Parkour is a discipline which offers benefits of value to all kinds of people in the forms of health, fitness, self confidence and simple fun. Unfortunately, due to the way in which it has come to common awareness, it has become an activity dominated by young men with older adults, children and women seriously underrepresented. I often hear traceurs ask why there aren’t more women in their scene, or note when there's an influx of women into the scene, even if their numbers are still dwarfed by the number of young men. I have had the unique opportunity to be married to a female traceur and to live with two more. I also teach classes that often attract an even gender mix. This has given me a unique perspective on why women tend to be underrepresented in parkour. I think the problem started with the original representation of parkour in the media; showing only the most dangerous and risky training done by the most advanced traceurs. For one reason or another, young men are more likely then any other group to see someone jumping from one roof to another and think, "Hey, I could do that!" Once parkour had become popular with young men, it made it more difficult for other groups to join. From the outside, it now looks like an activity for young men. Even on the inside, the specific applications and methods used in our discipline have been those designed by and for young men. The culture of any given parkour group in most places is likely to be dominated by young male traditions, humor, and conversation topics.

1. This is obvious, and if you're reading this article you're probably past this but it has to be said anyway, let go of any prejudices against women doing parkour. I have heard way too many young traceurs say that girls can’t or shouldn’t do parkour, or that it is for guys. Think about it for a second, what is parkour but training your natural ability to move? Why in the world would that be something only men should do? Do you think your female ancestors couldn’t/shouldn’t have run away from predators using their own four limbs? If they hadn’t we wouldn’t be here today. 

2. Be open and respectful to women who show interest in parkour, just like you would to anyone else. Don’t hit on women coming into the parkour community. For a while Janine, my roommate, and Beth, my wife(girlfriend at the time), both were hit on multiple times at every jam they went to. They started joking about getting shirts with their boyfriends' names on them in order to keep the other guys from asking. A girl who is interested in parkour is at jam to train same as you are.  Having to bat off the advances of one guy after another is not only distracting and annoying, but for a lot of women it's also intimidating.  If the situation does come up where you are seriously interested in dating a fellow traceur, and feel like the sentiment is returned, try to avoid asking the other party out at jam if possible. Also, please don’t invite the other party to train as a mid-step, that's just confusing.  Are they saying yes to a date or saying yes because they want to train? Instead of this, the best tactic is to just be clear and honest. Jams should be a safe zone, a place to train, not a dating service.

3. Don’t make a big deal out of seeing a woman at a jam. How would like it if you showed up for a jam and people were like, "Oh my God! You have brown hair! We don’t get many brown haired people interested in parkour! I wasn’t sure brown haired people could do parkour! Let me help you try this, etc etc." Be helpful, of course, but don’t treat women coming in to the scene as novelties.

4. Remember that they aren’t built the same way you are. Ever other piece of advice here is about recognizing that women should be treated as common humans. However, there are differences between men and women, and understanding how to treat each other requires recognizing those. Women are smaller on average, have smaller and less muscular upper bodies, and are often less confident in their bodies. When my wife started training parkour she was better then I was! She was more confident in her movement, less hesitant, and learned many things quicker than I.  However, because my friend Dane and I liked to focus on wall passing big walls and doing big jumps that were simply too high or long for her (being a foot shorter then us) she became discouraged. She felt like she couldn’t keep up with us and quit training for a while. So, If you have a woman or group of women coming into their first jam, taking them to train the biggest cat leap, wall pass or long jump in the area is probably not the best way to introduce them to the discipline. Likewise, I have seen many guys trying to teach incoming women kongs as their first vault.  Because a woman's center of gravity is lower, and her upper body strength tends to be less, a kong is usually the most difficult vault for her.  This is not a good way to start. Women can learn kongs and men can learn kash vaults, but in general a women well learn the latter easier and men the former.  If you're trying to teach a girl a kong, and she ends up doing a kash, it's not wrong. It's just a different, valuable skill that comes easier to her.  

By Henry Collie

Parkour Games: The Elements: Wood

Hey everyone! I hope you enjoyed last month's games, because here are some more! Last month we looked at the element fire, and this month I'm going to continue the theme of the elements with wood. Wood is its own thing. There are many different kinds of wood which look differently, act differently, and grow at different rates. This is very appropriate to Parkour and life in general. There are thousands of people in the world and we're all unique, no matter what (unless you believe in dopplegangers in which case you should probably ignore the rest of this article). We all need to progress at our own pace. Trees mind their own business and do what's right for them. In the end, they benefit every living thing on the planet for the simple fact that they do what they have to do to progress. That last statement can be taken in a lot of different ways, but then again that's the beauty of being a human being, we can adapt things and make them our own. This month, the games will not be competitive in any way other than to the self, in order to stick to the tone of both the above and parkour overall. So without further ado, here are this months parkour games.


