The Quiet Crisis in Parkour Coaching: How to Keep the Spirit Alive

There is a crisis happening in parkour coaching.

It isn’t dramatic. It isn’t dangerous. It isn’t even intentional. It’s quiet, almost imperceptible. Slow, steady, and—if we’re not careful—irreversible.

I’ve been aware of it for a long time.

We started the first parkour classes in the world in London in 2004. Classes grew quickly. Parkour spread. Demand for coaching exploded. What began as a handful of people training together became thousands of students moving through gyms every week, guided by coaches, progressions, systems, and structures.

And somewhere along that journey, something essential began to fade.

I remember a moment around 2007, observing one of our London classes with Stéphane Vigroux, one of the original traceurs and a co-founder of Parkour Generations. The class was very good by most standards: high energy, lots of movement, eighty or so participants working hard and enjoying themselves. The newer coaches were doing their jobs well.

And yet, watching from the side, I turned to Stéphane and asked him a simple question:

“Honestly—if this had been your introduction to parkour, would you have started training?”

He thought about it for a long time before answering.

“No.”

I felt the same.

And that was unsettling, because this was one of our classes.

Nothing was obviously wrong. But something was missing. Something raw. Something difficult to define. Something more challenging, more personal, more physical, more alive. What we had fallen in love with wasn’t fully present anymore.

Teaching Skills… but Losing Parkour?

Today, parkour coaching around the world is, in many ways, very good. Students leave classes with cleaner vaults, stronger jumps and better landings. They have clear progressions, a path to follow, a curriculum to move through.

But they often leave with something else diminished.

Less creativity. Less adaptability. Less confidence away from mats and perfect setups. Less comfort when the environment doesn’t behave.

I was reminded of this recently when Sparsha shared that some of his students aren’t comfortable training outside at all—away from warmth, predictability, and perceived safety. That’s not a criticism of them. It’s a reflection of the environments we’re creating.

Because parkour was never meant to prepare people only for ideal conditions.

So the question we need to ask—more important than technique, progressions, coaching models, or curriculum—is this:

Are we keeping the spirit of parkour alive? Or are we accidentally coaching it out of existence?

What We Fell in Love With

Most of us didn’t discover parkour because someone taught us perfect technique. We didn’t fall in love because of a syllabus, or a progression plan, or a neatly structured class.

We fell in love because of a feeling: a moment of clarity; a sudden sense of possibility; a realisation that the world was no longer just a backdrop, but an invitation.

We learned through trying, failing, experimenting, imagining. Through curiosity and stubbornness. Through small personal victories that mattered because we owned them.

But when we became coaches, a new set of pressures arrived:

Safety protocols.
Insurance requirements.
Risk assessments.
Parent expectations.
Commercial realities.
The responsibility of being accountable for other people.

None of these things are wrong. Many of them are necessary, in fact. But quietly, over time, they change how we teach.

Technique begins to replace spirit. Order replaces exploration. Repetition replaces problem-solving. Instruction replaces autonomy.

And if we lose the spirit, we lose the discipline. This isn’t about blame: it’s about responsibility—because whether we like it or not, we are custodians of parkour’s future.

Naming the Crisis: What Are We Losing?

Across the world, I have seen the same pattern appear again and again.

Students can execute movements—but struggle to improvise under pressure. Children follow drills perfectly—but panic when asked to solve something unfamiliar. Adults train clean lines—but freeze when the angle is awkward, the landing unpainted, the surface imperfect.

We’ve replaced creativity with compliance and exploration with execution. Classes have become predictable, safe, and efficient, but predictability is not what makes parkour powerful.

Parkour’s strength lies in uncertainty. In adaptation. In the ability to respond when the environment doesn’t match the plan. When there is no obvious answer. And yet many modern classes present students with a solved puzzle—one where the answer is already embedded.

If students never encounter unfinished puzzles, they never learn to think.

How Did We Get Here?

This didn’t happen because coaches became lazy or careless, it happened because the environment changed. And a huge aspect of it was the shift to indoor coaching.

Gyms create predictability. Businesses require structure. Parents want measurable progress. Insurance punishes risk. Risk assessments discourage freedom. Coaches feel responsible for every outcome.

So we prioritise what is safe, clear, and controllable. Understandably! But parkour was never meant to be fully controllable.

When every problem is pre-solved, when every movement has a “correct” answer, we train people to execute—not to adapt. And adaptability is the heart of the discipline.

Rebuilding the Spirit of Parkour

The good news is that restoring the essence of parkour doesn’t require abandoning safety or technique. It requires intention.

There are four principles that consistently bring the spirit back into our coaching.

1. Adversity Is Not the Enemy

We need to allow students to rise to challenges. That means accepting that some will fail—and recognising that failure is not a problem to be eliminated, but a teacher.

Lowering standards doesn’t unlock potential. Meeting challenge does.

2. Let the Environment Teach

The environment is the best teacher we have.

Distance.
Angle.
Height.
Grip.
Friction.
Speed.
Asymmetry.
Imperfection.

Endless variety.

These variables create understanding that instruction never can, because when the environment changes, the student must change with it. Even in the best parkour gym in the world, the environment becomes uniform: the same materials and surfaces, the same angles, the same lighting, temperature, the same mats. Variation is reduced, almost entirely removed in fact. And that’s a huge problem.

The solution? Go back to basics and take the classes outside! Explore the environment, discover new challenges, new jumps. Recapture the feeling of curiosity that you felt when you first found parkour, and let the students experience it too.

3. Variable Practice Over Perfect Practice

Perfect repetitions create brittle practitioners. Real resilience comes from variation of challenge as well as environment.

Different take-offs. Odd timings. Unexpected constraints. Skip the warm-up. Non-linear tasks. Monstrous physical challenges. Unusual and engaging games. This is where adaptability is forged, so embrace the unpredictable nature of what parkour can offer and encourage your students to be ready for anything, at any time, and anywhere. This is how parkour always was, and how it always should be.

4. The Coach as Provoker, Not Controller

Our role is not to give answers: it’s to create the conditions in which answers emerge. This means less of the instructive method and more of the participatory.

Ask better questions. Offer constraints. Present puzzles rather than prescriptions. Because when students own the solution, the learning sticks.

It’s a balance, of course. Cognitive skill acquisition is also a central part of parkour and always has been, hence the iteration of movements that leads practitioners to mastery; but it’s only half the picture, at best. The other half is chaos. Play. Emergent learning through constraints-led practices.

Expose your students to challenges, quandaries, puzzles and expect them to find solutions. If they fail, they fail – that’s also an answer of sorts. It’s the question that matters most.

Teaching Parkour Without Killing It

If you think back to the moment you first fell in love with parkour, it probably wasn’t tidy. It was likely very personal. Uncertain. Perhaps a little frightening. And almost certainly it was deeply meaningful to you.

Those moments don’t come from perfectly managed learning environments. They come from conditions that invite courage, curiosity, and agency.

And that’s the challenge we face as coaches: to create spaces for students where that first spark is still possible.

Our Responsibility

Parkour is evolving—and that’s good. But evolution doesn’t always mean improvement.

If we remove creativity, it becomes choreography. If we remove autonomy, it becomes fitness. If we remove adaptability, it becomes gymnastics. If we remove spirit, it becomes something else entirely.

Parkour teaches courage, resilience, problem-solving, creativity, and freedom—not as abstract ideas, but through lived experience.

So the question I’ll leave you with is this:

In your next class, are you just teaching movement?

Or are you teaching parkour?

Because the answer to that question will shape the next generation of practitioners—and the future of the discipline we all fell in love with.