Preface

This project was my thesis for my MRes Sport and Exercise Science degree. In the spirit of my undergraduate degree, I decided to also post this online to share my research with the wider parkour community. The main body of the thesis is presented in sections 1-5 and contain the main relevent findings of this project. There are also two supporting chapters, which are related but separate pieces of work created for assessment in the MRes, but I consider them to contain some interesting extra details so have also included them here.

You can also download a PDF of this project or a poster summary version from ResearchGate.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Karl Grainger for his academic and moral support during the preparation of this thesis, Juwad Malik, Thuli Lamb, and Andrew Pearson for listening to me think out loud in the early stages of formulating this idea, and my wife for literally every other thing possible.

Disclaimer

It’s important to know that this work has not been peer reviewed.

2020 and 2021 were very difficult years, for a number of reasons. This research project was, I have to admit, not my first choice for the MRes but I had to make do after in-person testing was cancelled by my university during the Covid-19 pandemic. Qualitative research was not exactly my forte, and so I did a lot of learning-on-the-job as this project evolved.

Still, I’m proud of my work and I think my findings are, at the very least, interesting. But, please bear the above in mind as you read and consider the results found—and conclusions drawn from those results—with an appropriately critical eye.

Data

You can also download the full anonymised interview data I collected if you would like to perform your own analysis. If you do so, please get in touch and let me know what you use it for and what you find.

Download the data from Figshare by clicking the badge below:

DOI

Download from Figshare