EPIC QUEST - I'm Calling This Move the HOLY GRAIL

[Ryan Sannar]

I'm really not happy about the idea of getting into an argument about this, but parkour is as much of an extreme sport as karate is. It depends on how its used. I am about to run/open my own parkour gym and what I do is not physically risky, neither is what I teach. Most of these people train years and years before they get to a level where they have a video out or any views.

My suggestion is to think of it this way. For some (maybe most) people squating 315 lbs is dangerous, but for a powerlifter who has trained for years it's nothing more than a warm up with little to no risk. Or martial arts tricker throwing a cheat gainer into a full split landing, super dangerous for the average person, but a full flexible trained athlete, no problem. The remarkable thing I've found from parkour is that when its practiced properly the average person can become an athlete (parkour is normally a hobby due to a lack of competition or defined rule structure, but the philosophy is to always become better, accept no limits. This attitude and set up allows anyone to become more.) very very much like this website.

Parkour is only dangerous if you don't train properly. Yes there are accidents, but high school football has at the very very least the same risk. You could hit by a car because you walk around outside. I feel that you fall only when you haven't trained hard/well enough and under the wrong circumstances.

Cato trains every day, his body is prepped to take this. Most of the people who do this professionally condition, train/have degrees in physical/bio studies. In example, though not a professional, Steven Low does parkour and is a moderator on the APK forums.

Now I don't know all their personal habits, but I know when I'm doing parkour or my friends do parkour we don't take drops that our bodies can't handle. We don't take jumps without testing, we spot each other, we stretch, condition and mentally run over everything we do. The only time we ever just toss ourselves into the air is into the foam pit in a gym.

It just really gets on my nerves when someone asks me if I jump off buildings or why I would risk doing something so dangerous. Its like the responses I get from the paleo diet.

I also had to say this because I really want everyone to understand that parkour is possible for everyone.

Sorry had to let that out.

[ETFnerd]

well obviously you are personally invested in this so i think that you have trouble being objective... cato shows his hand bleeding from a huge gash in his hand and a black eye...

injuries happen in every sport, in karate where i compete, it is understood that competing at a high level will mean competing with injuries all the time... all training does is create a higher threshold for competing and being effective in spite of pain and injury...

if you look at football or basketball players or boxers, it would be ridiculous to say that trained athletes don't get injured as a matter of course as you seem to imply with parkour... and injuries aren't accidents... it is because you are engaged in an inherently dangerous activity...

Parkour is only dangerous if you don't train properly. Yes there are accidents, but high school football has at the very very least the same risk. You could hit by a car because you walk around outside. I feel that you fall only when you haven't trained hard/well enough and under the wrong circumstances.

really? a knee injury or concussion is not an accident in football... it is the result of the the game and is expected... did payton manning or any other quarterback get concussions because they didn't train hard enough... nope...

and if you are a professional, you compete when you shouldn't because you have no other means of income and end up doing real harm to yourself... the examples abound in any fighting sport...

in the end, i expect that you'll believe what you believe and i'll do the same...

[azsf]

@ETF i think what ryan means is that once you have that level of skill, it's not hard to line up sponsors / competitions / films etc to keep the dollars coming in. it's hard to break into, because you have to be spectacular to reach that level. but once you're there, there's no shortage of money.

good bails video though! it even has one of david belle (2:03) xD but again it's the conditioning that comes into play. people fall all the time in parkour, but they train so they can survive those falls (that's basically the whole idea behind rolling). if you dedicated the next 5 years of your life to training at a professional level then you could be doing this too.

edit! didn't see the second page :/ im not sure you can compare parkour to competition sport like football, because the other players are elements beyond your control. you can't prevent someone from tackling too high or ramming your head into the ground through training. in parkour on the other hand, you train and train and train to build up to moves. you learn to fall, then to roll, then to precision, then to vault, etc and you drill them into the ground over and over before you start putting them into a sequence. and then you drill that sequence over and over before you take it to a larger obstacle. david belle, hitting that wall on a bad catpass, after decades of training, is about the same as me banging my knee on a bad vault.

and of course the other side of this argument, is that professional football requires a lot of skill and dedication as well, but no one goes "oh man i wish i could learn to play like that", they just go out there and join a football team. that's the crux here; parkour is no harder to learn (or more dangerous) than other sports. just put in the time to train.

[ETFnerd]

bro, if you want to believe that parkour/freerunning at the professional level is perfectly safe as long as you train hard... that's your choice... you're entitled to your opinion... i don't share that opinion...

if you want to believe that i could train for 5 years and could do parkour/freerunning at the professional level as long as one is training hard... that may or may not happen, but it hardly seems like it's a safe, steady or easy (or not as hard as i think) way to make a living...

it's cool... the world revolves because we all think different thoughts...

[azsf]

its not a question of whether it's safe or not, it's about whether you're prepared for it. to use the football analogy again, do you think its just as dangerous for a professional starting linebacker to step out on the field as it is for someone who's never played before? the guy who's trained hard for it, and conditioned his body, has a much lower chance of injury. this is what we're talking about.

this video is a good example of the basic way parkour trains the body to avoid injury: rolling. this guy is a professional, extremely well conditioned, and he basically hits the ground with the same force as someone walking down a set of stairs.

[Ryan Sannar]

well obviously you are personally invested in this so i think that you have trouble being objective... cato shows his hand bleeding from a huge gash in his hand and a black eye...

injuries happen in every sport, ...........................

Sorry you are right I did get a little emotional about that I'm trying to take a step back here and restate what I was going for.

Yes it is dangerous, but proper training manages and mitigates risk.

Training at a higher level does involve a higher level of risk, but once again training properly helps to manage that risk.

If done properly parkour is one of the safest activities I've ever participated in.

