Parkour
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Having confidence in our skills and abilities is vital in the practice of parkour, and yet this is certainly one of the most difficult attributes to develop and maintain. When questioned, most professional or elite athletes will attest to the fact that mastery of their particular discipline – whatever it may be – is 10%…
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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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We live in a strange world. If you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a shaper of people’s minds in a school, there are considerable and rigorous processes to go through to qualify to do those things – and rightly so, as such individuals are putting themselves in a position of responsibility…
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Coaching is a hard thing to do well. That’s something we’ve learned over the last decade or so of passing on the principles, methods and concepts of parkour to tens of thousands of people across every continent on the planet. It’s something very close to our hearts and as we’ve seen the global network of…
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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…
Dan Edwardes 