About Parkour
Parkour is not a sport, it is a movement art
Parkour is a form of movement that encourages its practitioners to adapt to their surroundings and navigate from point A to B in the most efficient way, without the use of equipment.
If we delve a little deeper into Parkour, we find a lot of interesting things.
Read along here:
Parkour - History and origins
The art of movement is called parkour. Parkour must be understood as a new unique activity that not only excites, but has a strong positive impact on children and young people.
Parkour is a form of movement, originally known as l'art du displacement, was developed in the 1980s in France by a group of nine young men under the name “Yamakasi". "Yamakasi", a word in the Lingala language, means "strong in body and spirit", which reflects the core purpose of sport - to nourish the individual both physically, mentally and ethically.
Yamakasi's founders are David Belle, Sebastien Foucan, Yann Hnautra, Bye Belle, Laurent Piedmontesi, Guylain N’guba Boyeke, Charles Perriere, Malik Diouf and Williams Belle.
David Belle first introduced the term “parkour” in 1998. The word “parkour” is derived from the French word “course“, which means route or path in French.
Parkour is a powerful, dynamic and exciting physical discipline that encourages participants to interact with their surroundings in innovative and effective ways. It is an art form that combines aspects of self-discipline, creativity and physical challenge.
What is Parkour?
The following is an insight into parkour, written by a researcher in Sports and Movement, Signe Højbjerre Larsen.
Most people have seen it on TV, on the Internet or perhaps out in the city. They move through the city at breakneck speed, overcoming benches, stairs, railings and walls in highly creative and fascinating ways.
In these above images, two apparently similar activities are seen, with the only immediate difference being that there is 100 years between them.
In today's gymnastics, many of the traditional exercises, as illustrated in fig. 1, slipped out, but on a street corner they suddenly appear again. A couple of young guys jump from wall to wall, do somersaults, land on their feet and run on, take off from new places, balance on railings and continue down streets and around the next street corner.
All over the world, performers fill the spaces of the city with wild and expressive movements.
Parkour started as a subculture that developed in the French suburbs, but has since spread throughout the world via the Internet. More and more people practice parkour, which is reflected in the fact that on the media sharing site www.youtube.com there are over 111,000 videos with parkour.
Interest in parkour is increasing, but despite this there is still only sporadic knowledge about it. The existing research has primarily dealt with the activity from a sports pedagogic angle
Parkour is thus a present and current topic in our culture, but at the same time an untouched and unique phenomenon that largely deserves to be further elucidated.
Parkour as an activity shakes up the understanding of what movement activities really are and testifies to new trends in body culture.
Parkour reminds us that body culture trends arise and develop as self-organized movement activities, and to ensure a future insight into how our body culture works, we must cast our eyes in this direction and try to understand what parkour really is?
Such a goal demands an examination of what it is that we as practitioners do when we practice parkour. In other words: what is it that parkour practitioners experience during the practice of parkour, and how does this experience make sense for the individual practitioner.
Isn't parkour just gymnastics outside?
In one's first encounter with the activity parkour, one may be somewhat doubtful as to whether this activity constitutes something new compared to traditional jumping gymnastics.
Is it an independent or new activity at all? The images on the next page demonstrate three almost identical movements. Parkour not only contains movement similarities with the traditional gymnastics that spread from the middle of the 1800s onwards, which the pictures illustrate, but also similarities in origin.
In what follows, I will try to shed light on what it is that we as the practitioners experience during the practice of parkour, and how this experience makes sense to us.
The analysis will begin with an explanation of the relationships that parkour as an activity has with the traditional Danish vaulting gymnastics.
Parkour - The historical relationships
Parkour was developed with a background in the "Methode naturelle" training system, which was founded by Georg Hébert (1875-1957).
The interesting thing is that "Natural method" has had a significant impact on the start and development of gymnastics in Denmark. It was under the inspiration of "Metode naturelle" that the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed his philanthropic ideas, which were fundamental for the constitution of gymnastics in the school subject circle in Denmark.
