Over the years, I’ve tried out a whole load of different sports, games, exercises and movement disciplines, and enjoyed most of them. As a teenager I started out with sprinting, also doing non-competitive longer runs, joined the rugby team and basketball team shortly after, and started going along to a karate club my friend did too. I went along to a badminton club for a year, had picked up the basics of tennis at a summer camp as a child, played squash for a year, and played a fair amount of table tennis too.
I came across parkour when I was about 14, and jumped about a little bit, but only started seriously when I was 16 and found a local club.
At university, I continued with rugby and athletics for awhile, and also tried rowing, a couple of different martial arts (jiu jitsu and krav maga), and a bit of swing dancing. I was lucky enough to do a year studying abroad, which was less intense academically, and game time to do (for one term each) yoga, pilates, pole dancing, capoeira, salsa and amateur theatre. I continued parkour too, though I took a break for almost a year when I first went to university for various reasons before deciding to get back into it. I have also played around a bit with acrobatics and “acroyoga” (aka partner acrobatics, the word ‘yoga’ just got added on for marketing reasons) and done intermittent bits of weightlifting and working out, and I cycle around, mostly to commute and get around but for occasional longer rides too.
(For those curious, writing this at the end of 2020, I am running once or twice a week, cycling around, doing parkour once or twice a week, going climbing once a week, and doing bits of stretching etc too. There isn’t currently time or space for much more, though there are many things I would love to do.)
All of those things have something to offer, but parkour is the one I have stuck with the most, because it generally has so much more to offer than other sports.
As a movement discipline, it includes the whole body. Running, jumping and striding with the legs, upper body involved in vaulting, climbing, arm jumps and swinging around. The core muscles are involved much of the time, and occasionally we roll on our backs too.
It has lots of different types of movement too, incorporating explosive power movements, technical foot and hand placements, different body shapes, and graceful fluidity.
There is also a richness of styles and variety. There are individual movements that can be practiced and honed, jumping from A to B 10 or 20 times to refine it, practicing one vault technique to get it more controlled, weaving creative sequences together or training brutal functionality of moving across obstacles.
Within parkour’s ethos, there’s quite a range. There’s the Bigger Faster Stronger part, how high or far we can jump, and so on. There’s the technical refining to try and get something absolutely perfect. There’s the speed, and there’s the dance-like fluidity. There’s the exploration side, whether its checking out views from rooftops or exploring abandoned or forbidden places. There’s also the more impressive showy stuff, including all of the flips and tricks. There’s a playful silly side, and there’s a functional/efficiency side. There’s also the dance aspects, where parkour practice blends into dance (whether solo or with others), or even a martial arts aspect, where practical movement with obstacles blends into fighting, self-defence and evasion.
Every person does each part of parkour more or less, finding their personal style and, more importantly, their why of what they seek to achieve or get from their parkour training.
That gives a huge variety, and each person does their own blend of these different attributes of parkour. Some people gravitate to big jumps, some to creative playful moves, some are focused on being strong and fast, and some care about the functional side, the ability to reach somewhere or escape from something.
The mental side of parkour is also a huge part of it. There’s the (masculine) pushing yourself and challenging yourself to face and overcome fears. Sometimes this is a brute force overcoming a fear through willpower, but sometimes it is a much more nuanced and reflective conversation with your inner psyche. In your head or with others, you map out the different possibilities: what if I don’t get enough power, what if I slip off to that side, and so on. Sometimes there is also an exploration of motivations: why is it that I want to do this jump or complete this challenge, and is it a good reason? When coaching, these discussions around emotions are, I imagine, a rare occasion for boys or young men to actually be talking about emotions, processing and reflecting on what they are feeling.
This process, overcoming obstacles and challenges, translates well into normal life too. Parkour practitioners usually have tools to break down tasks into chunks, or recognise why something is emotionally difficult and what it is we are scared of.
Creativity and playfulness are other mental states too, ones which are often not so common. Outside arts, they don’t much feature in our daily life. There is little play in going to the gym. Some parkour people, I think back fondly to gatherings I have been to, are good at silly games and child play, whether it’s messing around with a stick or play fighting or some other nonsense.
Parkour also has a lot of similarity with the mental state of meditation and yoga: mental stillness, awareness of and presence in our bodies, awareness of and reflection on our emotions and on our breathing. People who don’t know parkour often think it to be about adrenaline and danger, but it is much more like yoga in mindset. Of course, it depends who is doing it: teenage boys or young men filming themselves doing impressive moves will have much more in common with skateboards, but for me its much more like a yoga practice.
So, parkour has this huge variety and richness in the discipline, offering much more than most other sports do. The mental aspects are what really set it apart to me, more than just ‘movement training’ that has lots of movement in its scope. Partly, this is just that it has a broad scope: any sort of movement with (urban) obstacles is parkour. Partly, this is because it is still more in its infancy. In a particular parkour school or academy, only a fraction of the possible breadth I’ve described here will be present. And most practitioners don’t only do parkour: putting aside the fluidity around the edges or what is and isn’t parkour, many do climbing, weight training, martial arts, running, yoga, acrobatics and dance as well. But still: this is a lot for one sport to offer.