HOW TO PHYSICALLY PREPARE FOR TRICKING
BY AnTHONY mychal
Ten years ago, only a handful of people tricked. Since then, however, the sport has seen a rapid
climb in popularity. There are thousands of people from hundreds of countries that are flipping,
twisting, and kicking in their backyards aided by the massive amount of online content, support,
and resources.
Even though tricking depends largely on skill, better athletes are emerging and raising the level
of difficulty and complexity of the tricks. The downside of this is that most new tricksters have
no formal training. In its infancy, tricksters were martial artists that were already conditioned,
which helped protect from injuries and jumpstart their careers.
This lack of physical preparation can devastate an athlete. As tricking advances, just like any
sport, getting bigger, faster, and stronger is advantageous to prevent injuries and push the
boundaries of human capability.
What makes training for tricking difficult, however, is that there aren’t rules or boundaries
defining the sport. There are no intervals of work and rest. You trick when you’re ready to trick.
This means following programs, techniques, and regimens from other sports is very misguided.
A TRICKSTEr’S NEEDS
Successful tricksters will have the power and explosiveness to execute high flying moves, while
also having the strength and stiffness to handle the impact of sticking a landing. But tricking is
unique from others sports in that grace and flexibility are needed to execute most moves. It’s not
about brute strength, but having strength in extreme ranges of motion is important to protect
from injury.
The good news is that the very act of tricking provides a lot of these things. Traditional
techniques to get explosive, like plyometrics, aren’t necessary because tricking is plyometric by
nature. Adding more high intensity jumps and hops in addition to a full tricking load will
overload the system and cause injury.
Make no mistake, tricking makes you explosive. Since the sport isn’t bound by offseason
periods, you’ll be becoming more explosive year round. What you need to focus on are the
things that tricking won’t develop.
ORDER OF TRAINING METHODS
You have to follow a progression of training techniques to minimize risk of injury. The
continuum looks like this: skill and technique before speed, speed before strength, strength
before endurance, and endurance before static flexibility.
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Most workouts will follow this order: dynamic warm up, tricking, static cool down. If strength
work is to be done on the same day, it should be done after tricking and before the cool down.
EARLY STAGES
Anyone can start tricking at any time in their lives. You don’t need a martial arts or gymnastics
background; you just need the motivation to persist through tough times. While the safest way to
start tricking is inside of a gymnastics gym (look around your area for these places and ask if
they have something called “open gym” times, which are times that anyone is allowed to come
and use the equipment for usually a rate of $5 per hour), you can start in the nearest grassy
field—even your backyard.
A camcorder or some type of video capturing device is recommended so you can see what you’re
doing wrong and share it to others that will help. But it all comes down to reading and watching
the tutorials at your disposal and going out there and executing. It won’t be pretty at first, but
keep at it. Go at your own pace. Compare your tricks to others and see how your body mechanics
differ. Tricking is physical, but it also requires a lot of film study and note taking.
Expect to be sore. No sport is like tricking, and it stresses the muscles unlike any other activity.
The stiffness and pain will go away after a few days, so be patient. This especially applies right
after landing new moves, especially backflip variations.
The focus for a beginning trickster should be on basic kicks, the most basic tricks, strength, and
flexibility.
Practicing basic kicks is a form of dynamic flexibility training, which gives you the range of
motion you’ll need to complete tricks later on. They serve as a great warm up and should be
done prior to any tricking session. Here’s a good warm up routine that you should get into the
habit of doing:
1) Neck and shoulder rolls
2) Arm, elbow, wrist, hip, trunk, and ankle circles
3) Front, back, and side leg lifts
4) Roundhouse and hook kicks, OR inside and outside crescent kicks
5) Bunny hops, tuck jumps, and single leg bounds
That will get your muscles ready for most tricks. After the warm up, drill and practice the most
basic tricks. They may seem easy and lack the flare of more advanced tricks, but they are the
foundation. Mastering them will make future tricking easier and build up the tissue integrity of
the muscles in the leg and torso.
The basics of basic tricks are: tornado kicks, 360 crescents, butterfly kicks, cartwheels, and
backflips.
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After practicing them, muscle strengthening comes next. For a beginner, it can be as simple as
running through a circuit of bodyweight squats, chin-ups, and pushups a few times. This is just a
primer to prepare the body, so it doesn’t have to be intensive.
