To me mental health is about regulation — the ability to stay present, grounded, understanding, and resilient when life throws challenges at you regardless of whether they’re big or small. At its core, parkour is the same; you’re adapting to challenges, working with different environments, assessing, understanding, and overcoming the challenges you face within your training. This piece explores the importance of community in parkour, and how it can have a positive impact on your mental wellbeing.
Like most people, I didn’t come into parkour looking for therapy. Like most people I started because it looked cool, and it was something I wanted to explore. I’ve stuck with it because, to me, it has given me so many positive benefits.
Before we get started, I just want to start by saying I am not a trained mental health professional or doctor. What I describe, explain, and talk about in this piece comes from my own lived experiences. Everyone is different, and I encourage you to see help and guidance from a medical professional or therapist if you’re struggling with your mental health.
For those who don’t know, those who practice parkour refer to them as “members of the parkour community”. This isn’t an exclusive club, or anything you pay for. By starting parkour, you get this badge of honour to be part of the parkour community.
We’re quite particular on this term. I believe it comes from the huge emphasis on connecting with one another, shared learning, and most importantly, mutual support. Unlike traditional sports that are often hierarchical or institutionally led, parkour grew organically. Most of this growth has come from community produced content, teaching & learning from others, training together, and sharing tips and experiences.
The community is a huge aspect of parkour, and for me it’s one of the strongest elements of it.
As a teenager who was very disinterested in traditional sports, I found it difficult to fit in, especially at school. I attended an all-boys secondary school where PE and activity was a HUGE focus. Because of my athletic inability, I was very quickly sidelined in PE lessons and found it challenging to join in with the lunchtime football games for not being a sporty person. This all changed when I started parkour in 2012. I’ll try and keep my “parkour origin story” brief, but I watched a video online called “Storm Freerun Volume One” – This video changed my life, and it inspired me to go down to my local park and start hopping over the fences.
I very quickly became obsessed, and I wanted to progress and get better. I knew the best way to do that was to learn from other people who had been doing the sport longer than I had. There was a pre-existing community in my hometown. I know I wanted to get better at parkour, and I knew the best way to do this would be to learn from others who have been doing it for longer than I have. This was before parkour coaching organisations were as established as they are now, so there were no options close to me to attend a parkour class to learn.
I reached out to the local group called “Parkour Sundays” – I saw some of their videos online, and it looked like they trained in my local town centre quite frequently. They seemed like a very close group of friends, and I wanted to see if they were open to a newbie coming along to their training sessions.
Of course, this came with anxiety and worry. It was a group of pre-established friends together. Would they want to take some kid under their wing and show him the ropes? Would I get rejected like I did in the PE lessons?
“We usually meet on a Saturday at 11am. We’re always wanting more people to join us. Meet us at Subway at 11am!”
That day has had a lasting impact on me. These guys were all older and far more experienced, but they took the time out of their training session to help and support me to become better at parkour. As human beings we want to be in a pack. We don’t want to be on our own, or to be rejected, or to be sidelined. So, the fact that this group, without question, took me under their wing to support and help me learn parkour was lifechanging. It gave me determination, it gave me friendship, and it gave me community.
I’ve always struggled with my mental health, however any worries that I do have usually get squashed quick when I am around individuals who share the same passion and interests as me.
We were all different people — outside of parkour we all had different interests. Some of us liked football, some of us liked hip-hop, some of us like heavy metal, etc. But when we trained together, that didn’t matter — because we all had this shared connection of parkour. We all wanted to progress together and the best way to do that was to learn from each other.
As someone who didn’t fit in at school, I now had found this group of friends that made me felt like I belonged to something bigger. This wasn’t just on the in-person weekend sessions, this was also a worldwide thing. Connecting with different individuals over the internet and through YouTube and social media because of our shared interest. A lot of the friends I have now I have only met once or twice, or I haven’t even met them yet at all. All you need to do to get a picture of this is look through the comments of a parkour practitioners Instagram post to see a wealth of support and hype.
The community in parkour is not something to be estimated – It has saved my life, and It’s one of the strongest parts of this sport. I went from being sidelined in the school PE lessons or not fitting in with the typical crowd at my school, to finding a solid group of friends that I am still in touch with and connecting with to this day. Parkour helped me find a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, an understanding of friendship, and the importance of community.
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