Le Parkour

[mawali]

Le Parkour would make great cinematic choreography with fencing and savate!

[YouKnowWho]

It's important to develop skill such as to jump up, reach with your fingers, and pull yourself up.

[No_Know]

It has been indicated that Le Parkour~ can keep one safe/healthy, but so can eating right. However eating right has less proximity to a fighting type fisticuffs.

Unless it's a battlefield situation or jumped by a gang thing, Le Parkour as demonstrated would not be cnsiderable as a Martial Art ...Iwill reason how it might not be a Martial Art:

If one's skill and situation afforded that one feels one cannot win, and leaving would be best, then one runs. Using Five-Elements (Theory) or the environment (as it were) or over comming obstacles encountered, one makes-off. This one has a skill-set that the winning fighter would unlikely have. Person not only could not follow far but was winning and wouldn't feel a need to follow you far if at all--you're a loser not worth breathing hard over.

Besides that, the winner wouldn't try to chase you down; until it is used in the proximity Of the fight (not consistantly increasing the distance From the fight) it would not be a martial art.

Because of the importance of getting out when you find things are not working out in your favor-I can see it as a Support to a Martial art.

I say it's a Support to a martial art because:

-muchly it is not demonstrated as fight offensive directly.
-it's cardiovascular is supportive of Endurance (Wind)
-Perception and problem-solving in motion at speed supports Comprehension
-Motion, Weight, Speed, Timing, Lean~Understandings, go towards improved fighting ability.

When Le Parkour uses the curved fingers to strike, when grabs and body positions, momentum use leverage and are applied to throws, when grabs are applied to seize and controls--Chin-Na, when the upper body is grabbed and one lifts themselves while beginning to run-up the opponent's leg--forward force with downward pressure as rakes or toes-up kicks, when one does Manderin Duck Kicks to the opponent's gut, and when one displaces ones-self in the immediate environment/surroundings to attack from odd/unusual angles, and techniques for interacting with an opponent are grouped and repeatable by choice or situation recognition-then might Le Parkour be, to me, a Martial Art.

No_Know

[Sima Rong]

I would also agree that it contains acrobatic and athletic training which would be beneficial to martial arts or self defense training, but it is not a martial art in itself, since it isn't about resolving violent conflict. There's really no martial aspect to the Parkour I have seen.

[GeneChing]

Human-Powered Freerunning Machine - with Jason Paul

Some people gotz a lot of time on their hands...

[GeneChing]

Perhaps I just haven't tuned into Parkour deaths. So tragic.

Bridge Jumping Chinese Parkour Enthusiast’s Body Found
by Peter Barefoot on Monday, April 15, 2013



From Sina:
Body of Sichuan Parkour Enthusiast Who Went Missing After Jumping into River Found 8 Days Later

From Chengdu Commercial Daily (reported by Zhou Taiyang, Zhang Bingrao), April 6, Parkour enthusiast Wang Zijian went missing after jumping into the Tuojiang River from Tuojiang Bridge No.1 in Luhzou which is located at where the Yangtze River and Tuojiang River meet. Yesterday [April 14], on the 8th day of Wang Zijian’s disappearance, his body was found over 10 kilometers away downstream in the Yangtze River.

Yesterday [April 14] morning, over 10 kilometers on the Yangtze River downstream from where the incident occurred, on a sand dredger near the Guifei Garden of Luhzou Jiangyang District Huangyi Town, boatman Old Qiu was busy as usual. “Old Qiu, seems like something got caught by the buoy tender,” a nearby boatman from the Junfeng told Old Qiu. Then, Old Qiu asked the captain of the Qinglong No.9 to go check it with him on a skiff. When the skiff was near the buoy tender, they discovered that the steel cable of the buoy tender had hooked a dead body. The two of them called the police afterwards. The police dispatched a speedboat to salvage the body. According to a policeman at the scene, there were no evident bruises on the body, “however, because of the huge impact from the dive, his face was apparently twisted/warped.”

Because the characteristics of the dead body was similar to the height of the previously missing Wang Zijian, the police informed this situation to Wang Zijian’s family members. Yesterday [April 14] afternoon, at about 2:30pm, Wang Zijian’s mother, his uncle, and some other family members arrived at the Luzhou City morgue. The Wangs identified the deceased as indeed being Wang Zijian. Upon seeing him, mother Wang burst into tears: “Jian Jian, you can’t do this to your mother…” She passed out before she could finish. The other family members immediately rushed to bring her back to consciousness.

