While parkour reimagines the city for artistic or athletic expression, parkour strength training repurposes walls, rails, and stairs into training tools. When you know what to look for, common obstacles at public parks, schools, and plazas can help you get stronger, anytime and anywhere.

When lifting weights, it’s easy to devise a plan to work towards a specific lifting goal, because in order to get there all you have to do is use a lesser weight that you can handle and gradually increase the weight over time till you reach the goal weight. It’s a little more tricky when you are performing bodyweight exercises—you can’t exactly hack off some of your limbs to make yourself lighter, so you really don’t have anything to “work up from.” Thus, without the proper progression plan it can be impossible to meet certain goals. For instance, if you can’t perform a single push-up, how are you going to train yourself to reach a goal of say, 10 push-ups?

Before we get into exercises to progress into a pull-up, let’s chat about some general strategies.

Today we’re going to take you step-by-step (and jump-by-jump) through beginner parkour training.