Can you still do parkour if you're afraid of heights?

Question

Parkour or free running seems really interesting to me. But I have a fear of heights and sometimes just watching people do their somersaults and leaps down/across heights seems really scary. I don't think I'd do insane stunts, but I like the flipping off of park benches and stuff.

Are there a lot of female free runners? It seems when I youtube it or look it up, it's almost exclusively male free runners.

Answer 1

I was once afraid of heights while interested in rock climbing and understand your predicament. Fortunately I have overcome my fear, and while you have not, it will not hinder you too much.

A lot of parkour media and videos are catered to the effect of making an audience say "wow". Actual parkour comes with the intent of getting from A to B as quickly and fluidly as possible, and very rarely does this involve running across rooftops (and in many places it is very difficult to do). A lot of people in parkour videos are either very good with decades or so of training, or really really dumb, and likely to suffer an injury (in the future due to accumulation if not now). In the essence of parkour, if you are trying something and it feels uncomfortable or you are afraid to do it, you won't try it in  a real life situation, so you can forget it. If you don't want to do flips and stuff then don't (and technically they aren't classified as parkour as they are not efficient in the goal to move from one place to another the fastest way possible).

There are a fair bit of traceuses, though many of them like you haven't seen too much female activity in the field and are because of this too shy to come out and try it. In the community I'm in, we have two females and six males, which isn't a really bad ratio when you consider what is usually seen.

A final remark in regards to both questions, don't let youtube get you down. The parkour videos on there rarely represent what you will find if you go out looking.

Hopefully this helped some, good luck training.

Answer 2

ha ha yeah I'm afraid of heights too, but i still do it.

Flips and somersaults are not parkour btw. That's freerunning. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop is parkour though. That's scary, i don't see myself doing that anytime soon.

So to answer your question yeah you can do it. There is a ton of stuff to do that don't require heights. Though once you start getting to the more advanced pakour stages, you're going to want to.

I'm afraid of heights, but that is slowly fading the more i do it.

Nothing is exclusive for anything. Someway somehow you can get in. i think it applies for everything. Parkour is no exception.

I've seen some videos on youtube that have girls in it...but not many. Most of the time they are not very good, I'm sorry to say. Though i can see girls being better because they have naturally stronger legs than men. So they should be able to jump and vault better. And not much strength is needed to pull yourself up.

So i say go for it. You have nothing to loose...Just be careful.