It was also Hébert's training system that inspired the Danish gymnastics pedagogue Niels Bukh to have his gymnasts perform in bare upper bodies and small black boxer shorts.ix Parkour is therefore based on some of the same ideas about development and formation of the body through natural exercises as the traditional gymnastics that was developed in Denmark.
When parkour is put in relation to J. C. F Gutsmuth's historic gymnastics grounds, parkour appears as traditional gymnastic movements, which have simply been pulled out of the historical textbooks and set free in our time:
However, the two images contain a significant difference that attracts special attention.
Where gymnastics, as illustrated in figure 3, used defined spaces, parkour uses the arbitrary street environments of the city. Instead of bars, plinths and other classic gymnastic equipment, the practitioners move on the available objects in the street.
It is clear that the activity in its use of the street space is about more than the development and formation of the body through natural exercises, but the question then is: about what?
In the past, street corners have been perceived as a potentially sinful place with the risk of falling into social awkwardness and bad company.xi With parkour, on the other hand, we see a revitalization of street corners as a place for physical activity. Despite the immediate historical and movement similarities, the two images in fig. 3 and 4, that these similarities only remain a series of common quantities, which of course contain significant meanings, but which do not necessarily give us a greater understanding of what parkour is really about.
Is it extreme sports?
The media often portray parkour as an extreme sport.
The media have taken advantage of the visual effects of speed, excitement and action-packed intensity that the parkour performers' rapid movements through the city create. IN James Bond the movie"Casino Royale” from 2007 includes parkour as part of an opening escape scene where James Bond, leaping from crane to crane at dizzying heights, chases the villain.
Parkour contains an aesthetic element of excitement, speed and action, and it is therefore no wonder that the media want to make use of it.
When we look at the actual practice forms of the activity, parkour also seems to contain the same orientation towards boundary crossing that most forms of extreme sports contain.
The rapid movements of the parkour performers around the street space create risks. These risks are linked to an understanding of parkour as a culture of limit-seeking and testing that prompts self-development through physical and mental transgressions.
Most of the practitioners, however, distance themselves from the description of parkour as an extreme sport and describe it instead as an art of movement and a way of life.
The question is, then, whether it's about finding boundaries and self-development at all, or whether this is not just an immediate categorization that the media's use of the purely visual effect has brought with it?
The experience of body control and continuous self-development
Parkour is about challenging yourself physically and mentally. The movements around the hard, often high-lying objects of the street space create the risks that the practitioner must constantly deal with.
It is precisely this process that is central. Parkour is about examining and assessing one's movement limits and finding the right way to overcome them. In parkour, it is always necessary to carry out a thorough analysis of the challenge by measuring the physical distances and putting them in relation to one's movement capacity.
With this process, an ability to anticipate situations accurately is practiced, and thus as a parkour practitioner you gain experience with your respective limits and their nature.
The challenges must therefore always be seen in the light of the exercisers' movement abilities. The central aspect in the practitioners' experience with movement limits and their thematization of the nature of their movements is that the challenges are not something that parkour practitioners throw themselves into blindly and without consideration, but something that is continuously put in relation to one's movement abilities.
The question is, however, what meanings lie behind the challenges, in other words: why do we do it? For parkour practitioners, it is about continuous development and transcendence, as well as making full use of one's body. The risks that jumps several meters above asphalt create are meaningful to the athletes because they stimulate physical development.
On the other hand, it is irrational to "waste" one's movement possibilities. It is about living one's physicality to the fullest, and to do this one must constantly push the limits to ensure a continuous development of abilities and control.
The overcoming of the movement challenges not only makes sense because it is rational, but also creates an immediate excitement and euphoria.
When a movement challenge is overcome, it feels like overcoming something intangible.
The overcoming contributes to a surprising new experience of one's ability to move. The excitement and euphoria that emerges in the victory not only has a meaning in the present, but gives a sense of self-development.
So there is more at stake than the subjective bodily feeling of excitement and euphoria that the victory creates in the present. The parkour practitioner's formation and cultivation of excitement and adrenaline through the movement challenges is thus a way to play with - and explore - the body's movement abilities and ensure a continuous development of these.
Through parkour, those who exercise experience their body as a size that transcends boundaries and is capable of learning.
