Many people take the principles they learn through parkour and apply them to their lives. By challenging themselves in parkour both mentally and physically, it becomes easier to deal with problems and obstacles in everyday life. When a difficult situation comes up in daily life, a parkour practitioner can see this as any other obstacle which they've learned to overcome quickly, efficiently, and without disruption to their intended path. Another part of the overall Parkour philosophy is to be useful in a variety of situations. Parkour itself does not strive to be a "complete" discipline.

Excerpted from "Two Theories on Parkour Philosophy" from Parkour North America:

Original Article

    There are two divisions of Parkour philosophy I see which may clarify what I mean by an “inherent Parkour philosophy.”  The first is a theory of application and the second is a theory of practice.  These two theories are inherent insofar as they are entirely derived from the statement, “Parkour is the discipline of moving efficiently.”  Within that sentence, we can extrapolate a multitude of concepts and theories on Parkour and movement in general.

Theory of Application

    What I mean by "application" is the reason or intention of the practice. 
    The "Urban Reclamation" and "Human Reclamation" are a little difficult to understand, and they are somewhat derived from David Belle's explanations of Parkour earlier on, when he focused on describing how Parkour is a new (or old, depending on how you look at it) way of moving.  “Urban reclamation” is simply the idea that by creating an urban landscape around us, society has robbed us of something dear to us.  It is a cultural movement to break the monotony of the urban lifestyle.  We re-imagine the concrete and architecture as we see fit, and are no longer bound by the rules of “stairs” and “barriers” and “fences.”  We reclaim all land to what it was meant for: movement.

    “Human reclamation” ties into the same idea. Jean Baudrillard wrote a book called Simulcra and the Simulation and, in it, he wrote that a simulacrum is a copy without an original, or a copy of a copy, or a copy where knowledge of the copy precedes the original.  I would say that the modern, urban lifestyle is a simulacrum: a copy of a “way of being” which never previously existed.  We move in ways, mimicking the ways that others move around us, without understanding that this way of moving was never naturally intended.  It is as if, quite literally, we have built walls around us and ignored the natural world.  We have tried to duplicate the natural world into a “perfect vision” (air conditioning, heating, insulation, carpeting) of that world.

    In a lot of ways, Parkour is a means of reclaiming what it means to be a human being.  It teaches us to move using the natural methods that we should have learned from infancy.  It teaches us to touch the world and interact with it, instead of being sheltered by it. We want to feel the concrete on our fingertips, the harshness of the ground on our backs as we roll.  To quote Dan Iaboni on his CTV interview, “You want to feel alive again.”  This is reclamation of the human being. We were not meant to be sedentary.  We were not meant to sit around and eat potato chips.  Human beings were meant to move, were meant to interact with the environment, and move with the environment, not against it and not be confined by it.

Theory of Practice

    Theory of practice may be a bit easier to understand.  Instead of asking "why Parkour?" as the theory of application does, it only asks the "how."  Here, you have aspects such as (but not limited to):

"What is efficiency?"
"Is Parkour an art/sport/discipline?"
"What are the natural movements of the human body?"
"What is a traceur?"
"Is Parkour competitive?"

    It is within the theory of practice that we suddenly see the short-comings of Parkour still being a discipline in its infancy (relative to other disciplines of movement out there).  This is precisely where the most controversial aspects of Parkour philosophy are, because we have, as a community and for the most part, agreed on the theory of application.  Perhaps one of the most central conflicts is when a practical position seems to contradict an applicable position, but it is so vague and opaque that it truly is difficult to measure.

Conclusion

   What is provided here is a basic framework for philosophical discussion on Parkour.  It is a guide to measure one’s own beliefs where application and practice are concerned, and a means to better and more quickly understand the position of others.  This is what I believe is inherent to the philosophy of Parkour whereas the conflicts that stray outward from this are peripherally added on a person-by-person basis.  However, by adopting this mode of thinking about Parkour, I believe the experience of being a traceur is greatly heightened.