Game 1:

One of the main points in the introduction was that everyone needs to do things at their own pace, so the aim of this game is that you do it at a pace that suits you. This is meant to be a guide so you can gauge your level and see where to go in your training from where you are now. It's a bit like parkour top trumps.

1. Find a spot that has a lot of space and a few obstacles to practice on. Bring your training journal if you have one. If you don't have one then it's always a good time to start one as they help you to set goals for yourself.

2. Write down all the goals you think you can reach i.e. sprint 200m, kong vault a particular obstacle, 50 precision jumps without failing. By goals, I don't mean things like: jump off a 40 ft wall, somersault up a 40 ft wall, or run around in circles until you get really, really dizzy and then fall off a 40 ft wall.

3. Set yourself a time in which to do it all and then do it.

4. When you have done it all rip out a sheet from your journal, or better yet, actually get a few pieces of card to write on. I know it sounds silly, but if they're colourful you're going to be more likely to want to use them. Write down on the card everything you just did and in what time you did it.

5. Work on getting that level up every training session. As soon as you have brought everything on the card up to a new level, you can make a new one, maybe even with different things on it. I would suggest putting about ten values on any given card.  Here is an example of what two cards might look like, but yours wouldn't have to be exactly like these.


5th May 2009                                           7th June 2009

200m sprint: 30 sec                              100 m sprint: 12 sec

pull ups: 30                                           dash vaults: 45

muscle ups: 5                                        muscle ups: 8

wall run: 3 full steps                              lateral leg raise pull ups: 10

kong vaults: 40 in a row                        upside down sit ups: 20

cat leaps: 35 in a row                            front plank: 2:10 min

lateral leg raises: three sets of 15          cat balance/walk: 20 ft

rail walking: 16 steps                             handstand: 20 sec

push ups: 70                                          push ups: 80

running: 11 miles                                   running: 15 miles



Be sure to take your time with this! By the time you have twelve, everything should have improved dramatically. If not much has improved to the level you would consider enough, then you haven't done it right.



Game 2:

This game is going to focus on helping you to expand your roots, much like the tree. Many people will pick a few movements, or even all the movements, that have been written on paper and stick to them as their only form of practice. Hopefully this game will teach you how to become more creative and open minded about how you move.

1. Find somewhere dense with obstacles.

2. Pick two movements that you know at random. One way to do this would be to write them all down on separate pieces of paper and then jumble them all up.

3. Do these movements over and over until you really get the feel for them, and practice a few flow drills too just to get in the right frame of mind.

4. Try to mix the two movements together and create an entirely new movement.

5. An advancement of this is to mix another two together to create a new movement, and then take both new movements and mix those together.


Although this is a good exercise, you do need to practice and hone your creativity in other ways as well because this game on it's own is still technically thinking inside the box. Try to incorporate this game into a flow drill i.e. pick a few moves and try to improvise them together. This will also help your mind to work faster.  Remember to be careful, start low and don't move on until your near enough to 100% sure you're able to. Always progress at your own pace, just like a tree.

Train safe.
Have fun.

By: Wenxin Yang

I’m one of the youngest Traceurs you’ll ever find at the University of Michigan parkour meet-ups. I’m also one of the ones who’s trained the longest. After 2 years, I’ll show you some insight into the world of Parkour through a child’s vision.

We are a technological generation. Most of the time, our words are put into some device and transferred to someone else to read, instead of spoken aloud. We are driven by inspiring articles and flashy videos from Youtube, Veoh, Metacafe, etc. Parkour is no exception. I can say that most of the kids today started practicing Parkour from what they saw on a video. Why? I believe it's because if we were to just tell a friend of Parkour, they’d think we were crazy. Only after watching a video would they be tempted, driven, to try it out. I started during the beginning of winter. Without anything to do, I searched for a new hobby. I’ve always wanted to learn how to do a backflip to show off and went to Youtube and looked up a tutorial. Instead, I saw a video called "Russian Climbing". I was amazed by the video to a degree I have never been amazed before. I looked through the tags and saw “Parkour.” I went on Wikipedia and read what Parkour was. That was the dawn of a new beginning.

