PARKOUR PRACTITIONERS’ TRAINING HABITS, MOTIVES, GOALS AND PERCEIVED PERFORMANCE FACTORS: AN INTERNATIONAL APPROACH

Abstract

This study aimed to describe frequent parkour practitioners’ training habits, training motives and goals, and perceived performance factors of practitioners from different countries and continents. An ad hoc questionnaire (PARK-Q) was developed in four languages by the research group and validated by active experts with 12-18 years of experience practising and coaching parkour. The PARK-Q is a multidimensional questionnaire that explores demographics, habits, goals, motivation and perceived performance factors from the practitioner’s perspective. The PARK-Q presented overall great internal consistency (Cronbach’s α=.902) and was answered by one hundred and forty-one parkour practitioners (N=141, 26.2±5.0 years old) from 15 countries and four continents. Parkour could still be considered a masculine action sport with a low level of federated participation, mostly practised outdoors, with friends, in an unstructured way, and learnt freely: with friends, autodidact, etc. Parkour practitioners’ motivation mainly comes from within and could be considered intrinsic motivation. To parkour practitioners, precision, environmental adaptability, and movement techniques may be considered the most important performance factors, whereas flip repertoire, suffering capacity, and keeping yourself distracted are the least important. Thus, new measuring instruments or assessments that align better with the discipline should be explored, considering the performance factors perceived by international parkour practitioners.

Keywords: art du déplacement, freerunning, questionnaire, measuring instrument, training