Strategies of Parkour practitioners for executing soft precision landings

Abstract

Parkour landing techniques differ from performances of other sports as they are practiced in urban spaces with uncontrolled surfaces and drop heights. Due to the relatively young age of the sport, few studies have tried to understand how practitioners - called traceurs - succeed at performing these dynamic performances. In this paper, we focus on the precision landing technique, which has a fundamental role in most of the Parkour motions. We analyzed the lower limbs motion of traceurs executing the precision landings from two different heights and compared their performance with untrained participants. We found that traceurs perform a soft landing extending its duration twice than untrained participants do [Formula: see text], increasing the range of motion [Formula: see text] and generating more mechanical energy [Formula: see text] to dissipate the impact. In the Parkour technique, the knee accounted for half of the energy dissipated. The peak joint torques [Formula: see text] and power [Formula: see text] were reduced in the Parkour technique. The increase of the landing height did not modify the proportion of individual joint mechanical energy contribution for dissipation. Our results could be used to enhance Parkour performance, and to understand new ways in which sport practitioners can land in order to prevent injuries.

Comparison of adults and children anthropometric tables: mass segment distribution

“…In a second time, we compared the mass distribution of each segment obtained with adult's table thanks to the anthropometric table based on children data and those obtained by the scaling of an Opensim wholebody musculo-skeletal model extracted from Maldonado et al (2018). This model was based on data adjusted by Dumas and Wojtusch (2018).…”

How is parkour new and singular? A narrative review across miscellaneous academic fields.

“…Although according to Newton's laws of motion, momenta is a conserved quantity during this phase, postural adjustments are still possible without modifying the CoM's trajectory. In fact, instead of stretching out their legs as far as possible prior to landing such as in SLJ, traceurs adapt their posture to land on the target and to prepare the body to absorb the impact and to stabilize themselves [84,85].…”

“…In fact, traceurs have to regulate the stiffness of their legs and especially of their ankles during the landing to cushion high impacts: as a consequence, they land on their forefoot so as to better absorb the impact with a greater ankle dorsi-flexion range. [84,88].…”

Gait analysis comparison of two twins: one healthy and one with spastic cerebral palsy

“…The whole-body musculo-skeletal model in Maldonado et al (2018) was scaled with the Opensim software, using custom specification of the marker pairs, to obtain one model for each child. A maximum marker error (MME) around 2 cm were used to judge the quality of the scaling.…”