The Tao Of Parkour
Much has been made of Bruce Lee’s enduring concept of Jeet Kune Do, across myriad different activities, art-forms, sports and disciplines. Often it is applied quite wrongly, of course, flourished with bravado in a slapdash attempt to justify some sort of unstructured and unresearched approach to training or development. Nothing could be further from what Lee intended with his concept, or indeed more removed from his own path towards personal liberation. However, a strong and meaningful analogy can be drawn between Lee’s concept and our own discipline of parkour[1]. In fact, parkour is
Trickour Treat – Kids Event In London
JOIN US FOR ALL THE FUN AND FROLICS OF OUR SPOOKY 'TRICKOUR TREAT' EVENT The games will begin at 10am on the dot, so make sure your young ghouls and goblins are at The Parkour School and ready to get stuck into our day of parkour fun and halloween monster challenges! Fancy dress is actively encouraged and there will be a prize for the best dressed! Spaces are limited so sign up soon! All our young movers from 5-16 years old are welcome. All you will need is a pair of trainers, a waterproof
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