approach a wall at a 45 degree angle - you’ll probably want to approach with your strongest hand closest to the wall. For me, that’s the left.
2. At the wall, explode off both feet as if you’re hopping up. Plant your bottom hand flat on the wall and push up, round and over your legs with the top hand.
3. The movement should spin you 180 degrees with lots of momentum. Land on the balls of your feet and keep running, making the whole thing as smooth as possible.

Don’t attempt this while drunk! It’ll most likely end in embarrassment. Or a trip to the hospital.

Climbing

If an obstacle’s too high to jump onto with your feet, you can conquer it with what the Cat Leap move. (It’s a jargon term from the freerunning circle of people in the know).

1. Approach with confidence (and a bit of speed), jump off your strong leg and extend your arms, concentrating on where you’re going to grab the ledge.
2. Grab the obstacle and bring your feet up, absorbing the impact with your legs. Don’t slide down; your arms will give way and you’ll fall to your death! Okay you might survive if the obstacle isn’t very high.
3. Pull yourself up with the ‘Muscle up’ movement and use your feet for extra stability, then get going to your next obstacle.

A word of advice for this move though. A cat may have nine lives, but unlike our feline friends, a Cat Leap freerunner only has the one! Start ’slow and low’ to avoid having a tragic, and possibly quite painful, accident.

One final move for you, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, is the Tic Tac to Cat Grab. Check out the video to see how it’s done:

Final freerunning thoughts

Freerunning can be absolutely brutal on your joints. There’s no point in performing a Running Cat across the Eiffel Tower if you feel like escargot in the morning. (For those of you who got the escargot reference, kudos to you my friend)

Here are three simple ways to recover from leaping great heights onto concrete surfaces.

1. Jogging

   A slow-paced jog will mobilise the joints and get the blood pumping again. I find it best to run across a soft surface such as fields to reduce the impact on damaged joints.

2. Swimming

   Freerunning will leave you aching from muscles you never knew existed. A few lengths in the pool with give you a light, supported stretching session with added cardio benefits.

3. Stretching

   Obvious? Yes. Do loads of people not do it? Yes. I’ve never been a big fan of stretching. I’ve never stretched and never had any negative side-effects. However, when your joints and muscles have been damaged through freerunning, stretching from your ankles all the way up to your neck can improve your recovery time no end.

If you’re interested in learning more about freerunning then check out the American Parkour website. Also, if you’ve tried freerunning or are a freerunner yourself, drop us a message in the comments and let us know how you got started and the type of exercises you do to keep on top of your game!

Image by Joe Shlabotnik

There are so many different types of workout available for men these days that it’s often hard to determine which is best for you. This is made more difficult by so-called experts that claim their way is best and anything else simply won’t work. The fact is that there isn’t a one-type-fits-all workout per se. Different goals, body types, and motivation are all factors to be taken into consideration.

If you’re anything like me, you want your workouts to be as simple as possible so that all of your energy and focus goes into the exercise. This is why I hate most modern gyms. There are distractions everywhere! The TV is playing, there are social conversations between groups of friends and not to mention that there are often a lot of attractive women, which means my concentration is not 100% on the task at hand.

Working Out From Home

Working out from home may not be for everyone, however the exercises I will explain later in the article can be done at home or in the gym.

Working out from home allows me to remove all distractions from my surroundings and my daily life so that I can focus completely on my workout.

The main reasons why I love working out at home are:

1. There is never any queue to use a machine
2. I can put the time it takes to travel to/from the gym to much better use
3. No distractions
4. I can pull my most hideous workout faces without the hot girl on the treadmill seeing me
5. I can do exercises I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing in front of other people

Okay, so we’ve established reasons to work out at home (if you’re comfortable doing this workout in the gym then it can be done there too) so now it’s time to talk a little bit about the reasoning of the weight free workout.

Reasons For Weight Free and Conditioning Exercise

Having lifted weights for many years, I was very skeptical to try out conditioning and bodyweight exercises, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that resistance is resistance. It doesn’t matter if that resistance is your bodyweight, a barbell or a medicine ball. As long as I’m providing my muscles with the necessary resistance needed to improve strength, speed and flexibility, then I don’t really care about what type of resistance I’m using.

Let me tell you now that after doing these exercises (and various others) for six months, I was stronger, fitter, and healthier than I ever was when I was pumping iron. I’ve included a couple of very basic sample routines towards the bottom of this article for people who don’t need to go through the exercise moves and want to skip ahead.

I would describe the sample routines and exercises as low-tech and high intensity. It’s similar to circuit training I did back in school, but that was nothing compared to this. Let’s cover some exercises.

High Intensity Exercises

People often think that the further they run and the longer they run for, the better shape they’re going to be in. This is true in principle, but it’s not always the type of shape they’re looking for. Lengthy cardio sessions will increase your aerobic capacity which means you can run longer and further, but your body will adjust to this type of exercise by reducing the muscle mass.

What we want is short, high intensity anaerobic workouts (unless you’re running a marathon) to really get the heart pumping. This type of exercise burns fat while preserving your muscle mass.

Exercise 1 – Hill sprints

Remember when Rocky ran up those steps in Philly? Same principle. The process goes like so:

1. Start at the bottom of the hill
2. Sprint all the way to the top
3. Jog/walk down the hill
4. Rinse and repeat

If it sounds simple, that’s because it is. Be warned though, this exercise can be soul destroying. I used to jog over to this giant 200-odd metre hill, which was maybe a 30 degree incline, and sprint up it for 30 minutes. By the time I was ready to jog home, my legs were like jelly and I was ready to puke. Simply, effective and minimum time needed for the workout. Hill sprinting also helps to develop lower body power in addition to anaerobic endurance.

