Last week Dan spent some time with American best-selling suspense novelist Jeff Abbott, who came over to London to research parkour for his new book. Jeff is keen to portray the discipline accurately and convincingly, including the history and concepts involved, as it will be a skill utilised by the protagonist of the story. Jeff's work is really very good and worth reading, and we are sure he will do the art justice in introducing parkour to his very successful line of novels.

Sunday saw June's free London jam taking place, known as 'Off the Wall, and we had a stunning day for it - great weather, great location, great people... big thanks to everyone who came down to practice and share ideas, and especially to Grant for taking care of the now-traditional warm-up! See you all at the end of July for the next one... Anyone wanting further info about the jams can email us on Brian(at)parkourgenerations.com

A big thank you to all those people who sent in designs for the Charlie Keeper Design competition we hosted on the Forum. The competition is now closed and a winner has been chosen. The lucky winner's design will be printed up later this year on the Rendezvous 4 T-Shirts for everyone to wear at the event. The winner will also be given a signed first edition of the new Charlie Keeper Book as well as some Canvas Prints.

We will be shooting a stills campaign for communications giant T-Mobile in London this summer. The campaign will reach across Europe and the USA, and will feature Team Members Dom and James in action. Having now done projects for Nokia, Samsung, 3, etc as well it is clear that the communications industry have a bit of penchant for parkour..! We don't expect this to be the last campaign of its kind either.

On Wednesday this week, July 1st, Dan will be on BBC Radio 4 for the Midweek show, discussing the new book, the development of the discipline in the UK and all other matters parkour-related. The show airs live from 9am on Wednesday, and you can either tune in on the radio or listen live on their website at the link above.

The Morzine Intensive Training Camp has just drawn to an end, and what a great success it was. Blane and Forrest would like to thank everyone who attended for making the week so spirited and enjoyable: everybody worked hard but also managed to have great fun and keep smiling throughout. Great team spirit! We would also would like to thank Serge and Chalet Philbert for providing such first class accommodation for the second year running. Photo galleries and video edits of the event will follow in due course, and well done to all who made the trip from all over the world.

This year's Intensive Training Camp in Morzine, France, is now under full swing and going exceptionally well. With participants from Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Ecuador, USA, UK, France and Spain, it is a truly international event and we have been impressed at how quickly everyone took to the training and forged a real team spirit amongst themselves. The weather has been beautiful and the managers of the Chalet Philbert resort have looked after everyone incredibly well. After four days of non-stop training, today is the rest day before the real challenge is presented tomorrow...

On Wednesday this week Live Magazine, the 'voice of youth' in the UK, came down to the Outdoor Class to cover the training for a two-page review in their July issue. Well done to Samara and Crystal for jumping in with both feet and giving the class a try, and we look forward to the piece next month. For more on Live Magazine or to book a place on our regular outdoor classes, click the links above.

Monday 29th June sees us begin a series of workshops at St George's School in the Westminster Borough of London. Two 2-hour sessions on Monday, Thursday and Friday gets the course going and will give a good portion of the student population a taste of parkour training. With such a huge demand now from the school sector for regular parkour classes the next academic year is going to be a busy one for us.

This Sunday our free monthly London Jam, 'Off The wall', will meet at Poplar Station on the DLR at 12.45pm. The famous end-of-month gatherings are a means to get together, exchange ideas and training tips with all levels of practitioner from absolute beginner to battle-hardened veterans. We will move on to the training areas there soon after the meeting time, so anyone wishing to jump in should aim to be there on time and ready to move. For more information on the jams contact Brian on brian(at)parkourgenerations.com. Come along!

Ongoing at the moment is the Mayor's Story of London Festival, a month long celebration of London’s past, present and future. This pan-London jamboree showcases the city’s huge and glorious heritage, highlights many unique facets of its present day cultural offer and takes a sometimes fun, sometimes serious look at its future.

Next week we will be running two days of demonstrations and workshops for the finals weekend of the London Youth Games at Crystal Palace on the 4th and 5th of July. The London Youth Games are a unique season of events at the heart of youth sport in the Capital, involving all 33 London Boroughs and 26 National Governing Bodies. The Games are free and open to all young people, aged between 7 and 17, living in or going to school in the Capital.

The next two issues of extreme sports magazine, Spiked, will be running features on parkour and the work we get up to here at Parkour Generations. Spiked magazine covers all and any extreme sport, from skateboarding to kite surfing, mountain biking to base jumping, climbing to MMA, and now parkour! The ethos of the magazine is to provide stories about professionals down to the amateur participant or spectator, with a clear message that highlights the fact that extreme sports are open to anyone, at any age, at any level.

