Parkour and CST/Russian Martial Arts

It turns out that I am not the only one who has noticed the similarities between the Russian martial arts, Scott Sonnon's CST and the practice of Parkour. Here is an article by Dan Edwardes over at Parkour Generations on the similarities between CST and Parkour:

Le Parkour (1), though crystallised into its current guise by Frenchmen David Belle and Yann Hnautra sometime in the 1980s, is a practice the roots of which precede records. It has drawn on a myriad of sources, been inspired by a number of notable individuals and evolved through several traditions to arrive at the modern discipline now referred to as parkour or free-running. Names and labels come and go, of course, and the outward visage of this discipline has shifted and modified itself countless times. However, behind whatever appearance has been fashionable at the time, at its core there has always existed an eternal constant – the means, the end, the method and the goal of parkour: Movement.

You can read the rest of the article here.

I have been thinking a lot recently that the combination of CST/Russian martial arts and Parkour would be the ultimate martial art. To bring it all together I would add the nature awareness training of Tom Brown Jr. (in particular the Scout training), and Jon Young.

Christmas Gifts -- call of the wild!

It has been a very nice holiday for my family and I. My wife bought me two books that I have been wanting for a long time. They are both by Tom Brown Jr. AKA "The Tracker". I have bought and read both books before (more than once) and liked them so much I "loaned" them to other people. Of course when you give books away they never return. C'est la vie. Well the problem in this case was that these books went out of print. To make matters worse all of the used copies to be had online were exorbitantly priced. I'm talking ~$50 for a paperback. Yeah, he's a popular author.

Anyway my thoughtful wife got them both for me, and for a decent price. This probable because Tom Brown has bought the rights to both books and has published one of them himself just recently. This one is called "The Journey" and the other is called "The Quest". Along with "The Vision" these three books make somewhat of a spiritual trilogy, although all of his books have spiritual themes.

Anyway I love these books and am already half way through "The Quest". Of course that got me thinking about getting outdoors again and resuming my nature studies. I still have Kamana 2 ready to go on the shelf. Kamana is a great program and if you are interested in Tom Brown Jr.'s stuff it is like having a Tom Brown Jr. home study course. It was originally created by Tom's first student Jon Young.

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Happy New Year All!