In early 1900, Georges Hébert, a French naval officer, invented a military training known as "la méthode naturelle”, the Natural Method. Hébert was inspired by the indigenous people of South America, the West Indies and Africa, whose movements he described as "flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant”. A hundred years later a group of friends from the suburbs of Lilles, France, took this training and adapted it to the streets. They became the Yamakasi, the world’s first parkour group.
Parkour changes the way you look at the world.
It’s the act of moving from point A to point B in the fastest and most efficient way possible, a simple concept that has countless applications. It’s the awareness, when walking in the streets, that most of what you see can be interacted with in creative ways; the feeling of safety knowing that you can quickly get out of dangerous situations.
With the advent of Youtube in 2005, traceurs, parkour practitioners, shared the videos of their stunts online. Parkour has quickly gained popularity in the mainstream; in cinema, almost every action movie features parkour scenes, in the videogame industry parkour elements appear in countless titles.