The flow experience
When the parkour practitioners express themselves about their movements, it is usually not the challenging movements, but instead the ability to move efficiently and in flow through the environment that is at the center.
In parkour, it is about achieving the expressive expression, which can be defined as 'flow.'
Flow appears as an unbroken and fluid movement rhythm that is built up through the body's adaptation to the location in question. Flow is orientation towards an expressive expression, but the question is, is it the only thing at stake?
The American professor of psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the founder of the flow theory, describes flow as a state where there is a balance between the size of the challenge and the person's ability to tackle it, which gives physical and psychological enjoyment to the individual.xiv According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow therefore contains a bodily and emotional dimension of experience.
In the flow movements, a balance between challenges and physical abilities is experienced. The experience of flow is felt as a bodily, pleasurable sensation of a fluid and continuous movement rhythm. It is the feeling of being able to continue over the wall, over the railing, on to the bench, one continued movement.
Once this rhythm is experienced, there is no doubt about how flow is experienced. The mastery of movements in flow contributes to the fact that the movements feel liberated, effortless and in accordance with an inner flowing rhythm. In a historical perspective, the gymnastics pedagogue Niels Bukh in his primitive gymnastics also worked with a bodily experience of rhythm in the movements:
"Students can learn an unknown form of work by demonstration or by knowing that all the individual movements are carried out on command or by counting. On the other hand, the effect of work cannot be learned, but must be experienced, and in most cases this does not happen during work on command or counting, but in free trials, where the individual determines the speed and rhythm themselves."
As can be read in the quote, Bukh distinguishes between a work's "Form", which can be interpreted as the type of movement, and its "Effect", which can be interpreted as the meaning of the movement for the practitioners, i.e. the way in which the movement makes sense.
Bukh's description provides an adequate understanding of the practitioners' experience of flow as an enjoyable, bodily sensation in parkour. The bodily pleasure that the movement energy flow creates is the moment that gives the movements meaning. In the practice of parkour, one can therefore speak of flow as a fundamental bodily experience of pleasure.
The movements make sense because they feel good. Flow is a bodily pleasure that you immerse yourself in in parkour, and recreate again and again via repetition of the movements. Precisely the complete immersion is described as one of the most widespread and characteristic features of achieving flow in activities.
Are parkour practitioners narcissists?
On the media sharing site www.youtube.com there are over 111,000 videos with parkour, and the actual use of samplers must therefore be said to be a large part of practicing parkour.
A sampler is edited together of small video clips of the performer making various moves. The performer edits the small video clips together with one or more pieces of music into a rhythmic mosaic of movement situations.
With the use of edits and background music, the practitioners create a certain image, which can immediately make parkour appear as a narcissistic cult of self-staging.
Is parkour then about using the city as an arena for displaying one's individual physicality and abilities? In any case, our use of urban space differs from the other people who move around here.
It's about seeing challenges and alternative movement possibilities, where others see limitations and unique functionality. However, it is not only about staging one's bodily individuality, but also one's distinctive style. This aspect links to street culture, where the worst you can be is mainstream.
However, understanding the practice of parkour as a self-centered practice where it is about creating and exposing one's own individual style meets a counterpart in the form of group formations.
As in street culture, parkour is practiced in groups, which shows that there are also social aspects at play.
The question is, then, whether it is really just a social element, which is a necessary stage for individual self-presentation and recognition, or whether it is a question of close and binding communities?
To answer this question, it is necessary to explain a significant dividing line that can be drawn between the movements in parkour, the so-called vaults, and the standardized movements of jumping gymnastics.
The exercises of gymnastics contain anatomical, physiological and aesthetic standards for the correctness of the exercises.
The anatomical and physiological standards in gymnastics can be understood as the specific locations of the body parts, which help to classify the exercises, i.e. turn a patch of flak into a patch of flak.
The aesthetic standards are linked to the correctness of the gymnast in connection with the performance of the anatomical and physiological standards. A vault in parkour is a named movement such as catbalance, monkey, dash or speedvault.
