Dan
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Recently I had the distinct pleasure of chatting to Abel James for his number 1 health and fitness podcast show out of the United States, The Fat Burning Man Show. Abel is a fascinating guy who found his own natural way to health, fitness and strength after doctors, diets and training fads had all failed…
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Movement is like language: to be able to utilise it you must understand the alphabet, know how to organise letters into words and then how to combine those words using grammar and syntax to create sentences. The letters alone are useless, only sentences enable fluency and function; equally, ill-formed and incomplete sentences, poorly spelt and…
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This past week has seen us introducing parkour in various ways to one of the world’s largest annual professional fitness events, the Idea World Fitness Convention in Los Angeles, USA – and having a great time while doing so. It was our first time at Idea, the first time in fact that parkour has been…
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It was the final Q&A session following a talk I’d given to a corporate group of a few hundred people on personal growth and risk-taking, illustrated with examples from my own experiences of being involved with the unusual profession I’ve chosen for myself – parkour coaching – when this particular question was put to me,…
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For as long as records have existed, people have found ways to improve their movement abilities. Indeed, the human drive for physical self-exceeding is so great that it has at times become a religious passion. Native American runners, Tibetan yogis, Taoist monks, and Eastern martial artists have all developed control of movement to an extraordinary…
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How often have you stopped simply to listen to the world around you? Indeed, how often have you actually listened to yourself? Admittedly, against the constant background drone of an urban society this can sometimes be hard to manage. Noise, bright lights, the rush of the city – these things are the trappings of our modern…
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It is often thought that the one true bane of all parkour practitioners is rain. Most, especially beginners, will grimace at the sight of dark clouds or the feel of cold winds, head for home and resign themselves to another day without training. A current prevailing view within the parkour communities seems to be that the…
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Much has been made of the importance of warming-up before beginning a training session, and yet in general most people underdo or even skip entirely this vital aspect of the discipline of parkour. Some may not know why warming up is so important, others may not know how; some may perceive it to be a waste…
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How do you view your city? Does it feel constricting to you? Restrictive? Is it full of cold, lifeless structures? Unwelcoming? Unappealing? Or do you have no feeling about it, positive or negative? What’s your vision of the urban environment you inhabit? Perhaps one of the most powerful and profound changes that happen to those…
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Parkour, stripped down, is the use of space. It’s how we fill space, how we move through it. It’s a process. And it has often struck me when training and moving that the vast majority of that space is filled with what most would consider to be ‘unspectacular’ movement: that is, the gaps and distances…
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Trying to pinpoint the exact moment of the birth of Parkour is no easy task. In fact, it may actually prove to be an impossibility. Something as nebulous and indefinable as this thing we practise tends to defy classification. Already it boasts several names, in more than one language: Le Parkour, the Art of Movement,…
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Much has been made of Bruce Lee’s enduring concept of Jeet Kune Do, across myriad different activities, art-forms, sports and disciplines. Often it is applied quite wrongly, of course, flourished with bravado in a slapdash attempt to justify some sort of unstructured and unresearched approach to training or development. Nothing could be further from what…
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It isn’t fashionable these days to talk about training or self-improvement in terms of conflict – we often hear how we are meant to train smart, not hard; to pace ourselves; to work within our limits; to adhere to the principles of sports science throughout…
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What is it, ‘to be strong’? Why do we push ourselves every day to be fitter, faster, stronger, more fearless, more capable, more efficient? Who can jump the furthest? Who can run the fastest or climb the highest? Who can face the most danger? Who can do the most twists in a somersault? How could…
Dan Edwardes 