What is Parkour?
About Parkour
First created in the late ’80s by a French group the Yamakasi, Parkour is a holistic athletic training and discipline with roots in military obstacle training and martial arts. It was originally created to maximise efficiency over obstacles, with the intention of being useful to others.
Parkour consists of moves which mainly include:
- Running
- Jumping
- Swinging
- Rolling
- Vaulting
- Plyometrics
- …and even Flips (for Freerunning)
Simply put, Parkour is getting from Point A to Point B in the most efficient manner.
Now, Parkour athletes train the sport to not only express themselves, but to also improve on confidence, power, speed, technique, endurance, creativity and even mental fortitude.
The right way to learn and do Parkour is the safe way. Here at Lion City Parkour, our passionate and experienced coaches use a progressive approach, tailoring skills based on the individual and where they’re at and progressing them towards new moves in a safe, holistic manner.
Benefits of doing Parkour
Despite misconceptions due to how it’s portrayed by mainstream media (and highly experienced athletes with over a decade of experience), at its core, the sport has many physical and mental health benefits.
Adaptive Skills
Parkour includes agility, balance, power, speed, coordination, and reaction time. You have use these skills when navigating obstacles. These skills may not be required for everyday life, but are still very beneficial to have in your arsenal to ensure your physical fitness.
Techniques learnt can be transferred to other sports even, as seen in our trainings with schools such as Singapore Sports School.
Fall Prevention
Parkour practitioners practice falling, rolling and bailing as part of their usual training. We have adult students and parents of our young students report that they broke actual falls with little to no injuries as it became second nature to them through our parkour classes. Fall prevention is highly essential for Singapore’s aging population.
Increase in Safety and Risk Assessment
Ever watch your young child throw themselves off heights from playgrounds, hard floors, furniture etc without much (or any) thought?
Through our parkour classes, parents have observed a decrease in such behaviours as children learn to independently assess risks. This is achieved through our coaches teaching them how to consider and manage risks through proper training techniques, ensuring a safe and supportive learning environment.
Building Core and Bone Strength
The core is the center of your body and is responsible for helping you bend, twist and transfer power and strength across your body. Developing a strong core through parkour also helps to prevent lower back injuries.
In parkour, practitioners do lower and upper body impact movements, enabling their body to build stronger bones due to the impact they take, even if it’s an ankle height impact!
Improving Creativity and Problem-Solving
Similar to bouldering/rock climbing, parkour encourages participants to use their creativity and to think outside the box to solve a problem. Every obstacle you meet in parkour won’t have an obvious solution, so you must use your creativity and problem-solving skills to overcome it.
Increased Confidence
Parkour builds confidence by allowing people to be able to conquer things they would never have even attempted before. For example, when you see a large wall that before seemed like an impossible feat and you learn how to get over it? You feel as though you can accomplish anything in life.
As one of our adult students once said, starting parkour helped her envision that she could also get over life’s obstacles too, and that no problem was too big to get over. It is one of her most important takeaways from her classes with us!
The sport also teaches resilience, grit and adaptability through these obstacles and the idea of not giving up easily until the problem is solved.
And much, much more!
Join our parkour classes at Lion City Parkour, and experience these benefits for yourself.