Til forskel fra det traditionelle måtte- and trampolinspring er disse vaults ikke underlagt den samme radikale anatomiske and fysiologiske standardisering, som gør sig gældende for gymnastikken.
Det væsentlige er ikke den specifikke placering af udøverens kropsdele, men den måde hvorpå de i samme bevægelse glider igennem omgivelserne and skaber flow.
Selvom gaderummet i parkour er statisk and stabilt, stiller det ikke de samme betingelser for alle udøvere. For at opnå flow i bevægelserne må man som parkourudøver modulere bevægelserne efter personlige kropsligheder.
Denne modulering finder ikke sted i springgymnastikkens traditionelle måtte- and trampolinspring. For at skabe de samme betingelser for alle organiseres gymnaster derimod efter niveau and alder, hvorved for ulige bevægelsesmæssige betingelser forsøges udlignet.
Det er kroppen, der skal tilvende sig bevægelserne and ikke omvendt, som det er tilfældet i parkour, hvor forskelligheden netop dyrkes. Det handler ikke om at tilnærme sig nogle korrekte bevægelser, men om at danne en form for personlig bevægelsesstil i overensstemmelse med sin kropslighed.
Spørgsmålet er nu, hvilken relation dette ideal for bevægelserne har til spørgsmålet, hvorvidt der findes nære and forpligtende fællesskaber i parkour, eller det sociale blot er en nødvendig scene for individuel selviscenesættelse and anerkendelse? Svaret er, at dyrkelsen af de nære relationer i parkour netop finder sted, fordi dannelsen af personlig bevægelsesstil ikke er et individuelt, men et kollektivt projekt.
I parkour ”ledes” udøverne ikke som i gymnastikken, and som udøver må man derfor selv udforske and vurdere omgivelser and bevægelsesmuligheder, af hvilken grund gruppen kommer til at spille en mere signifikant rolle for den enkeltes udfoldelse.
Som udøver hjælper man hinanden med at overkomme and opnå beherskelse af bevægelsesudfordringerne. Den enkelte udøvers personlige bevægelsesudfordringer er altså et socialt projekt for hele gruppen.
Selvom vi i parkour dyrker personlig kropslighed and bevægelsesstil, så er selve bevægelsesidealet omkring personlig stil med til at skabe nære relationer and et betydningsfuldt fællesskab, gennem det gensidige engagement i hinandens bevægelser.
De nære relationer er ikke blot centrale for dannelse af personlig bevægelsesstil, men også i forhold til oplevelsen af identitet and tilhørsforhold til et fællesskab. Hvordan skal vi forstå parkour? Parkour har altså en række umiddelbare ligheder med både ekstremsport, springgymnastik and andre streetaktiviteter, men helt centralt er det, at parkour må forstås som en unik aktivitet, der på en helt ny måde bidrager med nydelsesfulde and overraskende oplevelser af kroppens bevægelsesmuligheder.
Parkour creates positive experiences of competence to overcome challenges, create one's own identity and belonging to a binding and significant community.
Forståelse for, at parkour er en selvstændig and betydningsfuld aktivitet, der kan bidrage med utallige fantastiske oplevelser for både børn, unge and voksne, er væsentligt for, at aktiviteten kan udvikle sig.
Parkour har en helt unik tiltrækningskraft på flere alderstrin, and der er ingen tvivl om, at aktiviteten vil brede sig endnu mere i løbet af de næste par år. På Team Jiyo arbejder vi for at skabe den bedst mulige grobund for denne udvikling gennem workshops and konsulentarbejde.
Filosofi and metode
Kernen i parkour er ideen om effektivitet – at bevæge sig fra punkt A til B på den hurtigst mulige måde ved at tilpasse sig and overvinde fysiske forhindringer. Dette kan involvere løb, spring, klatring, rulning, and en række andre bevægelser.
Det er imidlertid vigtigt at bemærke, at parkour ikke bare handler om fysisk kapacitet; det handler også om mental smidighed. Udøvere af parkour, kendt som traceurs (for mænd) and traceuses (for kvinder), lærer at se deres omgivelser på nye måder and udvikle problemløsning and hurtig tænkning sammen med fysisk dygtighed.