Tomorrow, Monday 22nd June, we will be running yet another in the ongoing series of workshops for Pupil Referral Unit young people in Westminster. These sessions are a great way to engage young people who have perhaps become disaffected and disillusioned with more conventional forms of physical activity, and have proved to be a great success throughout many London boroughs. We find the young people in the PRU scheme to have bags of talent and energy, and often simply in need of a suitable challenge - which parkour always provides ;)

Coming up this week, Tuesday June 23rd and Wednesday 24th, we will be running two days of workshops at Haberdasher's Aske's Knights Academy for young performance arts students. The project is to enable the students to then add parkour elements into an upcoming live performance. Projects like this are always inspirational and highly creative, we find, and it's great to see renowned schools such as Haberdasher's picking up on the versatility and visual appeal of the art.

The long-awaited Intensive Training Camp situated in the French Alps, in the beautiful resort town of Morzine, kicks off on Monday with Blane, Forrest and Agota all flying out this weekend to prepare the ground. The camp is at full capacity and booking is now closed, but next year we are intending to again increase the amount of places we can accept. One week of hard training awaits those lucky enough to have got on this year's, as well as a few fun ativities and events to help them relax between Forrest's fearsome runs..!

The famous 'Off the Wall' free monthly jams in London have now just had their year anniversary, and are going from strength to strength. A means to get together, exchange ideas and training tips with all levels of practitioner from absolute beginner to battle-hardened veteran, these gatherings run on the last Sunday of every month and are open to all. The next Off the Wall jam is Sunday 28th June, and will be held in East London. It will run all day, beginning with a thorough warm-up run by some of the Parkour Generations Team, and will consist of fun, frolics and a whole lot of movement...

Today Dan was interviewed live by Rosemary Laryea on Colourful Radio, the piece airing between 12.35 and 1.00pm. Colourful is a vibrant London radio station that focusses on life in the multi-cultural and diverse society that is the UK's capital. Click the link above to visit the radio station's website and to listen to the interview which will be presented there as a blog in due course.

As part of Islington's Proactive Festival this coming Saturday, we will be testing people's Comfort Zone with a range of activities exploring how we feel moving through the urban environment. The Comfort Zone Project is a creative investigation in conjunction with arts group All Change into the science of fear and our response to the urban environment. Through the practice of parkour, performance and film, a team of artists, scientists and young people in Islington are exploring our fight or flight instinct.

Several of the team have just returned from a few days training in Lisses, France, one of the birthplaces of parkour and home to the iconic 'Dame du Lac' climbing monolith. Dom, Blane, James, Alli and Brian all made the trip and captured some great footage and photos of the action as they tore the old place up... and we'll have some of that up on the site in due course so check back soon.

This year in conjunction with renowned architecture charity Open House, and as part of ‘The Lives of Buildings’ city-wide event in association with English Heritage, we will be putting on a public demonstration and workshops at Trinity Buoy Wharf on Saturday June 27th.

As always the workshops and courses we offer are in high demand, and this is only heating up as the spring and summer set in. This week, on top of the regular schools, we will be holding workshop and demonstration events around the capital for a number of different projects. This Sunday sees us at The Lee Valley Sports Centre in Westminster from 11am to 5pm in conjunction with the Sporting Futures, 'See it, Try it, Love it' event open and completely free to the public and for all ages and abilities.

Tomorrow sees us begin an exciting new project with Erect Architecture to help construct a new peer-conceived adventure playground in Kilburn Grange Park, Camden. We will be running a series of workshops in the development space to introduce the local young people and the designers to the possibilities of use for the area. The project draws on the local community to create their own bespoke space for play and movement, and begins with workshop days this week on Tuesday and Thursday and a further one on Wednesday 24th June.

Last week Forrest returned to teaching at the ever-popular Outdoor Classes after a long sabbatical due to a freak ligament injury to his knee. It seems that the time out has only fuelled the fire, as the booming voice and infectious smile proved. Well, that and the unforgettable intensity inflicted upon the class..! Anyone wanting to book onto one of these classes should do so well in advance by clicking here.

Our good friends the Yamakasi founders at Majestic Force in France have just launched their own YouTube channel, where over the coming months they will be posting a host of video edits, docs and short films for all to enjoy. Chau, Yann, Laurent, Williams and Guylain were 5 of the original Yamakasi who first began the movement around twenty years ago. Took them a little while to get round to YouTube but then they are busy guys.. ;) Check out their channel here.

If you live in the UK make sure to pick up a copy of The Times newspaper tomorrow, Saturday 13th, for the feature on parkour and our ongoing work. Should be a good one ;)

We are currently collaborating with MTV's The Lick to give away a week of free classes and some private tuition as part of their bumper prize giveaway - all details of how to enter can be found on their site here, and it's well worth having a crack. Good luck!

