Parkour: Maximizing Body and Mind

Parkour: Maximizing Body and Mind
Overcoming Physical Obstacles as a Means to Empowering the Self
© Luke Armstrong

Many youth across the globe are turning to "parkour" as a means to healthy bodies and fit minds.

Fences, walls and gaps between buildings; things generally considered obstacles, are welcome challenges to the growing number of parkour practitioners worldwide. Parkour (pronounced fittingly like hardcore) signifies, “The art of displacement.” Devotees of the practice are dubbed traceurs for males and traceuses for females. While practicing parkour they can be seen running on roofs, pole-vaulting fences, bouncing over cars and in general doing things that cause their elders to exclaim, “Kids today!”

Though it is often difficult to categorize (Is it a sport? Is it the offspring of martial arts and jogging?), parkour can be surmised as getting from point A to point B as efficiently as possible—geometry for the body. Unlike freerunning in which participants use urban areas to perform acrobatics, traceurs and traceuses concern themselves not in aesthetics but in cultivating the mindbody to a state of harmony in which daunting physical obstacles are overcome with apparent ease.

Movement of Parkour

The discipline’s founder, David Belle, said in a BBC News interview, “Our aim is to take our art to the world and make people understand what it is to move.” And move is what traceurs do. Their body’s hardware and mind’s software have been cultivated to a point to allow both to fly between buildings, to cruise gracefully over fences and to drop from heights so high that onlookers assume it surely must involve a death wish. “It’s all about how you land,” says traceur David Neil.

Mental Benefits of Parkour

A climber gone traceur, David Neil explains that it’s not just about fitness and exercise. “Sure, you need to be fit, you need to be in great shape to do this kind of stuff, but that isn’t the end, that’s only the means. The end is the mentality, what is going on in your mind, how it changes your way of thinking. It’s seeing the world not in terms of the things that confine us, but the things that define us. Most people see a fence as a preventative thing; a traceur sees that same fence and says, “What’s the most efficient way that my mind can direct my body over that fence.”

David Neal Answers Question about Parkour

Is injury Factors of Parkour

Not as much as people think. People see traceurs gap-jumping 10 feet and dash-vaulting and they think, “these guys are crazy.” But parkour is about knowing the limits of your body. It doesn’t encourage doing anything that you haven’t trained in advance to do. You gotta learn the basic moves like landing, especially landing (laughs), and you need to be in good shape. When I do a move that looks crazy to other people, I’m not asking myself “can I do this?” I know I can do this because I’ve trained hard to be able to do this. My goal is to find the most efficient way to do this.

Parkour Benefits

There’s the obvious one that you are going to be in great shape. But more than that, you are going to find that your whole way of thinking about life is altered. Out in the city, when I’m doing parkour, I see everything as possible, it’s all about finding the way and doing it. When I am not doing parkour, I find myself thinking the same way. You don’t worry as much about little things like credit card bills and stuff. With every obstacle faced, you know that there is not only a solution, but that you are capable of finding that solution.

How to Practice Parkour

Attitude, attitude, attitude. First you need to have the right mind set. The “I can” mind set. PK (slang term for parkour) is a completely individual thing. Yea, we help each other out sometimes, but it’s all about you and maximizing the possibilities of your body and your mind. But to start, urbanfreeflow.com is a good resource for learning the basic techniques such as landing. You also have to get yourself in shape. So first you need a toned mind, then a toned body, then a body that has the basic knowledge of how to do these moves without injury to yourself. After that, you are set to go and you will see parkour changing your life for the better.

David Neal is a senior electrical engineering student at North Dakota State University and has been a traceur for three years.


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