Parkour is a sport that takes something out of everyday life and turns it into a challenge.
“Once you start to do Parkour you can never stop. It´s not just movement, it´s a mindset." ~a training colleague
What he meant is that Parkour gets you to think differently about your surroundings. At all times and with every ordinary bench, wall, fence, playground, etc. you start to see opportunity, a challenge, something new to learn and to experience.
A normal person usually sees a wall, walks around it and is none the wiser. If you do Parkour you see hundreds of possibilities to use that wall for your training.
So once you start doing Parkour, there is no real way back. You will always view the world out of multiple perspectives. Your mind opens up to see obstacles, problems or difficulties as opportunities to grow and learn.
Obviously all that mindset thing is on one hand and on the other hand you have lots of physical learning and training that strengthens the body and stuff like that.
Because the body is getting stronger and over time you are able to do more and more amazing things, you are getting confronted with fears and start realizing that for some things the physical ability is just not enough.
A jump over a ledge might be easy for the legs to perform, but sometimes the mind is just to afraid to do it.
At that point the real challenge of Parkour arises.
The hardest part during training is to get the mind and the physical possibilities on the same page. Building a bridge between what you could do and what your mind lets you do.
“The body is only as strong as the mind” ~ me
I have been doing Parkour for about 10 years and the feeling you get, once you convinced your mind that you can actually do something is unbelievable every time. Often during a training session you find something you really want to do, but somehow can´t get yourself to do.
You start working on it, step by step, over and over again.
And if you are patient enough, it finally clicks and suddenly you are standing on that ledge that seemed impossible to reach just moments ago.
Sometimes it takes days, weeks, months or years to finally reach that moment, sometimes it only takes a few minutes. But it does not matter how long it takes, it always feels amazing.
In my opinion there is no other sport like Parkour. You can learn so much just from jumping around like a crazy person:
- Perseverance
- Patience
- Creativity
- Respect
- Confidence
- Trust (in yourself and others)
Positive physical effects of Parkour:
- Strength
- Endurance
- just generally all the good things sport does for the body (if you do it correctly)
Personally I gained much more than just physical and cognitive skills, i gained a community and lots of really good an amazing friends.
What I want to say in a nutshell:
I like Parkour, more people should do it. Parkour is nice!
You want to start parkour and are in Vienna? Find us here:
https://parkour.wien
or on Instagram: @parkour.wien
If you want to see some videos of me doing Parkour, just click the link:
https://www.youtube.com/@smini_suess