Injuries can occur, but it is far, far more common for them to be small, like a black eye or the ripped callous (happens all the time on the bars because I don't grind them down after my showers often enough).

Not everyone does this right, but the true philosophy of parkour is Etre et Durer (To Be and To Last), that why though I can and have before. I don’t take big drops without years and years of training up to them and when I do its normally for a commercial or photo shoot. Even then I do all I can to remove risks.

I believe that parkour (when practiced properly) is not an inherently dangerous activity and has less than or equal to the risks associated with another healthy activity. IE: soccer, weightlifting, running, climbing, power napping (okay probably safer, but who knows), etc…

All in all I just get really mad when people take parkour and make it this stupid daredevil stunt. Why would I do that, I want to be doing parkour in my 60’s and 80’s (David Belle is hitting his 50s soon and still does stuff I’m not capable of yet). I don’t want to die and I’d like to think that I’m a relatively smart person. Why would I risk it if I didn’t feel confident I could removed, reduce or deal easily with that risk?

Parkour is safe. Walking is safe. Lifting is safe.

But if you do any of these things wrong you could easily die.

This kinda sums up my thoughts.

Sorry ‘bout getting emotional. It really does mean so much to me and has changed so many lives (Daniel Illabaca, Mike Turner, some of my friends stopped doing drugs because of it). So its hard not to get passionate. But that’s true of any activity.

So in summary. Yes there is risk, but if you train properly it can be managed (though not entirely avoided) and the best way to do that is to progress slowly.

I still bang my shins on the bar, but I do go back out the next day.

@aszf Doyle is awesome, did you know he did that a year after his leg split in half (his shin is basically a metal rod). Awesome that he can get back up and go film with Nat Geo.

[ETFnerd]

no need to apologize bro... we all are passionate about what we like... it's part of our make-up... it was interesting to hear your take on things and refreshing to see your passion for the sport... who cares what i think anyway? you be you... and be awesome at it...

[azsf]

his shin is basically a metal rod

haha so thats why he can land so softly, he's a robot! xD

[Zorch]

bro, if you want to believe that parkour/freerunning at the professional level is perfectly safe as long as you train hard... that's your choice... you're entitled to your opinion... i don't share that opinion...

if you want to believe that i could train for 5 years and could do parkour/freerunning at the professional level as long as one is training hard... that may or may not happen, but it hardly seems like it's a safe, steady or easy (or not as hard as i think) way to make a living...

it's cool... the world revolves because we all think different thoughts...

A good analogy might be skiing - to become an excellent skiier takes a lot of time and practice. What Olympic skiiers do can be quite dangerous, but it's because they're competing at the absolute edge of their abilities, trying to squeeze every last fraction of a second out of a run. To an elite skiier, going down a typical "hard" black diamond ski slope at a relatively high rate of speed would be trivial, because they're not pushing the edge of their abilities. A mistake could still result in serious injury, but they're so far within their abilities that the risk of this is minimal, barring equipment failure.

On the other hand, someone like myself - who knows how to ski, but isn't spectacular, can tackle moderate slopes at pretty decent speeds without issue, but doing the equivalent of something that would be fairly trivial for an Olympic-level skiier would be high-risk for me. And then on the far end you have the total beginners, who will take things slow, because they WILL fall, and when it happens they want it to be at a speed where they won't injure themselves - even skiing at an "intermediate" level such as I do would be risky for them.

Parkour is very much the same way. If one stays within one's abilities, the risk of significant injury is small - those injuries could be catastrophic for people attempting some of the more incredible stunts, but these are things they've trained for. It's when someone pushes the edges of their abilities that mistakes most commonly happen, and injuries are likely to result - hence why you see the training scenes from the gym, where these athletes practice certain maneuvers until they're sufficiently comfortable with them to try them outside the gym, in the world. And very much the same way, beginners can(and do) stick to much tamer envrionments, because they know that they WILL fall on occasion, and a gentler, learning environment makes it such that when they do make a mistake, the consequences are not significant.

It's about a gradual, controlled progression of the challenge level, much like skiing or similar sports - at high levels the potential consequences of a mistake can be severe, but the idea is that almost all of the time you will be working within your abilities, and as such the probability of a catastropic error is kept to a minimum.

[ETFnerd]

for me there's always the chance that a tail event could hit you out of nowhere... you can perform a skill that you've done a hundred or a thousand times before and break your neck performing it one morning. say you're jumping from one elevated bar to another. not a difficult skill, but say one morning, conditions are such that there's a fine layer of mist or dew on the bar that makes the footing much less sure... you slip and land awkwardly on your neck... this is completely disassociated with skill level... it is just an idiosynchratic probability event... but if you do inherently dangerous maneuvers hudreds of times a day and hundreds of thousands of times over a period of months... the small probability of a tail event becomes larger as your sample size N increases....

this is just a statistical reality that stems from participating in dangerous activities with high frequency and has nothing to do with being within or without your ability level. that is one of the reasons why pro athletes and olympians are injured all the time from training volume.

like you correctly point out, no serious athlete trains within their abilities because they have to see improvement... that only happens when you push at or beyond your abilities on a consistent basis... that is the nature of competition, and if you aren't comfortable pushing the boundary all the time... you'll never be competitive or thus a pro or world class athlete...

[Ryan Sannar]

Granted. But we always check out landings before, even if we've been there a million times. Though I do see your point. I think that accepting that risk is worth doing in exchange for the benefits and open mind that comes from training parkour.

[ETFnerd]

word... agree completely... life is about taking risk to reap the rewards of life... if you love it, you should pursue your passions...

[Morrigainz]

This just broke my brain

This.

[ETFnerd]

this one look pretty hard too...

now this is the real way to do the human flag... if you're using your hands... you're doing it wrong... hahaha...

[Billz]

inspired