Parkour is a recreational athletic discipline where participants challenge themselves by effectively and creatively navigating obstacles in their environment. In practice this means running, jumping, climbing, crawling, flipping on and over walls, rails, benches, tables, and other fixtures in an urban space. Still not sure what this means? Check out our Instagram to see parkour in action.
The term ‘parkour’ was coined in Lisses, France in the 1980s by a group of young adults who called themselves the Yamakasi. They would challenge each other in various physical feats, rooted in Le Methode Naturalle principles used for French military obstacle course training. Through years of continued practice, they began to perform jumps and climbs that would look at home in a Jackie Chan action movie.
In the early 2000s, parkour became popularized through news features by the BBC highlighting the physical feats of the Yamakasi. This inspired many young adults to start training on their own. Through online forums, followed by the rapid growth of youtube, parkour spread across the globe. These early adopters coordinated online, began growing local communities, and traveled across the world to meet up together to train at parkour ‘jams’. As the physical capabilities of the parkour community grew, some of these early adopters began doing professional stunt work, motion capture for video games, or competing in reality shows like Ninja Warrior. This brought parkour to even wider audiences, who were eager to start training themselves. To meet this demand, veteran practitioners started opening gyms and after school programs, catering to excited youth, misfit teens, and adventurous adults.
Today parkour has cemented itself in popular culture, serves as the foundation for thousands of careers, and inspires countless people to become fit.