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If I were outdoors and happened to see someone leaping over park benches, dangling from tree branches, and balancing precariously on things that most people wouldn’t think to bother with, I’d probably think they were a little bit crazy. Or at least I would have thought they were crazy before I heard about a sport called parkour.
According to Wikipedia, parkour focuses “on moving from one point to another as smoothly, efficiently and quickly as possible using the abilities of the human body. It is built on the philosophical premise that any obstacle, physical or mental, can be surpassed.” Doesn’t that description sound nice? The reality involves much more than that, though.
There are thousands of matches for parkour on YouTube, and
this amazing example was posted just a few days ago from a parkour team in Germany.
What gets me is that most people try to exercise safely. We wear expensive shoes designed for the specific activity that we engage in most often; we wear wicking fabric to absorb our sweat; we pay attention to minute twinges in our body that signifies something is wrong and needs attention before it gets any worse.
Indeed, some people have expressed concern about the popularity of this fast-growing extreme sport. According to Jacqueline Stenson at MSNBC.com:
With all the jumps and falls, participants risk stress fractures, ankle and knee sprains, and ligament injuries, among other potential problems, says Ross [spokesperson for the American College of Sports Medicine], a foot and ankle specialist. And the sport could be quite dangerous if participants attempted over-the-top stunts such as jumping from one building to another, he says.
I've never seen anyone do this activity in real life, but it would be interesting to witness. Who are the people who decide to do this? Do they do it by themselves or prefer the camaraderie (and safety) of a group setting?
Adventure Girl has tried parkour, and she has an excellent post about her experience with a training class in New York City. There were both new and regular people there, and the instructors took them through a grueling workout. Adventure Girl said that parkour is “serious physical conditioning and focus, and over the next two hours I got the best workout I've had in recent memory.” This was just the warm-up:
* Extensive stretching of all joints - wrists, shoulders, knees, and ankles
* 1/4 mile jog while stretching and loosening elbows
* More stretching with a focus on quads, hamstrings, and hips
* Curb running - running on a narrow curb without touching the ground
* Squats
* Quadrupedal walking - walking on all fours while maintaining a straight back
* Arm circuit - 3 rounds of 4 kinds of push-ups, plank (1 min), side plank (right and left each 30 sec)
* Ab circuit - 3 rounds of plank (1 min), dip push-ups, airplane (1 min), 20 crunches, boat pose (30 sec), 10 leg/butt lifts
(And these classes aren’t just New York City. They’re offered in DC, too -- a place called Primal Fitness offers both CrossFit and parkour training.)
Kelley Eskridge thinks that parkour “is amazing -- beautiful and exciting, combining talent, skill, elegance and pragmatism (a blend I’ve always found compelling). So fabulous to see the human body in use, in motion, in flight.” She wishes she would have found out about it sooner:
My entire girlhood, my entire life, might have been so different in so many ways if I’d had any of this when I needed self-confidence, when I needed to be living in and learning my body rather than being so wary of it. Oh, the possibilities.
FitSugar describes how parkour first came about.
What do you think? Would you try it?
(Contributing editor Zandria blogs at Zandria.us.)
