Hello, Welcome to Bottom Level- (BL)

This Blog belongs to the people that train at least every week at BL and will be updated as regularly as possible.

The Blog has been named Bottom Level for two reasons.
1: The meeting place every Thursday at 4.30pm is the bottom level of castle street car park.
2: We are practising the real bottom level of the scale exercises that are essential foundations to progress in most sports; in our case we are training for Parkour as our increased strength will benefit the speed and control of all aspects of our movements.

This Blog was started by Jason Matten and Olivia Rowlands to encourage people to train hard more Physically than technically at least once a week and to document the participating individuals and groups progress. The Blog is about those people in and around Canterbury, Kent, who gather from all walks of life to train in this way so that they can improve their Mental and Physical Strength, Power, Speed, Stamina, Flexibility and endurance to have a positive impact on their lives.



Any and All.

ANYONE who's willing to give their ALL is welcome to attend the Thursday training sessions. Training starts promptly at 4:30pm, and finishes when the leader says so (usually around 2 hours).
Coming late when people have begun and are training hard is inconvenient because it breaks the mood and feeling of the team/group. Please do not be late.








This is where we train, Castle Street multi-storey car park



































This is a man. We do not know who he is.

Very hard Tick-Tack.

20th Nov 06.
Three steps across the road, take off before the yellow kerb, off the rounded wall then through the gap, clearing your feet of the black line on the ground, without smacking your head on the ceiling.

Jason:

I have tried this so many times and I just cant get it yet, Ash and I had a session training just this and the day after my groin was screaming because it is such a lunge to the wall and all of that speed at the wall has to be re-directed with one leg; HARD!! I came pretty close in my last attempts at it, but Ash made me laugh so much when he gave himself a hair cut and cleared it with ease at the same time. He went at a slightly different angle to what we had been doing and pegged it at the kerb going too close to the ceiling for my comfortable viewing pleasure (I thought he hit it) but he did it so respect :-)

This is one of the few staircases on which we train different technical methods. We have experimented with several methods of going up and down, two of which are shown below.
The principal rule, however, is that the actual stairs cannot be touched; we use the rails and the concrete skirting on the outside edge to get from one level to the other.
As the warning shows, the edges can be slippery when wet so this is another reason why we endeavour to keep control of the placements of the hands and feet, which are crucial to Parkour.

Times up using outside edge.
Jason: 18.8
Kevin: 16.5
Diz: 14.6

Times up using inside edge:
Jason: 22.5

Kev:18.6

Diz: 17.3

Times up using any/best way:

Meeting place (BL)

11th Dec 06.
Jason:

Diz and I have been practicing our underbars a little bit recently mainly because we suck at them but also because we have seen one that we are dreaming of doing. From the kerb to the black (wobbly as hell) rail. When we are training technically we try to move further away from the rail, at the moment i am stepping about a foot and a half over the curb into the road and Diz about two foot but we are both feeling a bit more comfortable with this underbar now so when we get the chance we will find and train some other types.