Below is a great article about what a parkour academy actually is - from Parkour Generations.

"Over the last few years we have seen a proliferation of parkour or freerunning academies all over the world, fantastic indoor spaces with great equipment, purpose-built structures and bespoke training environments. They’ve become all the rage in some countries, and whole new communities are being introduced to parkour in this fashion, starting indoors and staying indoors. And there is no doubt that moving parkour into a managed space environment has allowed the art to reach thousands more people from entirely new demographics, and made it accessible to huge swathes of the population who just would not even approach the idea of starting parkour in its natural environment."

Having a structure, a space, a building is not enough. It isn’t anything, in fact. An academy is a body of knowledge and expertise – without that, the grandest facilities in the world are useless. And quite often the best pools of learning and teaching develop far away from the best facilities.

We do teach indoors, we started it in fact (Not necessarily true). And indoor training does have its uses, which is why we continue to use it. However, it needs to be done in a balanced fashion. We have always stayed away from relying on bespoke indoor spaces, from specialised ‘parkour centres’, because there is a subtle, yet hugely important qualitative difference between training your movement to adapt to your environment and shaping your environment to fit your movement.

The point is that if we allow parkour to become focussed on these indoor centres and managed spaces, we condemn it to dilution and an early death. And, worse, we deny those future generations of new practitioners the most powerful benefits and truths that parkour has to offer – that of self-discovery and self-knowledge through applying oneself to the challenge of the unfettered world around us.

Parkour has the power to liberate whatever it touches – from individuals to whole communities. Its essence resonates with something deep inside us, something untamed and adventurous that we are all born with. That has to stay at its heart, no matter what.

Change that, and it doesn’t matter how far you jump, how fluid the motion is, how precise your landings are – it just isn’t parkour anymore.  

To view the whole article head to the Parkour Generations website here.