According to Wang Zijian’s uncle, because of his parents’ divorce, Wang Zijian has lived with his mother ever since he was small. “She suffers from depression, and before this, her son was her biggest concern. Now her boy is gone, and we don’t know if she can get through this.” It has been known that Wang Zijian’s body will be cremated today [April 15]. After Wang Zijian’s disappearance, other parkour enthusiasts in Luzhou had from time to time come to the riverside to mourn him. “Now that the child has been found, we’ll tell the other enthusiasts, so they can see Jian Jian one last time,” says Wang Zijian’s uncle.

Comments from Sina:

手机用户 [四川成都]:

These kids know only to do things they like, but forget to do things their parents like~which is to be healthy and alive!

guest [上海]:

Disregarding one’s safety is the worst way of being unfilial!

氷的眼淚 [上海]:

How could other people save him? By having another person jump down 40 meters? By the time people made their way to the riverside, he had been already been carried away [by the current]. This is a river, not some small brook in front of your home!

4371醉 [福建福州]:

So cool you died, right?! Next time, remember not to think with your ass.

[Note: 跑酷 pao ku is the Chinese word for "parkour" and literally means "running cool".]

手机用户 [广东深圳]:

Nowadays kids don’t know what responsibility is.

手机用户1793461937 [浙江杭州]:

This kid is so irresponsible to his mother. It wasn’t easy for his mother to raise him, yet just like this, he’s gone. “The grey haired burying the black haired”, it shouldn’t be like this!!!

手机用户 [北京]:

Although this is a case of suffering the consequences of one’s choices, I still want to say: Rest in peace.

手机用户 [山东潍坊]:

Parkour is a type of physical exercise, not for ignorantly showing off.

guest [新西兰]:

Now that you’re dead, there’s nothing “cool” left.

手机用户 [广东广州]:

You only live once, don’t treat life as a game.

Comments from Sina Weibo:

Simon__梁施文:

China needs this kind of fear-no-death spirit!

刚烈无双伏龙芝:

This Darwin Award winner… has been found.

Sir-Hunter:

Reading the comments, seems a lot of people are criticizing him. I want say: those who have different values have no right to speak! And people who are in pursuit of their dreams don’t ever need to be understood!!! Life itself is a bet, it may be colorful, it may be mediocre, it may be a worthy death, or it may be life-long gloom!!!

绿发魔女:

His bad judgement is a warning to other people. So everyone’s departing has something to do with his/her fate. He’s dead, and certain people are still taking pleasure in his misfortune. The real nao can are these people who show no respect to the dead. [弱][蜡烛][蜡烛][蜡烛][蜡烛]

冯小闹的祖国很傻很天真:

A SB’s behavior. Then there will be someone who’ll say: Live free and die proudly for your dreams.

还好没人叫这名:

Next time bring a condom, use it as a swim ring if necessary.

奋斗期的R:

Playing with one’s life and one’s life played out! Didn’t treat parkour as a sport/exercise, only wanted to attract eyeballs. God is above. Look at your mother’s torn heart, can you rest in peace?

Captain-Ares:

Wanted to play parkour in the water? Isn’t that too difficult?!

黄子洋VS滚滚子:

Overconfident. The price to pay is death. This young man is so really stupid.

老幼病残孕专座:

A worthy death, good, good. To die doing what one loves is better than most people dying slowly to their last breath on a hospital bed.

[mawali]

The last time I checked, the concepts of Le Parkour was part of a physical conditioning tool of using your environment instead of looking at it as a hindrance.
I also saw that Olivier Gruner had that type of conditioning when he was a naval marine. It could be part of Escape and Evasion training as well as part of a CQB training module.

[GeneChing]

Not to be mean, but I truly did laugh out loud at a few of these.

Parkour Fail Compilation

ouch.

[doug maverick]

no its not... is it an art..for sure..is it martial...not in the slightest.

[GeneChing]

This is just plain crazy.

December 14, 2015
Pau Riera
PARKOUR IN CHERNOBYL: THE ULTIMATE ADVENTURE OR A JOURNEY INTO MADNESS?
This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Spain and was translated into English by Andreu Navarro Lopez.

A death toll of more than 50 due to the initial explosion, followed by 10 days of fire that forced the evacuation of 350,000 residents. Almost one million people – colloquially known as liquidators – have helped to minimise the consequences of the accident. Nearly half of them have died as a result, while the survivors' lives have been shortened.

When Chernobyl's nuclear accident occurred in April 1986, it was said that the zone would be uninhabitable for the next 40,000 years. Although some are still living very close, unwilling to leave their homes, staying in the surrounding area is said to be tantamount to signing one's own death warrant.

But perhaps not.

Hit the Road, a parkour collective formed by four young freerunners living in Paris, travelled last summer to the actual centre of the nuclear power plant. "We wanted to see with our own eyes how nature had colonised the urban spaces that we only knew from what we had read or seen in photos", Clément Dumais, a member of the group, told VICE Sports at a pub in Paris.

