The Complete Guide to Parkour

Chapter 1: What Is Parkour and Why People Love It

Let's clear something up right away: parkour is not about jumping off buildings like a video game character. It's not about doing backflips, and it's not reserved for athletic teenagers in baggy pants. Those are the highlights you see online - the one-in-a-hundred moments that took months to master and a whole camera crew to film. What parkour actually is, in its day-to-day reality, is a very disciplined way of moving through your environment using your whole body. You walk, run, climb, vault over, and land safely on everyday obstacles: walls, railings, benches, stairs, and rocks.

The French guys who invented it in the 1980s called it "the art of displacement." That's a fancy way of saying: how do you get from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible, using nothing but your body and the stuff already around you? No special equipment, no motor, no brakes. You are the vehicle, and the whole world is your playground.

But here's the thing about parkour that the videos don't show you. Nine out of every ten minutes of practice are not spent soaring through the air. They're spent doing what feels like very boring groundwork. You'll do a lot of squatting. You'll practice landing from a height of three feet so many times that your legs feel like jelly, and you'll do it on the same spot on the same wall because you're trying to make your