Træning and teknikker
Parkour-træning involverer typisk konditionering ( conditioning ), styrketræning and tekniktræning for at forberede kroppen på de krævende fysiske udfordringer, sporten indebærer. Basale bevægelser som klatring, spring and rolls er fundamentale, men mere avancerede teknikker som præcisionsspring, kong vault (en type hænder-først spring) and wall runs kan også indgå i en traceur’s repertoire.
Parkour i dag
Siden sin oprettelse har parkour bredt sig globalt og er blevet en anerkendt og respekteret disciplin. Det er også gjort sin vej ind i popkulturen, med fremtrædende optrædener i film, tv-Shows, og videospil.
Mange byer har nu parkour parker and faciliteter, and det er også blevet inkluderet i mange skolers fysiske uddannelsesprogrammer. På trods af sin stigende mainstream popularitet, er parkour dog stadig meget tro mod sin kernefilosofi om frihed, kreativitet and selvdisciplin.
Kort sagt, parkour er en unik and inspirerende disciplin, der udfordrer både krop and sind. Det er en måde at engagere sig med verden på, der fremmer både fysisk kondition and mental smidighed, samtidig med at det skaber en dyb forståelse for vores egne begrænsninger and potentiale.
Hvad er Freerunning?
Freerunning er en fascinerende and utroligt dynamisk disciplin, der udspringer fra parkour, men tager en unik drejning ved at inkludere kreative and æstetiske elementer i bevægelsesformen. Mens parkour ofte handler om at finde den mest direkte and effektive rute gennem et miljø, handler freerunning om at udforske kreativiteten and den kunstneriske frihed i bevægelse.
Oprindelse and filosofi
Freerunning blev oprindeligt udviklet af Sébastien Foucan, en af de oprindelige medlemmer af den franske parkour-gruppe “Yamakasi”. I modsætning til parkour, hvor hovedformålet er effektivitet and hurtighed, opfordrer freerunning udøvere til at udforske and interagere med deres miljø på mere kunstneriske and individuelle måder. Med andre ord, det er mindre en sport and mere en form for kunst, der udtrykkes gennem kroppens bevægelser.
Teknikker and træning
Freerunning inkluderer en bred vifte af akrobatiske bevægelser, herunder flips, spins, and tricks, som ofte ikke findes i traditionel parkour. Derudover lægger freerunning stor vægt på flydende bevægelse and æstetik, hvor det er lige så vigtigt, hvordan en bevægelse ser ud, som hvordan den udføres.
Træning inden for freerunning involverer ofte at udvikle styrke, smidighed, balance and koordination, samtidig med at man lærer and perfektionerer forskellige akrobatiske teknikker. Freerunning-udøvere træner typisk i både urbane and naturlige miljøer, alt fra byparker and bygninger til skove and klippeformationer.
Kulturel betydning
Freerunning har vokset i popularitet siden det første gang blev introduceret til det offentlige i den tidlige del af det 21. århundrede. Det er ikke kun blevet en anerkendt disciplin i sig selv, men det har også haft en betydelig indflydelse på popkulturen, idet det ofte er blevet fremvist i film, Music videos og videospil.
På trods af dens stigende popularitet er freerunning stadig dybt rodfæstet i sin oprindelige filosofi om frihed, selvudtryk and kreativ udforskning. For mange udøvere er freerunning mere end bare en sport eller en hobby; det er en livsstil and en måde at se verden på.
Kort sagt er freerunning en unik and kreativ disciplin, der handler om at udforske verden omkring os gennem bevægelse. Det er en form for kunst, der giver udøvere frihed til at udtrykke sig selv på deres egen unikke måde, and udfordrer dem til konstant at skubbe deres egne grænser and prøve nye ting.
Parkour and Freerunning i Danmark
I Danmark har flere brands and parkour Teams været med til at påvirke bevægelsesformerne i en positiv retning. Team JIYO var de allerførste i Danmark and har dermed haft en vigtig rolle i forhold til, hvordan danskerne betragter parkour and freerunning i Danmark idag.
Det handler om at finde glæde, frihed and befrielse i bevægelse.
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