What is Parkour?
Lloyd Dyson, Director/Head CoachAs a parkour coach, I often hear parents and newer practitioners say the same things: “I don’t really know what parkour is, but it looks cool”. Previously, when we opened Park Rats Parkour, I wrote the following description for our website’s homepage:
“Parkour/Freerunning is an officially recognised sport and a physical discipline that involves traversing and overcoming obstacles in a creative and effective manner. Parkour has a significant emphasis on developing the athlete’s wellbeing, both physically and mentally, through the practice of various physical challenges combining skills such as running, jumping, climbing, vaulting and other acrobatic movements to navigate urban and natural environments. While Parkour is a physical discipline which challenges all of the fundamental movement skills, it is equally mentally stimulating, pushing the boundaries of the individual through fear management, puzzle solving and creative thinking, taking the practitioner on a journey of self-expression and personal development.”
While this is a great introduction to the idea of parkour/freerunning as a sport, it doesn’t fully describe what parkour is in practice, nor philosophically.
A Brief History
For context, I think it’s important to look at the history of the sport first to understand how parkour developed and became what it is today.
Parkour has its roots in the French military, adapted from the training method “la méthode naturelle” (the natural method) originally developed by Georges Hébert prior to the First World War. The techniques he included were adapted from native populations he had encountered throughout his travels in the navy, and the natural method focused on movement skills and functional fitness useful for military personnel. In the late 20th century, a man called Raymond Belle, who had trained under the natural method, began to adapt the training methods specifically for traversing any environment as efficiently and effectively as possible, later becoming a renowned firefighter in France. His son David would follow in his footsteps in the 80’s and 90’s, taking the movements further, alongside his friends, coining the terms l'art du déplacement (the art of movement) and later parkour. David Belle is widely cited as the founder of the sport as we know it, alongside the likes of Sebastien Foucan. Later Foucan would also create the term freerunning as well. As time went on, a number of different styles would develop throughout the world, creating an incredibly diverse sport engaging people from all walks of life.
The Importance of Philosophy
Historically, parkour and its predecessors existed purely as a method to train the body. Developing functional physical fitness was the prime objective, as evidenced by the single philosophy behind the natural method. “Être fort pour être utile” (be strong, to be useful). This single concept is what led to the challenge-based method of training seen in the sport to this day. Parkour is trained through the setting of challenges, either physical, mental or both, in order to push the individual’s limits and develop physical fitness, problem-solving and creative thinking. This could be anything, from a single jump between two walls to creating an elaborate sequence of movements traversing multiple obstacles.
Over time, two main philosophies have developed behind training and for the sake of simplicity, I will split these ideas into two categories: Traversal and Expressive parkour. In the past, this was known as the parkour/freerunning divide; however, that is an outdated concept. The general consensus is that both are synonymous terms for the same sport.
The Parkour Spectrum
Traversal - This is the traditional concept of using parkour to traverse the environment as efficiently and effectively as possible. This will usually involve movements where function takes precedent over form.
Expressive - This is the practice of using movement to express style and creativity, oftentimes movements take on an acrobatic or dance-like quality placing priority on flow and form above function.
It is quite rare that an athlete will specialise in just one of these philosophies; you can think of it as a spectrum where athletes lean towards one more than the other and over time may slide from one end to the other and back again. This is a theory I will refer to as “The Parkour Spectrum”. It is the idea that each practitioner develops their own interpretation of parkour philosophy, and in turn, their training reflects where they sit on the spectrum of Traversal-Expressive movement. This idea can be applied to an athlete's movement philosophy, a line (sequence of moves) or an individual movement.
What Does Parkour Involve?
You may notice that I have generally refrained from discussing what parkour involves skill-wise, opting to discuss historical context and philosophy instead. This is because parkour is ultimately a movement philosophy just as much as it is an active sport. A common misconception is that parkour is “jumping buildings”; however, it is not the roof gap that makes it parkour, but the intention and mindset behind it, in the same sense that a backflip could be a part of multiple sports, but it requires the specific context of where and why to be parkour.
To answer the question more specifically, however, parkour involves an almost infinite number of movements which can be split into a number of categories such as jumping, vaulting, wall skills, bar skills, balancing, climbing and acrobatic movements. In practice, parkour typically involves completing challenges set individually or by peers using these movement skills, for example, a precision jump between two walls. If the participant makes the jump but doesn’t stick the landing, then the challenge is not complete, and they will typically repeat the jump until it is complete. Many athletes train under the idea that “one time is never”, aka if you can’t repeat the challenge, it may have been a fluke.
