Vaulting movements are some of the most archetypal movements in parkour, while everyone has jumped from one thing to another and most people have climbed, and swung on monkey bars, relatively few people have explored the more sophisticated vaulting patterns seen in parkour.
In the parkour sense a vault is a jump with support from the arms to aid the body in passing over an object.
In the orginal french terminology there were only a couple names for vaults, the general term for vaults was passement, the only vaults that were distinguished from this general term were the saut du chat where one dives on to ones hands pushes of both hands equally and lands on the other side and the demi-tour where one swings the body around to land on a cat hang on the other side.
After Parkour was adopted in the english speaking world a whole new set of terms was popularized with far more distinct vaults named including the speed vault, lazy vault, reverse, monkey, kong, dash, kash, gate and many more the value of this more specific set of names has been debated in the community extensively but find it an aid to communication though it can distract people from the point which is not the vault but what it achieves.
While the more sophisticated vaults might seem specific to parkour all the basic patterns had been explored in previous acrobatics and martial arts.
The value of vaults lies in the ability to stabilize a jump and guide yourself while staying relatively low to an obstacle(only a hurdle surpasses vaults for an efficient flight path). In addition connecting vaulting movements together provides a way to find allot of complex connections in small space providing a great place to start in building movement complexity.
So today my challenge to you is to practice your vaults and work on connections between them.
If your new to vaulting I always start people with the step vault, lazy vault, and reverse vault. Which you can see below.
For inspiration today check out this simple warm up video from the incomparable Joey Adrian.