This Sunday 14th June we are holding our monthly Womens Jam at Kilburn Park. With the success of the new weekly womens beginner classes we are expecting a great turn out on the weekend. The Jam is open to any level of female practitioner, so if you are interested in coming along then please drop Tracey an email at tracey(at)parkourgenerations.com.

You can also find more information about all the womens classes HERE.

For the next two days we will be running comprehensive parkour workshops for Flixton Girls School in Trafford, with the sessions being led by both male and female instructors from our team. Consisting of both indoors and outdoors training the girls are sure to be put through their paces, and we know it will be a thoroughly enjoyable experience for all. Great to see the continued growth in interest in the discipline among women. For more details on the school, click the link above.

Today we ran a hugely successful introductory session in Lambeth at the PLT conference there for around 60 PE teachers interested in qualifying to be able to deliver basic parkour principles within their PE classes in secondary schools. The last couple of years has seen a lot of effort gone into laying the groundwork for parkour to be delivered in schools around the country as part of the national curriculum, expanding on the schools work we have been doing since 2005, and it is now beginning to unfold at last.

The Positive Futures event at the heart of London in Leicester Square went very well yesterday, with some of the team providing demonstrations for most of the morning. We are always very happy to see this kind of event being given due attention and support from official bodies, as Positive Futures does such great work for 'at risk' young people in disadvantaged areas. Long may it continue.

Traceuse and Parkour Generations team member Agota has now confirmed that she will be attending the upcoming Morzine event from June 21st to the 28th. Agota will be training alongside both Forrest and Blane at the camp and therefore we encourage any ladies who are interested in coming to book their places as soon as possible by visiting the Morzine page HERE.

Dan has been invited to speak about parkour and the benefits it can bring people at the 6th world conference on sport and society held by sports political organisation Play the Game this week. The Play the Game conference offers a unique forum for dialogue on sport.

Last week Metro reporter Lisa Scott joined Parkour Generations for one of our outdoor classes at Vauxhall. This was in conjunction with the new book release by Dan (Parkour & Freerunning Handbook) and highlights both the handbook and her experiences that evening.

This year the Dance Umbrella group is looking for 24 performers with strong partnering and performance skills to perform in bodies in urban spaces, a free outdoor event, in which performers take to the streets and create a series of “body sculptures”, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places. Austrian choreographer Willi Dorner has created this piece in cities around the world, to great acclaim. This will be a unique event in London and an exciting opportunity to test your skills in new ways.

We can now confirm that our popular training concepts video series, Behind The Jump, will be released on DVD when the 10th episode is finished. The DVD will feature extended cuts of each episode along with a whole load of extra footage and insights into the practice of parkour. Sponsored by Canon, Behind The Jump is set to go on and on with new edits featuring more and more veteran traceurs giving tips and advice on how to focus your own training. To see the existing BTJ videos, see our videos page here.

Last week most of the team hit a great new location in London for a shoot with our very own photographic genius, Kiell. Always turning out superb images, Kiell was the first parkour photographer on the scene and his images can now be found in print all over the world, not least in both parkour books published this year. We'll have a gallery of these new shots up on the site soon.

We have been fortunate to do a couple of photoshoots in the past with renowned sports photographer Adrian Myers, which have turned out some incredible results, and today Stephane and Forrest went on a new location recce with Adrian to scout out ground for another shoot. As part of the build-up to the summer's eagerly awaited Rendezvous gathering we are thinking of basing this shoot at the iconic Southbank Centre, and we can't wait to get out there and generate some amazing new images. Well worth checking out Adrian's work at his website here.

Today Team Members Chris and Dom were out shooting a video piece for the online face of FHM Magazine, details of which will appear here as soon as the edit goes live.

The Parkour & Freerunning handbook, written by our very own Dan Edwardes, has been published and is on sale in the UK from today. It will be available worldwide in a few weeks but UK residents can get their hands on the highly anticipated book by visiting the Random House Publisher website HERE to purchase their very own copy.

Regular readers of the forum would have noticed a new competition that we have set up to win a free signed copy of the new novel 'Who Is Charlie Keeper?' by Marcus Alexander as well as your own T-Shirt design printed up for our next Rendezvous 4 event. For more details about the new novel and the competition, head on over to the Forum HERE.

With the Morzine intensive training camp only 3 weeks away, running from June 21-28 in the stunning French Alps, we have now managed to open it up to a handful more people and will be taking bookings for a couple more days before we lock it down. The week includes daily and intensive parkour training run principally by Forrest and Blane this year, but also offers some fun in the form of white-wafter rafting and suchlike as well as great accommodation and food in the top Morzine resort of Chalet Philbert.

In the build-up to the imminent worldwide launch of our Handbook of Parkour, both newspaper and TV media groups are sending their journalists down to get a taste of real parkour training at our Outdoor Classes. Last week The Metro came along and we shot a piece for Sky TV, and this week reporters from The Times will be trying their hand.