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Resumen

This chapter considers how participation in lifestyle sports, like parkour, can enrich the functionality of athlete interactions with the environment to negate some of the detrimental effects reported in studies of early sport specialisation. We elaborate on how parkour experience and participation could improve the lifestyle of specialist athletes to enrich practice in sports-specific programmes to cultivate athletic skill development through exploratory practice and guided discovery. Previous research in ecological dynamics has proposed the value of parkour as a donor sport which shares an overlap of athletic-enhancing affordances available in team sports by challenging performers to learn how to negotiate different properties of a performance environment, such as obstacles (e.g., a net, playing area markings, positioning of defenders or attackers), as well as relevant information including angles of approach, interpersonal distances, surface texture, inclinations, and sizes, effectively and efficiently. In this chapter, we explore and reflect on how advancements in knowledge of parkour as a donor sport have developed a contextualised understanding of its role in facilitating athlete learning and development in team sports. We also acknowledge that as a donor sport, parkour may help athletes focus on a specific lifestyle in elite team sports.