Why parkour is bad

Or even worse when you cause damage to their property because you did something wrong. And this has caused people in some places to ban parkour and make it illegal because they want to avoid the dangers that come with people doing parkour on their property.

They are afraid that you could hurt yourself and they could be liable or that you could cause damage that is hard and expensive to repair. Parkour is a street sport that requires urban architecture to do properly but none of that property is owned by parkour athletes.

This could land you in trouble with the law and you could be fined and put on community services for your offense. The most important thing you can do is to experiment with doing parkour on private property and see what happens. In others, they tell you to stop doing parkour there and you have to stop, move on and find a different place to do parkour.

That will get you in trouble because they can call the police and you can get charged with trespassing. This way you can avoid coming across people that have an issue with you doing parkour on their property. If that fails then the last option you have to run if you get in trouble. You can also find parkour gyms in your area where you can do parkour. Nobody is going to chase out of it because they are made for parkour athletes. And a benefit of doing parkour in gyms is that they are safer than doing it outside because they have things like safety mats and foam pits that reduce the chances of injury.

Keeping yourself safe in parkour is a skill that every parkour athlete has to learn to get better at parkour. Learning to keep safe and reduce risk in parkour is not glamorous.

You will have to learn the different techniques for keeping yourself safe and reducing risk in parkour. You might not use them as much as all the other parkour moves you learn but they come in handy when things go wrong. Your mind will subconsciously know how to keep your body safe if you teach it. But over time, you start getting better at the basics and you have to move on to advanced parkour skills.

Advance parkour skills are advanced for a reason. They up the stakes and they are more dangerous than beginner skills.

They put you at more risk because they can get very extreme. This includes doing parkour on top of buildings, climbing down buildings that are a couple of stories high, or doing massive jumps that could injure you badly if you do them wrong.

You can get around this and stick to doing low-level parkour skills but that will cause you to stagnate. Upping the stakes is one of the things you need to do to become a professional parkour athlete. Luckily our students do not take an hour long parkour class every single day for 6 weeks.

This exact scenario is highly unlikely, but it does help to gain a much needed perspective: impact adds up real fast! Joints are like tires, every mile put on them will wear them down. A speedster will probably need to replace their tires sooner than a cautious driver, but unfortunately for us, there is no joint store. Were your hips back? Did your heels drop? Were your knees too far forward? How much of the force did you really absorb with your muscles? Instead, we want to place emphasis on the fact that we do not have any conclusive evidence as to what long-term complications could come from this type of repetitive training!

The drill is to perform a pop vault, and for those who cannot yet do a pop vault, they are devoting a significant amount of mental energy into that technique. Once they get on top of the box, the drill is over. Without fail, we saw student after student jump off of that 3ft high box. It can also be guaranteed that none of the students we are looking at can squat twice their bodyweight. Within the span of an 8 minute drill, a student is dropping off that 3ft box more than a dozen times.

To remind them to land quietly? Or, to keep them from possible irreparable damage by designing the drill to have a required low-impact vault dismount, rather than leaving the decision up to the ill-informed student? Take a step back and think about your training. How high would you say is too high?

How often do your students take these drops? In the same way, it would be a real failure for someone to read this article and use it as fuel to shame other traceurs for taking big jumps or performing large-scale power moves. But in the same way, life cannot only be about making destructive decisions in pursuit of fun or fame or whatever else. What this means for us is that we need to encourage a distinction between parkour as a performance and parkour as a discipline.

So what can we do to improve the lives of our kids? Pop Warner Football officially decreed that helmet-to-helmet contact is wrong and will not be permitted in games or in practices.

Think about how many traceurs there are with over 10 years of training under their belt. Now imagine that by the time one of our 5 year old students gets to the age at which those people started, they will have been subject to upwards of three times as much impact volume as most other traceurs.

Hopefully this article can serve as the catalyst that makes athletes, coaches, and students take a good hard look at their training and start asking these hard questions that should be answered sooner rather than later. Here is an easy example:. Take a box, measure it, and make it known to anyone that might be moving through that space what that drop entails.

A student, even our young kids, can easily digest this information and begin to understand that lbs is a huge number or whatever their respective numbers would be …so it becomes more logical that if they jump off that height, they might be doing harm to their bodies. The results are instant! The idea is that we should be creating environments and atmospheres where our students and kids develop the understanding we want them to on their own, rather than being forced into it.

Now, our kids naturally choose to do any number of their vault dismounts rather than leaping off! Lastly, we have also chosen to proactively change the way we present our curriculum to our beginner level students.

Some examples of this are emphasis on dismounts instead of drops and taking away precision landings from our adult beginner repertoire. Looking at precisions, we found that students would routinely save bad jumps with good balance, shoving and gesticulating their bodies around in order to save a landing and presumably feel successful.

Students underwent countless practice jumps trying to lock in that proper landing technique and we began to see that students were all too willing to accept a mediocre precision and immediately add in more distance. Now, instead of having beginner students work on precision jumps over and over again, eventually developing the balance, strength and control needed to stick a landing, we found that diligently training stationary balance in a horizontal landing position with focus on squat performance on flat ground and working up to a bar transfers to precision jumps later on without taking much impact.

Our adult intermediate students now have a much higher standard and perform precisions with strength and flawless technique upon introducing large scale precisions without having had to rack up quite as many bad jumps to get there and especially at a time when their bodies were less prepared to handle the associated impact. These are just a few of the ways we as a community have chosen to address our elephant in the room and continue to communicate and educate our members, coaches and associates on this topic.

We hope that you are now equipped with a better mentality to help promote the positive and healthy nature of parkour training. This topic absolutely requires discussion! None of your joints are safe from the bad effects of parkour. Your ankles, your knees, wrists, elbows, and shoulders are all in danger. Imagine you try jumping in between two ledges and you miss the jump. How badly will your knee hurt when it makes contact with the concrete? What if you twist your ankle after trying a parkour vault that you saw on Instagram thinking that you were completely safe?

Those kinds of joint injuries add up if they keep happening to you. You might end up making it harder for you to walk as you get older. Unless you focus on mastering basic parkour moves first. They also make noise as they cheer each other on and encourage themselves to do dangerous stunts. There are people in some places that have even gone as far as making it illegal to do it.

Can you imagine trying to walk up to get into your house but you find that somebody is jumping around on the ledges nearly and disturbing your peace of mind? They jump over the biggest gaps on the highest rooftops. They climb up the small ledges on the sides of buildings like they are ladders. You try out some climbing and your weak arms feel like they are going to tear right off your torso.

And you regret it because parkour is bad. More people started doing parkour as it became more popular. And that means that more women started doing it too.

There are actually quite a lot of amazing female parkour athletes who are pushing the sport forward. Parkour is a very male-dominated sport. This could be because of the patriarchal nature of parkour where the meet-ups are full of men brimming with testosterone doing crazy stuff. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

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