Is Parkour Safe?
We get asked a lot -
Is parkour dangerous? Or it’s insidious cousin of a question - isn’t parkour dangerous?
Knives and fire are dangerous, but we don’t let that dissuade most of us from learning our way around a kitchen equipped with both. Movement is no less an essential part of life, though modernity does its best to convince us we can do without it.
The children in our lives, and maybe the children inside of us, are a little less convinced. Movement continues to be a fantastic and accessible way to process thoughts and feelings, and it aids us in our exploration of the world.
If we dig a little deeper though maybe we can answer this question. The real question might be “How dangerous is parkour?” Or… “How much more dangerous is parkour than other sports?” The answer across our programs might surprise you.
In parkour we manage risk in our practice - we make the decisions that we believe will keep us training healthy and longer. Despite how it can look from the outside, it is very rarely an impulsive endeavor.
Something wonderful about our practice is that we get to choose our own challenges. This can almost go without being noticed, but it’s incredibly important to point out that we choose the variables that are present. There are no other players against us, and there are no wheels or motors. We choose the conditions, the challenges, the movements, the time, and the place.
So how much more dangerous is parkour? According to our records of 5922 hours of practice during Parkour Adventure last spring - we have an average injury rate of .509 per 1000 hours of practice. This falls well below the average of 2.64 per 1000 hours* (they are measuring an injury as any time someone in an organized practice or event had to be seen by a healthcare professional). If you include every time we’ve taken out our first aid kit, it brings us up to 1.519 - below paddle tennis (4.36), soccer (7.21), volleyball (2.64), and judo (4.82).
We manage the risk of the students, of the company, and of ourselves. We navigate social and physical risk. Our whole team travels and trains for parkour and other sports. The point of risk management is not to simply say yes or no and ignore the potential consequence - it’s to be informed and to make decisions that we think will improve ourselves and our experience.
A number may not change your impression of parkour at large, but I hope that it adds some color to the impression of the way we coach and practice. Movement is a tool we use to explore our worlds, much the same as knives are an essential tool for cooking. (Though knives are a bit more dangerous!**) Learning how to move well, increasing strength, and maintaining healthy joints is far less dangerous than not doing all those things. Parkour is the quickest, best, and most fun way of improving and maintaining one’s movement practice and physicality when practiced consistently over time.
When I wonder why parkour is safer with us we can boil it down to mental, physical, and social points:
We have physical progressions for every skill so you can find your limits gently inside of the systems.
Your decision-making and risk management are held as more important than your physical performance.
We ask students to adopt a social attitude that promotes acceptance, safety, and effort.
If you want to learn how to move a little safer - sign up for a class today!
Cited Sources:
*Epidemiology of Sports-Related Injuries and Associated Risk Factors in Adolescent Athletes: An Injury Surveillance
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8125505/#:~:text=and%207.75%25%20Judokas.-,The%20average%20injury%20rate%20was%202.64%20per%201000%20h.,5.11%25%20higher%20in%20professional%20athletes.
**Knife-related injuries treated in United States emergency departments, 1990-2008
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23849364/
Looking for a little more information on injuries in training? Look at this graphic from a study from our friends "Perttu "Spider" Pihlaja, Ben Waller and Tuija Tammelin. Download here.