Can I Do Parkour?

This is a question I asked myself when I first discovered parkour 12 years ago when I was in my late 30’s. The short answer is YES, you can do parkour. While your first impression of parkour may be of people who perform super-human feats on YouTube, I discovered that the heart of parkour is far from that. Parkour is fundamentally about personal growth. Through parkour you develop yourself so you can move better in ways that are new to you. You get to develop your body and attitude toward obstacles through parkour. And if you commit to ongoing, incremental growth, you may find yourself doing super-human movement yourself.

So how does it work? In the parkour community there are a variety of people at different fitness levels. Everyone who comes out to train comes out to discover their own personal limits. They then choose to grow past that limit just a little bit at a time. This is the fundamental truth of parkour. Discover YOUR limits and choose to GROW. Parkour practitioners are passionate about discovering and expanding their limits. We embrace new movement ideas constantly. There is no single way to do anything because we are all different.

This idea may seem scary at first, but the great thing about parkour is the community. You don’t have to do this alone. When I joined my first community training session, I found that the community is filled with encouraging, supportive and high energy people who inspired me to push past my psychological limits of being too old or out of shape. Being surrounded by this energy is what I truly love about parkour. I may never release a YouTube video of myself doing super-human movements. What I do get everytime I come out is a sense of personal growth and community. This feeling makes all the other obstacles in my life seem a little less overwhelming and solvable. This is what parkour can bring to anyone who simply shows up.

If any of my words have caused you to be curious about parkour, I highly encourage you to simply come out to a free weekly community session in your area and try it for yourself.

-Stephen Leung

Stephen is a long time community member and supporter of our programming. He's now gone around the world and met friends and trained with them through parkour. He's pushed into transformational work, he's joined Misogis and led an old-school session weekly in the early mornings at the East River Amphitheater (RIP). He wrote this blog several years ago, and joined a session last week - it's never too late and tomorrow you will wish you started yesterday.