Welcome back to The Takeoff! In this week's episode, we're digging into plyometrics with The Plyo Guy @mcinneswatson himself.

It was such a cool experience to dive into all things plyos with Matt while coming at it from slightly adjacent angles - myself from (obviously) an extensive parkour background with a decade plus obsession with track/plyometrics and Matt being someone whose plyometric-specific content I have mined for years and incorporated into my training regularly.

We cover the differences between plyometrics and parkour, trends we are seeing in the GPP space with how plyometrics and "parkour"/play are being incorporated, why it's important for athletes to create a clinical space to isolate plyometric work, and what parkour can ACTUALLY contribute to the broader fitness conversation.

Check out Matt's work at https://www.plusplyos.com and follow him on socials at @mcinneswatson and @plusplyos

Catch you next week! - Max

This week, we sit down with Dylan Polin - owner of @HUBPTC and one of the minds behind Sport Parkour League.

Dylan has run the East Coast's most successful and influential parkour facility for almost a decade now, and after expanding into two new locations in the past year is making a run for the United States' top parkour facility.

In this episode, we chat about creating a community that has helped produce phenomenal athletes like Brandon Hooper, Will Hess, James West, Z Zoromba, and others...all while making space for parkour to be a fulfilling hobby to many children and adults who don't want to make it their lifestyle.

Dylan has a ton of great insight to add to the ongoing conversation around what a parkour gym should look like moving forward - particularly when it comes to embracing competition and integrating it in a healthy, positive way.

I hope you enjoy this episode and thanks as always for tuning in!

Dylan's Recommendation: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Hey y'all, I hope you are managing to make it through what has been an incredibly rough week here in the parkour community. I address all of the recent revelations regarding Callum a bit in the intro (and have shared on Instagram as well) but want to let viewers know there may be mentions of him or his book in this and the following episode, which were both recorded before this information about Callum was known.

On a lighter note, this episode with Camila was a joy to record and I hope you enjoy it. You may notice a few pauses or cuts - Camila was having some storage issues during the recording and I had to splice around it once or twice.

My apologies to anyone that finds it distracting and I hope it doesn't stop you from finding this episode as fun and informative as I did!

If you aren't already, go show Camila some love on socials: ⁨@CamilaStefaniu⁩

Camila's Recommendation: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

Thanks as always for listening and I'll catch you next week! - Max

On this week's episode we have Kevin Franzen (@kevinfranzen01) of ⁨@KIPAMAGAZINE⁩ fame. This may be my favorite conversation I've had so far on the podcast and it's one that has the potential to totally shift the way you look at training.

If you're not familiar with Kevin, he is a phenomenal competitive parkour athlete and regularly in the conversation of the sport's top innovators. He blends top level power and technicality with a unique vision...and in this episode, we dive into how he developed that vision and how he tries to empower others to develop their own authentic style by embracing the reality of failure.

We could have gone on for another hour or more on this one, so if you'd like another episode with Kevin let me know in the comments and we'll make it happen.

As always, thanks for listening! - Max

This week, we are catching up with Lynn Jung ( @LynnJungAthlete ) - one of the most influential female athletes in the history of our sport and a lovely human being/friend.

Lynn has recently stepped away from the athlete lifestyle to take on new challenges in athlete management and marketing, and I wanted to chat with her about her professional experiences - both in front of and behind the camera - and how she's seen the community grow over the past 15ish years, particularly in the realm of female competition and overall involvement.

It was honestly so fun to just catch up with Lynn, so this one may feel a bit more casual than some other episodes, but I think we also dig into some very interesting shifts and new directions the sport appears to be going in that coaches and content creators may find particularly interesting.

As always, thanks so much for watching and I hope you enjoy this episode!

Lynn's Recommendations: The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge

In today's episode, we have parkour athlete and movement mentalist Flynn Disney on to chat about the relationship between our training, our emotions, and our internal narratives.

Despite nearly 1.5 hours of runtime I feel like we barely scratched the surface of Flynn's training insights and I think more than anything it indicates how much attention to detail he puts into his coaching, guidance, and overall framework for development.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did, and I can't recommend enough checking the links below to get even more depth on Flynn's perspective!

Follow Flynn here: @flynndisney

Substack: https://flynndisney.substack.com

Flynn's Recommendation: https://youtu.be/66aCaw_27Oo?si=C98nS_wnPUVV5Cla

Recommendation Accompanying Text: https://web.archive.org/web/20190820003834/https://eightyeightdays.com/human-writes/parkour-re-establishing-context-and-the-introduction-of-the-superstimulus/

On this week's episode, I have Ihab Yassin (@little.parkour.hulk) on to chat about accessibility in parkour and his mission to help raise visibility for athletes with disabilities in the parkour community.

Ihab has been training parkour in Germany for over a decade and achieved an incredibly high level. He also has dwarfism - and has used his platform to advocate for more education, accessibility, and understanding when it comes to disability within parkour.

In this episode, we dive into how parkour has affected his life, concrete ways that the parkour community can continue to make the sport's narrative and education/competitive structures more welcoming for people with disabilities, and why visibility is so important in parkour - not just for athletes with disabilities but for everyone.

As always thanks for watching and drop some love for Ihab in the comments! - Max

On today's episode of The Takeoff we have Davis Vasconcellos - one of my best friends in the sport and "Uncle Davis" to my daughter. Davis, Sean, and I spent the past 3+ years shooting the next long format piece for Point A...which I have been working a ton on over the past month.

With that in mind, I wanted to bring Davis on to talk about what the process of filming was like for him and get some hot takes on how his relationship to parkour and the community has changed since we started shooting in 2023.

As always, I hope you enjoy this one! If you haven't seen it yet - or it's been a while - you can check out the trailer for Davis's piece "Still Here" on @pointaparkour

- Max