It looks so easy in the videos doesn't it? Everything looks easy at first. I ran to the park nearest me and tried the first jump that I saw (nothing big). Easy. The second one, not so easy. So close, but so far. I just couldn’t get my feet to pump out strength or even move. When I actually got the guts to jump, I could only get one foot on point B. There was a lot more to Parkour than I thought. Some kids are immune to fear and getting hurt and go for it, but to me, that’s just dumb. I would never hurt my leg for a one-foot drop.

The winter was long and harsh. I pushed myself outside to train. I didn’t know what caused me to go outside in 3 layers just to punish myself more. Parkour has a mindset unlike any other that affects everyone who trains.

Mom always said when I loved something, I read everything I can about it before trying, and Parkour for me was no different... except for the warm-up part. I never warmed up. After 1 and a half-years later, guess what that gave me? Not tendonitis, not a messed up ankle, but tennis elbow. It put me out of commission for 3 months. In those 3 months, I did hard conditioning. Hard. After 3 months, I was so strong, except for my left arm. It hung there like a dead branch. Warm-ups! You've got to do them! Childhood does not equal invincibility. I have had several incidents where I over-trained and had pains in my back and shins. I gave myself a break. I knew it wasn’t worth training in pain forever over one day of training till I drop.

We are gutsy. Especially in the years of adolescence. We try or are peer pressured to do the stupidest things. We go straight for the backflip 360 without even learning a proper drop if we want to. This is one of the greatest dangers of learning Parkour at an early age. We try things without any thought of how it might effect our future. Without learning the basics, we could be walking around with a cane at 25. If you don’t train and drill, but instead go out and try stunts without thought to technique or how your body will handle the impact, I don't feel that you can really call yourself a traceur.

After a many weeks of training, after gallons of sweat drained, after numbers of walls busted through, everyone gets stronger. Kids start out pretty resilient, and after training, we get stronger. Strength combined with fresh joints gives us an advantage over older practitioners with movements like precisions, vaults, and our small size can make underbars easier for us. However, since we are also shorter; large wallruns and far precisions are harder for us. We’ll grow up, and be back with a vengeance. I know I have. I’m a fairly tall kid. I’ve gotten a lot taller since I was 12. Over the years I’ve achieved previously impossible heights. Ten “foot” precision? No problem. That wall run? Got it. It’s the greatest feeling when you achieve something you have doubted you could do before.

Getting stronger for us isn’t easy. We have a hard time being self-motivated. Most of us quit after a while 'cause the going got tough (but for the kids who are reading this so far, this excludes you, you’re doing fine.). If you want to improve, cut off excess stuttering steps, you have to drill, drill, and drill. Repeat, repeat, and repeat. Only then, can you get better.

Our minds are fresh and we pick up on new moves really fast. We can’t always compare to other, older traceurs that have been training the same amount of time on the factors of speed, strength and flow (unless you’ve done martial arts and gymnastics, that’s a different story). After maybe 6 months, older practitioners will probably kong harder, jump farther, and maybe even balance better than a young traceur. I’ve been training for 2 years, and I watch the samplers of older 2 year traceurs. Their kong to precisions are massive, and their jumps can be like 10 feet wide, but mine are only maybe 3/4 of their distance. I know I’ve been conditioning as hard as I can, so why aren’t I an equal to them? It could be the fact that my muscles are still developing or some other biological reason. Our flow is another problem. I just can’t get that down. I know I’m only halfway there, But at least we can carry out our moves fearlessly. I guess I've just got to scrap some more money together to go to the gym to Kong and jump farther.

Some perks of being a kid is that we have endless energy. I’ve always said we suck it off from our parents. We are fearless and want to try everything. Fearlessness is a great aid in parkour, but can have its negatives. Without fear, that gap which has eluded you for so long is suddenly achievable if it’s within your physical limits. If it is out of your limits, then you are putting yourself in danger. Use common sense, be smart, and do not let your training career be short.

The great thing about parkour is the community. What other sport in the world can you just gather and have a great time? None! Skateboarding, no. Basketball? Your skills are going to be tested before you are going to be accepted, or not. When I first went to a jam, I had no one with me, I knew no one, but I felt belonged even though I was only half the age of almost everyone else there. It’s pure magic how strangers can just meet and train. I knew everyone was going through the same amount of pain I was from the warm-up (thanks, Travis!) and we were all trying to be better, stronger, faster, higher.

We are the future of parkour. We don’t know the consequences of training in parkour. We can only hope and train safe, be responsible and have fun. When I’m older, I’ll probably read this again and say to myself, “Phhf..10 “foot” precision? Way too easy.”