Dumais co-founded the freerunning collective in 2012 along with Nico Mathieux and Paul RBD. Two years later another freerunner, Leo Urban, joined them. With the group now complete, their number one objective was quickly decided: climbing the Eiffel Tower.


A public swimming pool in Pripyat, the first city evacuated after the catastrophe. Photo via Hit the Road.

"Going to Chernobyl was totally worth it," says Leo "but we really didn't know what to expect and it left us speechless". Before steering towards the ghost town, the parkour collective visited Kiev to meet some of the traceurs – as those who practice parkour or freerunning are known – from the Ukrainian city.

During their time in the capital they searched abandoned bunkers. "That's where we found the suits and masks that we took to the prohibited zone," says Nico. He shows us one of the masks, which looks like a prop from a Hollywood movie. "They were all from the Cold War, in case there was a nuclear attack. We found them in closed boxes, totally new."

In Kiev they met with someone interested in urban exploring who had been to Chernobyl three or four times using GPS. "He knew the way and knew the police check points and, more importantly, how to avoid them," explains Paul. There are many military checkpoints around the nuclear power plant to prevent access to the prohibited zone. Those who break the law can go to prison without trial.



"We drove from Kiev to a place around 12 miles from the first checkpoint. Then we climbed through a hole in the mesh fence and started walking," says Leo. The first night they walked for 12 hours.

In the power plant, the work to isolate the perforated sarcophagus continues with high risks of radioactive exposure, hence the military patrols and the ban on civilians.

"To avoid some of the guards we had to cross through highly radioactive areas that seriously worried us," admits Clément. "Leo got a cut in his hand and when measuring the radioactivity with the Geiger counter we saw it was seriously high". Some of the vegetation they touched was 14 times more radioactive than the safe limit.


It is known as "The Dead Zone" because there isn't human life, but nature has taken over. Photo via Hit the Road.

The limit of daily radioactivity is 0.30mSv. The group reached up to 5.20 mSv in the woods, but only during very brief exposures. They slept in places where radioactivity wouldn't exceed the limit, but they still had to be very careful. "We were amazed about what we were seeing and looking forward to coming back home," said Leo.

In order to arrive in Pripyat, the ghost town three miles from Chernobyl that was evacuated 36 hours after the accident, Hit the Road had to cross through rivers, woods and follow railway tracks. "We were exhausted from all the walking so we did very little parkour. We mainly explored the town and its surroundings," says Nico, looking at his trainers. "These are the same I was wearing. They are good to do parkour but not so good to walk. Not that many miles, anyway."


Members of the group walked almost 100 miles through radioactive zones in only four days. Photo via Hit the Road.

"The hardest part was accepting that we were completely exposed to the radiation and still carry on walking," explains Leo. The others nod. Parkour is their life: a discipline that goes far beyond inner mental and physical limits. And that is exactly what they did in one of the most radioactive zones on the planet.

Travelling from Paris to Chernobyl, they also time travelled from the 21st century to the reality of a Soviet Bloc nation during the 1980s. It is an untouched zone: everything looks like when it was left by the families that would never come back. There are communist symbols everywhere.


Trees and plants taking over every corner of Pripyat. Photo via Hit the Road.

"We thought that after the work of the liquidators there wasn't much more left to do in Chernobyl. Nevertheless, we actually realised that without the Ukrainians studying and safeguarding the place the radioactivity would travel a lot further," said Paul.

"It feels like it was ages ago... but it has only been 30 years," says Clément before he leaves.

@21pauriera

[GeneChing]

In my day, we used to call these Jungle Gyms, not no fancy schmancy frenchy words.

Parkour Equipment Coming to Riverside Park South
By Emily Frost | February 23, 2016 6:39pm @efrost1




Riverside Park Parkour Equipment
This equipment facilitates parkour practice. Parkour was started in France and involves different techniques of moving between structures, usually urban architecture like benches, lamps, bike racks or buildings.
Photo credit: undefined

UPPER WEST SIDE — The city is installing special equipment for parkour enthusiasts in Riverside Park as a part of a multimillion-dollar redesign that will begin construction this summer.

The Parks Department is installing the obstacle course-style equipment between West 69th and 70th streets in the park, just south of the basketball courts and under the highway structure, agency officials said.

Parkour, which first emerged in France in the 1990s and has spread in popularity across the world, involves acrobatic vaulting, swinging, jumping, leaping and rolling between objects. Typically parkour practitioners use urban infrastructure, leaping from benches to bike racks and over fences, or even between building roofs.

But classes for acrobatic kids and exercise structures, like the ones the Parks Department plans to install, are aimed at finding safer ways to practice the sport.

