Mercenary Tricking

Tough Mudder wall by WellDoing

As a tricker you’ve gone through your ups and downs.  There’s a reason not everyone tricks.  It’s tough as hell and takes a lot of dedication to get halfway decent.  There’s quite a few sticking points in a tricker’s timeline that I’ll refer to as walls.  I’ll quickly characterize three distinct walls that you as a tricker may be going through or have already experienced first hand.

The First Wall

You see a video on youtube.  It’s crazy ninja shit.  It’s called tricking.  Sure.  You grab your buddies and drag them down to the gym to do flips ‘n kicks.  It’s gonna be awesome!  Freeing!  Hardcore!  You get there and fall on your head six thousand times.  Damn.  It’s hard.  You get a few tricks—barely.  You look like you’re testing rag doll physics and getting pretty beat up.  People cringe.  Your friends call you the parkour with kicks guy.  You’re embarrassed to trick in public.  This is what I call the first wall of tricking.  Tricking has a steep learning curve and until you break this first wall, social pressure is against you as well.

• The First Wall:  Tricking’s steep learning curve and social pressure before you actually do anything cool.

The Second Wall

You’re a casual tricker.  Sweet!  You’ve got some skill now.  You do your flips, twists and kicks.  People on social media think you’re cool.  You follow all your favorite trickers on youtube, facebook, instagram, and snapchat.  You try dub now and again.  You don’t land on your feet but you get the rotation.  You watch tutorials and get a variable amount of success.  You dip in and out of sessions.  You’re doing swell, right?  Then a month passes, then the next, then a year.  You’re the same level.  Maybe better or worse.  But basically the same.  You’ve hit the second wall.  You haven’t committed to tricks yet.  This is your threshold of casual tricking.  There’s no problem being a casual tricker and  you’re no less of a person for it, but to break the second wall, you need to decide whether or not you are going to take the plunge and really dedicate yourself to tricks.

• The Second Wall:  Going “full send” on this whole tricking thing.

The Third Wall

Congratulations!  You’re a serious tricker.  You’ve got the fire within.   You train 5, 7, 12 days a week!  Savage.  You’re hungry.  You consume everything you can about technique.  You watch tutorials and go all in on discussions.  Your eyes are wide open and you realize just how far you have to go.  You’re never satisfied.  Even when you land a trick or combo, you only see flaws.  You should be happy—you promised yourself a year ago you’d be content when you get dub and now it’s a game yet you lust for trips and dubdubs. You’re the last one on the floor and the gym owner gives you shit for it every time.  Screw him, what does he know about dedication?  Passion?  What does he know about falling hard and pulling yourself off the floor for one last try, then still doing it again for twenty tries?  Congratulations, you’ve got about 90% of tricking figured out.

“To get better, I must train harder and drill more!”

Amen.

By now you’ve gotten pretty far and crashing isn’t so bad, now is it?  No pain no gain!  You push through.  Then it catches up to you.  You hit another wall. Everything hurts.  Ankles snap-crackle-poppin’?  Knees clickity-clackin’? Neck and back feel like a rusty garage door.  Maybe it slowly creeps up on you.  First the left ankle, then the right knee.  Tricking is a painful mess.  Maybe it all accumulates in one single catastrophic injury.  This halt in progression from chronic and acute injury due is the third wall of tricking.

I’m Rythroja from Trick Therapy and this third wall is what TrickTherapy is all about. . .

. . .is what I WOULD have said if I followed through with the TrickTherapy blog nearly a year ago (as of 2018).  Now that MT is up and doing well, I don’t see why it can’t encompass what TrickTherapy would have been: pre-hab and training strategies for trickers plateaued at the third wall of tricking.

1. 10 Years Later:  The Mercenary Tricking Addendum to Dogen’s Titanium Ankles