After the strength work, focus on the static, slow flexibility work. Spend most of your time on
the hamstrings, groin, and hip flexors. Don’t be satisfied with your flexibility until you can do
the front and side splits. If you’re miles away from this goal, make static stretching a priority
during your cool downs.
Lastly, in the beginning stage, consider the shape you’re in. If you’re overly fat, you need to
clean up your diet so you can trick more efficiently. Don’t add in extra exercise to shed the extra
weight, do it by manipulating your food intake. Your body has enough adapting to do with
tricking. The easiest way to do lose fat is to focus on eating copious amounts of protein and
vegetables, with a spattering of grains, beans, and dairy. Stop eating cake.
LATE EARLY STAGES
After mastering the basic tricking maneuvers and beginning to condition your body, it’s time to
move onto the next tier of development.
The warm up throughout your tricking career should stay constant. The only addition is
incorporating the basic maneuvers into your warm up by doing a few tornado kicks, 360
crescents, butterfly kicks, and backflips after the hops and bounds. This “completes” your warm
up because it becomes very tricking specific at that point.
Your new goal for this stage is to master the basic tricks: the 540, 540 crescent, double leg,
butterfly twist, aerial, and backflip (if not already mastered from a fear standpoint). All things
considered, these tricks are still “low intensity,” which means they can be practiced 3-5 times per
week.
Strength work can be taken to a higher level. Tricking requires leg and hip strength, so squats or
deadlifts with a barbell can be introduced to aid power and explosiveness. Finish either of those
off with an exercise that works the deep hip flexors, like a hanging leg raise.
Upper body strength isn’t important, nor is extra upper body mass. Training it can be as simple
as sticking to chin-ups, inverted rows, pushups, dips, and other bodyweight exercises.
The initial flexibility work should have primed the body for more advanced stretching
techniques. Remember, range of motion isn’t enough; you need to have strength in that
range of motion. Alternate days of isometric stretches and super slow kicks during your cool
down.
ADVANCED STAGES
Progressing through the basic stages of tricking and muscle strengthening won’t be overly
complicating. It’s just a matter of going out there and giving quality effort every time you can.
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But after the introductory stages, both tricking and weight training become more intense.
Tricking is no longer about learning relatively easy moves that can be frequently practiced.
What used to be tornado kicks are now jackknives. Backflips are now gainers. Even new tricks
like corkscrews are introduced. Not only does it become more physically demanding, but it also
becomes more mentally demanding. Remembering the nuances of every move and mustering the
motivation to try more dangerous tricks takes a toll on the body.
Bodyweight squats are now weighted barbell squats with an excess of your bodyweight on the
bar. This fatigues the legs and can interfere with tricking to the point of altering technique and
causing a lot of problems that otherwise wouldn’t occur. Fatigue management becomes more
important.
Keep in mind, however, that tricking should always be your priority if you want to trick
better. Never prioritize energy in the weight room. All allotted energy must be used for tricking.
It’s a skill, and skills need focus.
PROGRAMMING STRATEGIES FOR ADVANCED STAGES
To manage recovery while becoming a physical beast, one of my favorite programming
strategies is managing stressors on the central nervous system.
Skill is the limiting factor of becoming a better trickster. Jumping higher and being agile have
their advantages, but it comes down to how skilled you are.
Becoming skilled is about managing stress and recovery. If you train when you’re tired, you’re
going to hurt yourself because you’re working in a slowed state. Throwing sloppy tricks only
makes you better at throwing sloppy tricks. And throwing sloppy tricks makes getting injured
easier. But when it comes to skill, the more practice the better.
SKILL ACQUISITION
Becoming skilled requires frequent practice. Don’t confuse that with always going at a
maximally intense effort. But I’ve never heard of any skill benefiting from practicing less.
The problem is that, at some point for some activities, training too frequently becomes too tiring.
Take a look at a baseball pitcher. They can’t go out there every day and throw 100mph fastballs
because their arm would quickly tire and they would get injured.
Tricking is similar. Your body takes a beating with the volume of intense jumps and high impact
landings. You can’t go 100% every day and expect to live through it for very long. Remember,
you have to manage both stress and recovery.
But the problem people have is they dissect it into two separate entities. They are either going
100% or they are going 0%. Stop that kind of thinking. As Jujimufu said, “We are training 24
hours a day, we are recovering 24 hours a day.”
