By Leaps and Bounds: Shanghai Parkour

By Elena Rubanik

One afternoon along The Bund, a small group of athletes dressed in sportswear begins to leap, flip and pop handstands on the concrete, momentarily drawing more attention than the iconic views of Lujiazui across the water. It’s a sight we’re apt to see more in the future. Parkour has come to Shanghai.

Parkour is a sport that doesn’t just defy expectation; it leaps over it in a single bound. The men and women of parkour soar through the air, bouncing off walls and flipping over obstacles with such ease that we can scarcely believe our eyes; it’s the stuff of Chinese kung fu fantasy movies. 

But unlike the actors in these dramas, parkour practitioners, or traceurs, perform their feats without the aid of a harness or wires. It looks dangerous, an activity reserved only for a bunch of elite professionals. However, a chat with some members of Shanghai Parkour reveals that nothing could be further from the truth.  

From beginners to long term enthusiasts, the membership base of Shanghai Parkour is vast, and the biggest challenges affecting everyone tend to be more mental than physical. Thoughts of what could go wrong when attempting a backflip off of a two metre high wall are apt to discourage most of us from even beginning to learn how to accomplish such a feat. Still, Kyle Shapiro, a representative of Shanghai Parkour explains that mastering any sort of trick in parkour, much like any other sport, requires an intense period of training in order to become good. "We don't do things that we can't do. We train to prevent injuries." 

Eye-catching results it may have, but a large part of becoming good at parkour comes from being introspective and understanding one’s own body more and its limitations. Only after coming to an understanding of what these limitations are, are traceurs able to proceed to the "next level" and begin doing tricks. This often comes with the discovery that if a certain move can’t be made in one way (due to one’s own physical limitations), alternatives are always available. In this way, regardless of skill level, some aspects of parkour are accessible to everyone. 

Becoming a traceur can for some people be a once-in-a-while activity for staying active, or a way towards becoming a professional performer or stuntman for movies and commercials. It is the latter that Shapiro and his teammates are most interested in, and have consequently formed a stunt team loosely affiliated with Shanghai Parkour called Link, training seriously in some of the more challenging stunts of parkour.

Link’s impressive skills, as to be expected, offer a lot of surprises, but there’s an additional surprise to be had in finding out that women are also very much involved in the sport. "We are all very close friends," says Simone Zhang, one of the women involved in Link. In her own experience, she says that the only way in which women might be treated differently is that they gain more support and help during training sessions. But, of course, this really depends on the woman and her goals. Some women who join Shanghai Parkour have been gymnasts in the past; others, like Zhang, just enjoy active sports such as running. 

Shanghai Parkour and Link hold training sessions four to five times a week, each time for three to six hours. So far for Shanghai Parkour, over one hundred people from across Shanghai have found themselves involved: men and women, locals and foreigners, with a range of different backgrounds and ages (from fifteen to mid-thirties). 

Language turns out not an issue either. If your Chinese is only on the level of an awkward ni hao, there’s no need to worry. After all, picking up parkour involves using your voice less, and focusing more on seeing the possibilities of your body. 

To find out more about about parkour in Shanghai, e-mail [email protected]

Understanding Parkour

Like other sports involving stunts, parkour has developed its own terminology for its different moves. The following are a list of some of the common moves you’re bound to see when trying out parkour for the first time, and a bit of basic information about what you’ll need to be able to do them:

The Flag: A horizontal handstand on something sturdy like a street lamp or a street sign. 

Backflip (tuck/flared): It’s a backflip with a twist. What makes it a ‘tuck’ or ‘flared’ backflip depends on whether you’re jumping backwards from a height holding your knees with your arms (‘tuck’) or spreading your arms (‘flared’). Traceurs stress that this not be tried without expert supervision. 

Kick Moon: This is a complicated technique which involves three steps in the shape of a letter J. During the last step, the traceur jumps, putting most of their weight into their arms to increase the height of the jump, and swings one of their legs over the opposite shoulder. 

Wall Spin: This involves standing next to a wall just far enough away to reach it with your straight left arm, then jumping upwards (not forward) and rotating 180 degrees, pushing the wall with your other hand. 

Kong Vault: So called because it allows the traceur to jump over an obstacle (like a railing) the way King Kong would. Approaching a rail, the traceur jumps first, then pushing with their hands, uses the strength of their lower body to vault over. 

Lazy Vault: More or less the same as the Kong Vault, but the traceur approaches from the side, rather than head on.

Parkour and Freerunning

Another distinction you’re bound to hear thrown around when hanging out with traceurs is that of freerunning, which distinguishes itself from parkour. To the layman gawking on the sidelines, both of these activities might look the same. However, the traceur knows all too well that there is an ongoing ideological debate in the parkour community about these two terms.

The main idea or even philosophy of parkour can be summarised as “efficient movement” and at its core, parkour is not solely about running and jumping. “It’s about wanting to overcome your fear and to become stronger,” says Yang Lei (also known as Maomao), who has been a traceur for over three years. What he means by this is that parkour is not limited to being a physical activity; its ideas are applicable in everyday life, making one more sensitive to finding the most efficient way to deal with one's problems. 

Freerunning, on the other hand, is more about artistic movements and self expression through the way you move. In this respect, it’s more similar to dancing, although dancers don’t tend to do the cha-cha off of concrete walls. To give an example of how freerunning differs from parkour, take the act of hopping over a rock for example. A person who does parkour would simply jump over it or even run over it if it proves more efficient. A person who practices freerunning would pay a lot more attention to the rock, using it to perform flips or other tricks. While the results of both ways of thinking often coincide, ideologically the ideas are completely different. 

Of course, there’s no need to worry too much about all of this. You certainly won’t be forced to declare your allegiences during your first day with Shanghai Parkour, and in the end, it’s up to the traceur to decide how they see what they do. However, one thing that most traceurs agree on is that ultimately the knowledge of one’s own body and the ability to move freely through a space far outweighs the cachet of showing off a few tricks. Simone Zhang says, “If you’re just copying movements without responding to your environment, without using your imagination to create your own, you’ll never get past a certain level. It's about expressing yourself through the medium of your body.”