Teaching Parkour Sports in School Gymnastics

Book excerpt: Parkour Sports combines the trend sports of parkour, freerunning and parcouring. All of these disciplines are founded on moves derived from classic gymnastics skills, which makes them eminently suitable for school sports classes. The exercises are motivational and offer scope for spontaneous variation, while the moves themselves are creative and dynamic. Since parkour is gaining steadily in popularity outside the school arena, it is all the more important that schools provide pupils with a safe and methodical learning framework, to prepare them adequately for real-life urban conditions. This handbook has been conceived as a practical guide, for which reason, all the practice movements covered are illustrated with photo sequences. Sports teachers and trainers will find that the moves contained in this book are presented and explained in a clear and easy to understand manner and require a minimum of prior preparation. Over and above this, each move is introduced with the same systematic methodology, including warm-up exercises, a game segment, and a relaxation phase. The book contains a total of seventeen complete sample lessons, all of which have been tested in actual sports lessons. Additional materials are available from the Internet, at: www.parkoursport.com. 17 sample lessons covering all moves encountered in the range of parkour disciplines 458 illustrations 33 sketches