The installation will include equipment, likely from the manufacturer Lappset, as well as a safety surface underneath, new paving around the area and new fencing, said a department spokeswoman.

The parkour space is "specifically geared towards teens," said Parks Department Landscape Architect Meredith Bracken. "We feel that they’re underserved,"

The idea is for participants to move between the pieces of equipment in "a connective loop," she noted.

"It takes quite a bit of dexterity and practice," Bracken said.

This part of the larger Gale Brewer-funded plan to upgrade Riverside Park South, which runs from West 72nd to 59th streets, should get under way this summer, Bracken added.

[boxerbilly]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[Cataphract]

[Jimbo]

IMO, Parkour is a great sport/art. It can potentially offer many things to a MAist.

HOWEVER, as an art form, it is limited to the peak years of an athlete, in the same way that gymnastics, 'Extreme Martial Arts' (XMA), competitive performance wushu, etc., are. Meaning that for most people, by their late 20s (sometimes much earlier), they will have passed their peak performance capabilities at it and will have started to degrade. If one is racked with injuries (which is almost inevitable), the decline will be much quicker. It is not the type of art form that an 'artist' can continue to develop and refine over his/her lifetime. I remember seeing a special on XMA where a young guy/former XMA champion who taught kids was saying that he's old and no longer able to do certain stunts and was "passing the torch to the next generation" like he's an old man or something. As I recall, this guy was only in his 20s. By the time he's in his late 30s, I suppose his students' students will be tasked with "passing the torch."

Not to mention that, like any sport, Parkour isn't suited for everyone. There has to be some natural talent for it. Gymnastics might offer similar benefits to MAists, but to be honest, most people lack the potential to become great or even good gymnasts, even if they started young. Everyone doesn't have the potential to someday play in the NBA or the NFL. Even MAs require a combination of natural talent for it, proper instruction and hard, consistent training over many years, which is why almost everyone has 'done a bit of MA' but relatively few in the population stick with it, much less develop any real expertise.

[GeneChing]

What a senseless loss. I wonder why we don't hear of more Parkour deaths.

Russian chess master Yuri Yeliseyev dies in Moscow fall
28 November 2016


RUCHESS.RU
Yuri Yeliseyev was admired in Russia as a grandmaster with original solutions to chess problems

Russian chess master Yuri Yeliseyev, 20, has died after apparently plunging from a balcony on the 12th floor of a Moscow apartment block.
A fellow chess grandmaster, Daniil Dubov, said Yeliseyev had been trying to reach another balcony but slipped.
Yeliseyev reportedly practised parkour, an urban challenge which involves climbing or leaping across roofs, fences or other man-made obstacles.
He became world junior chess champion in 2012 and was a grandmaster aged 17.
He won the Moscow Open 2016 chess tournament and ranked 42nd among Russian grandmasters. His world ranking was 212.


ROSSIYA 24 TV GRAB
Russian TV reports that he fell to his death from this balcony

Police quoted by Gazeta.ru news website said the marks on his body pointed to his having plunged from the 12th-floor balcony on Saturday night.
"Tonight my close friend died - an outstanding chess player and analyst, one of the most talented people I know, Yura Yeliseyev," wrote Daniil Dubov on Facebook.
"He was trying to climb from the window onto a balcony on the 12th floor but lost his grip."
The apartment block is on Moscow's Pyatnitskoye Avenue, in an area dominated by high-rise housing.
Does anybody still care about chess?

The origins of parkour


GETTY IMAGES

Takes its name from phrase "parcours du combattant", the military obstacle course training devised by French physical educationalist Georges Hebert (1875-1957)
Modern parkour was popularised by French actor and stuntman David Belle - his video "Speed Air Man" played a large part in popularising the sport
Practitioners of parkour are often known as traceurs

The Russian chess team's national coach, Sergei Yanovsky, said Yeliseyev "was a very talented chess player, a very bright lad, he was always very popular in the team".
"Yura always sought unusual methods in everything, he had a predilection for unorthodox solutions... This is a very heavy loss."
Mr Yanovsky said Yeliseyev "even as a young boy always wanted to show his daring and climb to places.
"But he didn't go to extremes - he kept within sensible bounds. For example, he'd climb to a height of two metres (6.6ft) and walk along the edge just to show that he had a head for heights."


RUCHESS.RU
Another Russian chess grandmaster - Mark Taimanov - died in St Petersburg on Monday aged 90. He was Soviet chess champion in 1956.

Taimanov vied with US chess genius Bobby Fischer in 1971, in a bid to become world champion, but lost all six games.
Taimanov was part of an award-winning Soviet team and earned international respect for his contributions to chess theory.