This is not a post concerned with philosophical issues such as WHY you do parkour, or how your training improves your life, or what exactly you hope to get out of the discipline, etc. etc.  It's more to do with the technical and intellectual aspects of training.  All too often, I see people training with no real sense of what they're doing or how it's meant to help them ... they're just sort of going through the motions blindly, without any sense of purpose.  They might drill something fifty times, but they don't really know WHY they're drilling, or how to tell a good repetition from a bad one, or how to take full mental and physical advantage of the experience.  This is no way to make progress; you must be aware of what you are doing when you are doing it, or else you will go nowhere.  The following are a list of things to think about during EACH AND EVERY MOVE YOU EXECUTE, regardless of whether it's easy or hard, whether you're doing it once or a thousand times, whether you're alone or in a group.

The Goals of Training

1. Improve your "first attempt" success rate.
When you drill a technique fifty times, you are not doing one set of fifty, you are doing fifty sets of one.  In any real chase scenario, you are likely to have only a single shot at a given technique - climbing a wall, vaulting an obstacle, whatever.  With no time to turn around and try again, you have to succeed on your first shot.  This means that you should NEVER attempt a move with less than 100% effort and concentration - if you do, you're wasting your time.  It also means that you should approach each repetition afresh, with no consideration to how often you have failed or succeeded in the past - THIS time, you are planning on success.  Finally, you should never go through a motion in an incomplete fashion unless you're focused only on conditioning - if you are working on catleaps, climb up at the end.  If you are working on drops, run out of the roll.  Having practiced only half a motion means that when you need to execute, you effectively cannot do it at all.

2.  Constantly increase your efficiency.
Practice alone does not improve your technique; in fact, if you have bad habits, repetition will carve those bad habits deeper and deeper until you can't shake them off.  Examine your motion from all angles - how quickly are you executing, how coordinated are your movements, how well are you balancing effort against results?  Are you engaging in extraneous movement?  Are you taking full advantage of grip, angles, and momentum?  FIX THINGS CONSCIOUSLY; DELIBERATELY VARY YOUR METHOD.  Repeating an imperfect technique over and over again does you more harm than good - before you can gain strength and coordination, you first have to develop proper form, and this can only be done through a combination of trial and error and analysis.

3.  Broaden your understanding of the technique.
Even when you are relatively familiar with a particular move, no two attempts are ever exactly alike.  Hand and foot placement, body positioning, momentum and acceleration - all of these things will change between repetitions, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically.  You must pay attention each and every time you move, engaging all of your senses so that you will remember and detect these differences.  If you aren't actively trying to remember what a certain motion "feels like," you won't - after a few repetitions they'll all blend together.  It's only by "listening" to yourself that you can figure out what's really going on and break it down in your mind afterwards, and by extension, begin to learn what works and what doesn't.

4.  Sharpen your recovery skills.
A poorly executed attempt is only wasted if YOU waste it.  Just as every physical obstacle presents opportunities for enhancing your motion, every slip up and stumble presents an opportunity to develop your reflexes, your coordination, and your versatility.  In a full-speed run, you will not land every technique perfectly, and the difference between you and the next traceur lies in how well-practiced you are at failure.  Be capable of adjusting your position in midair to compensate for an inaccurate takeoff; practice using feet and hands individually and separately to change direction.  When drilling a move, you should ask yourself: "Where else might this move come in handy?  In what sorts of environments will I utilize this skill?"  Take your answers, and develop a backup plan, something to practice if your intended move falls through.  For instance, with a precision landing, the two most likely kinds of failure are overshooting and undershooting - your feet will make contact with the target, but you will tip one way or another due to your momentum.  If you fall forward, practice your roll; if you fall backward, practice shifting your weight so that as you fall you can grab with your hands instead.  It is these secondary survival techniques, much more so than the more standard moves, that will keep you safe during an actual chase situation, and since you will inevitably fail EVERY technique at some point or another, it behooves you to think about your fallback options in advance.

5.  Think in terms of ends, not means.
To some extent, your goal is to build a "toolbox of techniques," different skills and motions that you can pull out at a moment's notice and adapt to a given environment.  These are the movements that have names, such as saut-de-chat (kongs) and saut-de-bras (catleaps).  However, these skills are only the beginning.  They are like phrases in speech - you can memorize set phrases and use them from time to time as you speak, but if the phrases are all you have, your conversation will be severely limited.  Similarly, while much of your training might consist of practicing a given set of moves, most of it will center around novel motions or on fluid variations of a basic "ideal" technique.  Constantly re-examine your environment and challenge yourself to move within it in new ways.  "Textbook" obstacles, that remind you irresistably of some move you saw in a video or read about online, can be overcome using other techniques, too.  Never get into the habit of thinking of an environment as being "made for" this or that move - it wasn't.  The move was made for the environment, and when you travel outside the realm of your training grounds, what counts is not which techniques you can do, but which obstacles you can overcome safely and efficiently.

6.  Push your physical abilities.
I've put this last not because it's any less important than the other five, but because it's the only one most people already think about.  Never settle for a given level of strength, endurance, or control; if you find yourself accomplishing a move or a run perfectly every time, devise some way to make it hard again.  The human body will only improve under stress; once it has adapted to stress, improvement halts.  If you are able to jump onto a particular obstacle, work on jumping over it; if you can vault something with two hands, try relying on just one; if you can travel along a difficult path, see if you can also make it back.  Remember that you need speed AND coordination, strength AND sensitivity, limbs AND core, left AND right.  Competency in parkour goes beyond any one aspect of health or agility; the best traceur is not one who can already do everything, but one who is in such control of his mind and body that he can learn something new on the spot.

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