Exercise 2 – Burpees

Remember those weird star jump into a push-up type things you used to do at school? They’re called burpees and I guarantee that once you start doing them, Burpees will be the exercise you love to hate.

This exercise is, in my opinion, the best conditioning exercise available. You will rarely hear people bragging about the number of burpees they can do the way guys in the gym brag about their bench press figures. This is a very difficult exercise which a lot of people avoid by choosing alternative conditioning methods. Here’s how to perform it.

1. Start in the squat position with hands on the ground.
2. Kick your feet back into the downward position of a push-up.
3. Push up with your arms, simultaneously thrusting your feet back into the squat position.
4. Explode into a jump.
5. As soon as you land, repeat and continue at a furious pace.

For those that didn’t get that, here’s a YouTube video:

Try performing 100 burpees as fast as you possibly can. It makes for a brief, but very effective conditioning workout.

Exercise 3 – Pull ups

How do you workout your back? Don’t tell me you’re knocking out a couple of sets on the lat pulldown and calling it a day?

This exercise works out your back, your arms, your shoulders and strengthens your core. It’s an amazing bodyweight exercise which can be made more challenging through the addition of a weighted vest if you start to find yourself knocking out a lot of reps.

Pull ups are done from a bar with your palms facing away from you. If your palms are facing you, that’s a chin up and is easier because you can pull with your biceps. Pull ups are a much more functional exercise because if you ever needed to climb up and over something, your grip would resemble a pull up. Ideally, you should combine the two for best possible results.

Also, you can wrap a towel over the pull up bar and do a modified chin up by holding the towel. This really blasts the forearms and grip.

Exercise 4 – Squats

You all know the exercise. Legs shoulder width apart, squat down sticking your bum out until your knees are about 90 degrees, back up and repeat. It’s a great exercise for strengthening the leg muscles and is a staple in the routine of any serious gym go-er. If bodyweight squats are too easy and not challenging enough for you, then I’d recommend giving the Pistol a go. It’s basically a one-legged squat. It will further strengthen your legs, while improving your stability and balance as well.

I remember a friend of mine who had big powerful legs, but he simply couldn’t do a Pistol because his balance and supporting muscles wouldn’t allow it.

Here’s a video showing the Pistol technique:

Exercise 5 – Push ups

Another no brainer really. Push ups will strengthen your shoulders, chest, triceps and core. Aim to improve your maximum number of push ups each week. Once you reach 50 push ups in one set, you’re ready to try the one armed push up. This is a much more difficult exercise which puts extra stress on the triceps and, to a lesser extent, the chest. Video below:

Exercise 6 – Skipping

Most boxers are in fantastic shape, and it’s no wonder with the amount of anaerobic routines they go through. Skipping is a great exercise to get the heart pumping and the blood rushing.

Try doing double unders. Because you’re jumping higher to spin the rope twice before you land, you get an even better workout!

Exercise 6 – Medicine ball slams

One of my absolute favourite exercises is the medicine ball slam. If you or your gym doesn’t own a medicine ball, you can knock one together pretty cheap by following this tutorial. The slams go like so:

• Take the medicine ball and hold it above your head
• Slam it down into the ground as hard as you possibly can
• Bend down and pick it up
• Stand up and raise the ball over your head

Repeat

This excellent conditioning exercise works the arms, shoulders and legs as well as improving your anaerobic conditioning.

Okay now we’ve got a few highly effective exercises, let’s put them into a couple of sample routines.

Sample Workout Routines

I’m going to give you 2 sample workouts to try and see what you think.

This first workout is commonly referred to as No Excuses. It only takes ten minutes to complete so it can’t be too bad. Can it?

1. Burpees
2. Pull ups
3. Squats
4. Push ups

The workout begins with a 60 second interval of each exercise (Burpees then pull ups, then squats, then pushups). You then immediately perform the circuit again with 45 second intervals, then 30 seconds, and finally 15 seconds.

You must move from one exercise to the other without stopping. There are no rest periods between any of the circuits or exercises. If you get stuck on an exercise, rest brief and do your best to continue. If you can’t perform anymore pull ups, hang from the bar for the remainder of the time rather than sitting out to rest.

The second workout is even more of a killer and you may want to make sure you can fully complete the first one before trying this one out.

1. Hill sprint
2. 10 Burpees at the top of the hill
3. Jog down the hill
4. 20 Medicine ball slams at the bottom of the hill

Repeat 8 times.

This exercise is very straightforward. Perform the circuit 8 times as fast as you possibly can. There should be no exercise between exercises or circuits. You can rest if you need to after the completion of the current circuit, but aim to complete the 8 circuits with minimal rest.

These exercises and very simple routines are not meant to replace your current workouts, but supplement them and shock the muscles by doing something a little different. I’ve had a great deal of success using these methods as part of my training and I’m sure you can too.

I’d love to hear your opinions and feedback on these exercises. Do you know of better routines that I can try? If you try these workouts let me know how you felt about them.

You should also check out munfitnessblog and The Fitness Black Book for regular fitness articles. Also, I wouldn’t know about half of these exercises and routines if it weren’t for the truly amazing and inspirational Ross Enamait.

Finally, subscribe to my RSS feed to get all the latest posts and then check out the following video, just because Ross is a complete badass fitness guru!