Parkour Vision: What’s a City For?
How do you view the city you live in? Does it feel constricting? Restrictive? Is it full of cold, lifeless structures that have no meaning for you? Is it unwelcoming? Unappealing? Or do you have no feeling about it, positive or negative? What's your vision of the urban environment you inhabit? Perhaps one of the most powerful and profound changes that happen to those who walk through our doors and take up parkour is that of how they view their environment and, subsequently, their place within it. Almost universally we see
Time to Play
Look at how children move when they play: almost universally (assuming the adults around them don’t intervene and impose restrictions on their natural instincts to play) they run, jump, climb, crawl and they do these things at every given opportunity, exploring their space and learning what their bodies can do. The movements of play are holistic, complex-dynamic, non-linear, instinctive and adaptive. They don’t play by repeating isolated patterns over and over. They don’t play by deconstructing movement into its component parts. They don’t obsess about ‘alignment’ or ‘core strength’. And
SPRING-LOADED: WHY PARKOUR JUMPS WORK
One question I’ve been asked countless times over the years by fitness professionals, physiotherapists, sport scientists and general public alike is how do you (parkour practitioners) not break things, explode joints and generally cripple yourselves taking all those impacts from jumps? And looking through the lens of many recent models of human movement – typically those that deconstruct and treat the body as an automaton – the question is an obvious one, as it just doesn’t seem to make sense or adhere to prevailing theories of what the human body can safely
Nature’s Athletes: Adapt or Die
‘Complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors’ Nassim Taleb Here’s a truth I want everyone who doubts their physical and mental potential to keep at the forefront of their mind: beneath the shell of the soft, sedentary people we have become are the raw materials of nature's most adaptive and capable athlete. The key word here is adaptive. If you’re not already convinced that adaptation is the true birth-right of all human beings, I’ve got one word for you: wingsuits. How the hell have we worked out how to do
Parkour’s Road to Recognition
Today sees one of the most significant, if not the most significant, announcements in the short history of our discipline of parkour. For today parkour becomes the first new sport to be recognised formally for something like 30 years in the UK! Parkour UK is now recognised by all the Sport Councils of the UK as the National Governing Body for Parkour / Freerunning. This is an amazing step, and can’t be overstated. It’s the first time ANY country in the world has recognised parkour in a formal capacity, and it