User:Angadgill

It's hard to talk about me nowadays without talking about parkour. There is some bland professional info, but I'll briefly go over some general things before getting into the meat of what drives me.

My name is Angad Gill if you hadn't figured it out already. I consider myself to be an explorer in the loose sense of the word, my specialty lies in not specializing and I am generally willing to give anything a try at least once. That's the way it's always been for me with sports, with philosophies, and with opinions. Let the best float to the top and discard the rest, but always give each new experience and thought the same treatment as your first. Overall I feel like this has made me a well-rounded and open-minded person, you're cool with me unless you're harmful to others.

Parkour - The Beginning

Six years ago parkour seized a hold of my being, and it hasn't let go since. In fact it has gotten much worse. At first it was simply a natural progression. As a kid I loved movement of all kind and had been shifting from sport to sport, always looking for something new to learn. Everything from gymnastics, to raquetball, to polevaulting, to rock climbing, I loved it all. When I discovered parkour I at first tackled it simply as a set of new skills to learn, with ever more tricks to master.

The Change

It wasn't until about a year and a half ago that I realized that parkour was so much more than I originally thought. It had already incorporated itself into me at that point, I could be found vaulting and scrambling over things wherever I went. But it wasn't until I started to really research where parkour came from and think it about while training alone at night, that I discovered the underlying usefulness and mind-altering power of parkour. That epiphany struck me very powerfully and changed how I look at the world forever. Parkour to me was no longer just a fun new thing to learn and use, it became a major part of my life and how I live it.

The Effects

The mindset and positive benefits of parkour are too vast for me to get into here, but watching them form in me and in my friends convinced me to start teaching. I wanted to spread that realization around to more people and do it in a way that was safer than how I first started.Somewhere along the way I also fell in love with how beautiful parkour looks and it has opened an artistic side of me that I didn't even know existed.