Difficulty in Parkour

Often Parkour is just about doing something difficult. Many jumps would not be interesting at all, if they were not difficult. Yet, not every ´difficult´ is the same kind of ´difficult´. Difficulty can happen on many different layers, some of which are more obvious than others. To illustrate that I want to give you some example for different aspects of movement in which there can be difficulty:

Technical difficulty

Technical difficulty is probably the one difficulty that you were to think about first, if we speak about difficulty. Technical difficulty is all about complexity and perfection of coordination.

A good example for someone that puts alot of emphasis on technical difficulty would be Elis Torhall (@elis_torhall), or Twin.pk (@twin.parkour).

Athletic difficulty

Some people focus on athletic difficulty, meaning some jumps are just so big that it's just physically hard to do them like for example Thomas (@thomas.mpo).

Mental difficulty

Then we have pure mental difficulty like in the jumps of Manu (@manu_na_). What he does is technically pretty easy but the place where he does it makes it very hard to commit. The challenge is to get yourself to do exactly what is needed, despite the great threat. You have to keep your mind together and this is a difficult skill to achieve.

„Aesthetic“ difficulty

Then we have other kinds of difficulties, which are not so easy to grasp at the first sight. A good example would be Bastian Dratva (@bastian_dratva). Often the moves he does in a line are neither technically, nor athletically, nor mentally difficult in and of themselves. But the difficulty lies somewhere else: To arrange those many little movements in a beautiful way, make the whole run a round thing, bring it out in one unit with so many details, execute all in perfect place & timing, perfect shape, and keep a rhythm through the whole run. These are already several different difficulties at once. For a lack of a better word, I would sum them up as aesthetic difficulty. The point of the article is not to make a list of all the difficulties that exist, but to show once again the multi-layeredness of Parkour/movement.

Mix of difficulties

I also want to mention that all of these four athletes that I've shown you only have a main emphasis on one aspect in my eyes. But of course they require multiple difficulties to be able to do whatever they do. For example, what Elis does is not just technically difficult but of course also athletically and also mentally. What Thomas does is of course not just athletic but also super technical, since his jumps usually require a lot of speed, and with more speed the timing of movements becomes more difficult. And of course it's also mental, since with more speed also mistakes escalate exponentially. And for Manu, even though he does a simple technique, this simple technique needs to be at the peak of its technicality. And if you look at Dratvas movement, this requires very high technical understanding to be even able to come up with all these kind of details.

Difficulties with difficulty in competiton

Difficulty is a criteria which plays a major role in competitions – rightly so. But even though this criteria seems to be rather one of the more simple ones to judge (lets say compared to creativity for example) - if you think about it, it is still very vague. This has been my criticism of competitions ever since: the irony about competitions is that they are trying to get objectivity into Parkour, yet already by selecting some aspects (and disregarding others) for their measurement, they have a distorting effect. Not only are they anything but objective, they are also harmful for movement from an artists perspective, since competitions mold the image in peoples minds as to what is good movement. By selectively highlighting movement, they train people to have a limited view on Parkour.