freerunning
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Fear is an edifice we build within ourselves. Unless you’re inhuman, you know fear. It’s natural. It’s healthy. It’s a survival mechanism designed to warn you against very real dangers and guide you safely through times of risk and uncertainty. But, if you’re like most people, the mechanism has got out of hand and grown
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The deconstruction of movement in the fitness industry is rife. I’ve encountered so many ‘experts’ and methods that reduce what are the most natural and holistic aspects of our athleticism in an attempt to identify their component parts and so produce some kind of holy grail for understanding movement, when in actuality all that is
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The buzzword ‘functional’ has become so misused that it now means next to nothing, and for effective training I favour practical movement over functional fitness any day of the week.
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It is quite common for us as practitioners of parkour, I think, having broken a new jump or mastered a new movement or overcome a new challenge in training, to then look back and remark: well, that was easy. And it is good, in a sense, to be buoyed by such achievements and successes in
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You ready for this? You need to stop exercising. And you need to start moving instead. What do I mean by that? Well, when we think of exercise we typically imagine high frequency, low variety repetition of consecutive and limited movement patterns. You hit the gym or the sports ground or the running track 3-5
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Occasionally we get asked why the ADAPT Qualifications are so physically demanding, when in principle they are only coaching qualifications? It’s a fair question, I suppose, and one the creators of ADAPT thought about long and hard when the system was developed around 5 years ago now. And while a small part of me does think
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1. States Parties recognise the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and arts. 2. States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic
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For the last two months the PKGen UK team has been ensconced in East London at a mysterious location, hammering, painting, designing, heaving, dragging, assembling, redesigning and generally working like never before – all to create the UK’s first dedicated Parkour Academy centre. It’s known as The Chainstore, after the official name of the building
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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
Dan Edwardes 