training
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It’s important to understand that the deficiencies every PE teacher now sees in their young students is not the fault of the children themselves: it’s the fault of the adults who took away the environment these children required for healthy development. We have sabotaged the natural childhood of an entire generation.
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In parkour, adaptability is not an advanced skill to be layered on later. It is the foundation. Movement that cannot survive variation is not yet robust. Variable practice exposes weaknesses early, when they can still be addressed, rather than allowing them to remain hidden behind repetition.
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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.
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Parkour, when practised primarily outdoors, has such a profound impact beyond movement itself. It teaches people to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it, to see obstacles not as hazards to avoid but as features to understand and negotiate. In this sense, parkour becomes a form of environmental literacy.
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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…
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Today, parkour is more visible than ever. It is shared, edited, competed, branded, and consumed. None of these things are inherently wrong. But they do raise an essential question that every practitioner must eventually confront: Why do you train?
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‘There’s something rare and special about moving through a city at night, most people are asleep and the whole world feels like it’s yours and yours alone.’
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“About 25% of all play is what’s called locomotor play. So, if you leave kids alone, at least a quarter of their time will be spent in very physical, very active play. All kids want to do that because It’s what we evolved to do – to move over terrain.”
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Parkour is that rare discipline that develops in its practitioners the competent use of all the (land-based) human locomotion patterns.
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Parkour was born out of the process of solving movement problems, or challenges. They began simple – can we cross this gap; can we climb this building; can we balance along this railing; can we vault this wall? Over time, as competence increased, the complexity and demands of the problems increased, which powered the continual…
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The French founders of parkour were motivated by the singular desire to become ‘strong’ individuals, but not just muscularly strong: rather, strong in the sense of being anti-fragile. By that I mean capable of managing a wide range of physical demands, from running a marathon to climbing a building to lifting a heavy weight, to…
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If you train in parkour long enough you will come to understand that your body will quickly become strong, fast and powerful, but it is the mind that truly dictates how much and how quickly you progress. You have a phenomenal capacity for movement, just as every primate does! You are nature’s most adaptive athlete.…
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Repetition is the birthplace of skill. Skill, to me, is not best measured by the ability to do something well but rather by the inability to do it poorly. When you rarely get something wrong, you’ve acquired true skill in that thing. This takes time, and countless repetitions. And smart, well executed repetitions, too. There…
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‘Fitness’, I believe, is an almost redundant term. When you think about it for any short amount of time, you will soon come to realise it is too broad, too vague, to be of much use. Are we talking about health, or performance, or resilience, or longevity, or the original Darwinian meaning of ‘fit for…
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Stretching yourself is vital. Not the yoga kind, though – here I’m referring to stretching your abilities in movement and training: asking more of your body and mind so that you find new levels of performance and achievement and reach your true potential. If you aren’t stretching yourself in your practice, whatever it is, you’re…
Dan Edwardes 