On Adversity: Why challenge is the engine of parkour

Parkour is often described through the language of movement quality: efficiency, flow, precision. And these descriptions are not wrong, but they are incomplete.

They describe what parkour looks like when it is working, but not what makes it work in the first place. Beneath every meaningful movement in parkour lies a more fundamental force: challenge. Not danger for its own sake, and not hardship as performance, but the presence of resistance that demands our engagement. Without challenge, parkour becomes a set of movements. With it, it becomes a discipline.

From its earliest days, parkour defined itself by its relationship with difficulty. Obstacles were not chosen because they were comfortable or convenient, but because they required effort, judgement, and commitment. Progress was not measured by how impressive something looked, but by whether the practitioner had genuinely met something that tested them. The aim was never to conquer everything, but to encounter difficulty honestly and respond with intention.

Without challenge, movement may improve cosmetically, but the practitioner does not.

This is why adversity is not an optional extra in parkour training: it’s the core mechanism through which learning occurs. When challenge is present, adaptation follows. When it is absent, learning becomes shallow and fragile.

Modern training environments, however, often work very hard to remove adversity. Tasks are carefully scaled to guarantee success. Difficulty is introduced slowly and predictably. Risk is managed until it is barely felt. These choices are understandable, but taken too far, they strip parkour of the very conditions that make it transformative.

Comfort and the Loss of Resistance

In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter explores how modern life has steadily removed friction, discomfort, and uncertainty from everyday experience, often with unintended consequences. As environments become more comfortable and predictable, resilience declines. Confidence becomes dependent on control. Capacity narrows instead of expanding. Parkour, when practised as it was intended, offers a direct counterpoint to this trend by reintroducing challenge in a meaningful and embodied way.

This does not mean glorifying suffering or chasing danger. Adversity in parkour is not about being reckless or proving toughness. It is about engaging with difficulty that is real enough to matter, but appropriate enough to allow learning to continue. Finding that balance is part of the discipline itself. Learning where challenge supports growth, and where it overwhelms it, is a skill that transfers far beyond training.

Adversity reveals information that comfort never can. It shows practitioners where their movement breaks down, where fear enters the picture, where perception becomes distorted under pressure. These moments are not failures to be avoided; they are feedback. They tell us what needs attention, what needs patience, and what needs courage.

Personalising Challenge

One of parkour’s defining characteristics is that challenge is always personal. The same obstacle can present entirely different levels of adversity to different people, or even to the same person on different days. This is why rigid curricula sit so uneasily with the discipline. Meaningful challenge does not exist in the obstacle alone, but in the relationship between the practitioner and the task.

When training environments try to standardise difficulty, they flatten this relationship. Everyone moves through the same progressions, toward the same outcomes, at roughly the same pace. In doing so, they reduce opportunities for ownership. Adversity, by contrast, forces decision-making. It requires practitioners to assess themselves honestly and choose how to engage. That act of choosing is central to parkour’s power.

Adversity does not remove agency; it demands it.

Over time, repeated exposure to appropriate challenge builds a particular kind of confidence. Not the loud confidence of guaranteed success, but the quieter confidence that comes from having faced uncertainty before and learned how to respond. This confidence does not depend on perfect conditions. It travels with the practitioner into unfamiliar environments and unpredictable situations.

What This Means for Coaching

For coaches, embracing adversity often requires restraint rather than intervention.

It means resisting the urge to solve problems too quickly, to smooth over difficulty before it has done its work.

It means trusting students to struggle productively, and recognising that learning does not always look clean or precise or immediate.

Most importantly, it means developing the skill of calibrating challenges so they are sufficiently tough for each specific group of students. This skill takes time to master as a coach, and requires not only a process of trial and error but the experience of having gone through such challenges yourself so as to be able to pitch them at the appropriate level.

Parkour loses its depth when challenge is treated as something to be minimised, and it loses its relevance when adversity is postponed indefinitely. In the early days we had a basic rule in training – if there is more than one way forward, always take the harder of the two paths. The discipline was never meant to make life easier by avoiding difficulty. It was meant to make people more capable of meeting it.

And this is why adversity remains essential. Not as a test, not as a spectacle, but as the dynamic through which parkour does its real work. Through challenge, practitioners learn where they are, how they respond under pressure, and how they might grow. Without it, parkour becomes comfortable, efficient, and safe — and in the process, it becomes something else entirely.