Parkour is an Open Source Project

     I've always held a more broad definition of parkour due to my early influences watching the old yamakasi documentary. Throughout my journey I've generally kept up with their philosophy from what I've seen of it through the lens of the internet. People have different ideas about training parkour and it is often thought of as something that is practiced in the urban environment. I think that is just one aspect of the discipline that has been more popular due to parkour culture. I don't think there is consensus about what and how we should train and still capture it under the label of parkour but I think that's a good thing. It seems to me that parkour is more about a mindset that all of it's practitioners share which prevails regardless of location or overlapping practice with other disciplines like gymnastics. Those principles would include:

•  The spirit of exploration
• Adaptability 
• Reliance on the body with minimal dependence on gear 
• Progression
• Creativity
• Play

So the history of parkour as it developed in france appears to have these qualities but applied to an urban environment. Through the internet, the gist of this practice has spread, grown, and changed into a variety of different iterations of the core discipline. There are basic movements that every practitioner should learn like shoulder rolls and vaults but it branches out from there depending on what a person wants to explore. This makes parkour a kind of open source project where people add their own things to the core movements. I feel like, as this project moves forward, we will see many different styles just as in martial arts. Also there will be more effective forms of training/moving for getting over obstacles that prevail in one style and fail in another. It's the same reason that no one ever pulls a flashkick in the ufc.

    Another aspect of the open source concept applied to parkour is the "free" part of it. People should be able to take this discipline and its principles and tailor it to their own needs without being blocked by our economic system. Parkour is such a basic thing that can be learned in such a progressive way that anybody can learn it on their own. This requires patience, caution, and problem solving abilities but with the internet as a resource it really doesn't require a coach. I myself have spent the last 8 years discovering parkour without any "official" people or organizations guiding me. I asked the internet, went outside to explore, and found the discipline myself in a gradual organic way. Doing it this way can really make the discipline "yours" in a lot of ways because it becomes a journey of self discovery rather than simply listening to other people telling you what to do.

    All that said, I still get paid to teach parkour because some people need personal guidance on their journey and they're not the kind of people to go outside and figure it out themselves mostly because they don't have the time or desire to devote a lot of time to a parkour lifestyle. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just another way of doing parkour. I'll post more about what I found to be the "core" practices/movements of parkour versus the variety of extensions and add ons that people create.