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Just because you can’t go 100% every day doesn’t mean you can’t trick every day. If you’re
considering this technique, you should be beyond the late early stage described above, meaning
you have clean and powerful basic tricks: 540, 540 crescent, aerial, backflip, double leg, and
butterfly twist.
Now, we’re going to assume that those are the highest level of trick you can do in each category.
Meaning you can’t jackknife. You can’t axe2aerial. You can’t flashkick. This means that the list
of basic tricks above (540, 540 crescent, aerial, backflip, double leg, and butterfly twist)
represent your 100% efforts.
What you’re going to do now is rate how effortful a trick or technique feels compared to your
100% benchmarks. Remember, your list of tricks (540, 540 crescent, aerial, backflip, double leg,
and butterfly twist) are all 100%.
Tornado kick – 30%
Inside crescent – 10%
Cartwheel – 10%
Butterfly kick – 50%
Those are just a few examples, but you end up with an estimation of how much intensity is
needed to complete each trick. These levels will change as your skill levels increase. If you’re a
little more advanced, your list may look like this:
Corkscrew, Jacknife, Reverse Aerial, Flashkick, 720 Double, 540 Crescent, Hypertwist – 100%
Tornado kick – 10%
540 – 50%
Double leg – 60%
Cartwheel – 0%
Aerial – 20%
Hook kicks – 0%
Every time you can consistently land a new, more difficult move in a category, its previous
version gets assigned a percent value lower than 100%.
HACKING THE SYSTEM
If more frequency is better, then we want to train as often as we can while minimizing our risk
for injury. Since tricking is a skill, we need to be fresh attempting new and difficult moves, or
else we’ll just ingrain bad motor patterns. To avoid this, follow the rules below when setting up a
program.
RULE #1:
Never train with high intensity on consecutive days. On our scale, a high intensity trick will be
classified as 50% or higher. Let’s say you’re the person I outlined above that has a scale like this:
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Corkscrew, Jacknife, Reverse Aerial, Flashkick, 720 Double, 540 Crescent, Hypertwist – 100%
Tornado kick – 10%
540 – 50%
Double leg – 60%
Cartwheel – 0%
Aerial – 20%
Hook kicks – 0%
It rained Sunday so you couldn’t trick. Monday, you come out fresh so you can do whatever
tricks you want. But Tuesday, you’re going to need to recover from those tricks. You can still
train, however, stay below your 50% threshold. You can do basic kicks and any trick you rated
below 50% (on the list above it would be tornado kicks, cartwheels, aerials).
Wednesday is where it gets tricky, because you’re going to want to go based on how you feel. If
you feel good, widen your range to encompass all intensities. But if you’re feeling sluggish or
sore, do another low intensity day staying below the 50% threshold.
RULE #2:
Six days per week is your cutoff point. Although the inclusion of lower intensity days facilitates
rest, you need at least one day a week to get away from it and recharge yourself completely.
Watch samplers and study your tricks. Lay around like a hobo and recover.
RULE #3:
Attempting new tricks extends beyond the 100% designation. As I mentioned earlier, trying new
tricks is mentally taxing as well as physically taxing. For that reason, they are beyond the scale,
and why I don’t recommend trying new tricks more than twice per week.
If you’re smart, you’ve probably figured out that my first two rules put a cap on training at a high
intensity a maximum of three days per week. This leaves two days a week to try new moves. The
other high intensity day is reserved for drilling high level moves you can already land.
Reasons for injury prevention
Training this way helps prevent injuries for three reasons. First, high intensity training doesn’t
occur too frequently. This allows your muscles and body to rest and recover. Second, once
adapted to, the low intensity days actually help you recover from the high intensity days. Third,
training with a higher frequency allows the body to adapt faster and accommodate to the stressor.
PARTING WORDS
Anthony Mychal – AnthonyMychal.com - 2011
This certainly isn’t an all encompassing guide or the only way to go about organizing your
training. There are many ways and methods that can be used. It’s up to you to decide what is
right for you.
If this guide interested you, please note that I’m currently writing: The Complete Guide to
Physical Preparation for Tricking, which is much more in depth that this short PDF. Be sure to
stay up to date by visiting my blog and staying subscribed to the newsletter.
Anthony Mychal – AnthonyMychal.com - 2011