“To neglect one’s body for any other advantage in life is the greatest of follies” Arthur Schopenhauer
“It is the mind itself which shapes the body” Fredrich von Schiller

Two of Joseph Pilates favourite quotes

What is Pilates?

Who is your parkour for? What is the meaning of your training? What is the point of the risks you take, the hardship you suffer in training, the spectacular movements you make?

Until writing this article, composition is something that I’ve never really given a lot of thought. There are rarely any conscious decisions when I compose a shot, in the same way that there is rarely a conscious decision of when to pull the shutter. I just know (or at least I hope I do). And my assumption is that other experienced photographers are the same; I feel my way to what’s ‘right’ and in terms of composition, sometimes that’s as simple as making sure I don’t stick something slap bang in the middle of the frame.

So, most of the information you can find on this website, or any other parkour related website, is obviously about.....parkour, right? Well, yeah that's a no brainer. You want to learn how to jump better, or climb-up faster. Maybe add a few flips into your movement, who knows? But recently, what I've been personally discovering more is how helpful it could be to broaden your mind in the art of movement. So I'm going to be a bit unorthodox and advise you to stop drilling jumps now and then go learn something new.

For the past six years a group of select people who are now my friends have been putting up with me and my camera. We made films and I listened, learnt and did a lot of thinking. I spent around a year and a half writing about it all and coming to some conclusions. I'm very happy to say that the result of this is the world's first parkour PhD!

I’ve got a lot to say about American Rendezvous 2, so I’ll be splitting it into a few blog posts. The first blog post will be a play-by-play of what happened.

You might have heard that parkour started in a suburb of Paris called Lisses. Ordinarily, one would assume that the creation of a new discipline, as poetic as it is physical, would be cause for local celebration. In the UK, we put up little coloured plaques to mark the places where famous people lived, or where new things have been created. We lay claim to our cultural heritage with pride. But not so for the officials of Lisses.