Parkour coach Gwendolyn Neo remembers how some HDB residents would hurl insults at the young kids she trained, at an open area in Bishan: “Stupid kids – only know how to climb and dirty walls. You are delinquents! Young punks! Confirm never study well in school.
“People would generally shout at us and say we are doing illegal things,” said Neo, who co-founded a parkour academy, Lion City Parkour, with her husband Koh Chen Pin in 2022.
“I even had to call the police on them once because they kept filming the kids, and threatened one of them,” she added. The children were mostly aged six to 10 years old.
This scenario would be unimaginable had the kids been practising any other sport – basketball, badminton or wushu – in the open area. But parkour was different.
Neo has since moved her children’s classes to an indoor gym, although she still conducts some women classes outdoors in Bishan, as well at the Holland Village estate and Jurong Lake Gardens Parkour Park.
Indeed, parkour seems to have garnered a bad rap, especially within some communities where learning to scale walls and performing other daredevil stunts have been linked to delinquency and dangerous behaviour.
Neo teaching a new student the cat hang on a wall at Bishan. (Photo: Instagram/@deeenester)
But the 31-year-old
“If only we can have the support of the public and the government, the sport can really grow in Singapore,” she said.
Neo herself used to have misgivings about parkour. When she was first introduced to the sport by Koh, her husband (then her boyfriend) in 2018, she rejected it.
Koh, better known as CP or Denester in the parkour community, is an experienced practitioner who has won international awards, including second place at the 2024 International Parkour Master Tournament in Zhejiang, China.
“My perception was that it is a very extreme sport. I kept saying, ‘I'm going break my leg’,” Neo recalled.
Neo started practising parkour in 2019, and co-founded her own parkour academy Lion City Parkour in 2022. (Photo: CNA/Joyee Koo)
But she was persuaded to join the occasional class, and in 2018 and 2019 helped out at Lion City Gathering, a prominent parkour event organised by Koh, which attracted practitioners from Asia and beyond.
Witnessing a female practitioner from Turkey in the 2019 event changed her perception.
“I watched her jumping effortlessly from obstacle to obstacle that was very high and very far. I never thought that human bodies were capable of this kind of movement. I was like, ‘Wow, girls can be capable of explosive power too!’” she told CNA Women.
This inspired Neo to train earnestly. Within a year, she gave up her videography career to become a parkour coach.
When Neo started coaching, her income ranged from a few hundred dollars to S$1,000 a month and barely sustained her.
“My parents were very against it because they thought that there was no future in it. For the first three months after I became a coach, at every dinner, they would ask me if I had gone for an interview for a ‘proper job’,” she said.
But she loved coaching so much that two years later in 2022, Neo and Koh co-founded their own parkour academy. They held their wedding ceremony two years later in 2024.
Put simply, “parkour is about getting from point A to point B in the most efficient manner”, Neo explained.
In an urban environment, this may include running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping, and rolling to overcome obstacles. Developed in France in the late 1980s, it was largely influenced by French military obstacle course training.
“A lot of people think that parkour is about jumping from building to building and doing flips. But actually, that is pretty advanced,” Neo said.
“At the start, you are usually crawling on the ground, doing on-the-ground jumps and landing on small obstacles. You also learn how to fall safely in case you don’t make your jumps, which we call ukemi (the art of falling) in the parkour and martial arts scene,” said the coach, whose students are aged between two-and-a-half and 70 years old.
Parkour students at Neo’s academy range from teenagers to middle-aged women and young seniors. (Photo: CNA/Joyee Koo)
Well-meaning friends warned Neo that the sport was too niche and Singapore parents would much rather enrol their kids in established sports like badminton.
But some parents saw it differently and signed their kids up. Many had active kids who tended to jump on the sofa or from the top of playground equipment, and they wanted their children to learn to fall safely.
She also has many students with severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which affects impulse control. This makes it important for them to learn to fall properly and learn risk assessment, said Neo, who was also diagnosed with ADHD last year.
She also offers private classes to kids on the autism spectrum, some with dyspraxia, a developmental disorder that affects coordination and motor skills. She works with them to build muscles and learn to engage different muscle groups.
At Lion City Parkour, Neo helms the women’s classes. In fact, coaching women was the reason she became a parkour coach in the first place.
Parkour is traditionally a male-dominated sport, she said. As such, some male coaches may struggle to teach women how to clear certain obstacles.
A women’s class led by Neo. (Photo: CNA/Joyee Koo)
“A woman’s body weight is distributed very differently. A lot of it sits on the hips. For guys, it sits higher up, around the chest and shoulders,” Neo said, adding that she started women’s classes to offer tailored training advice to women.
Her female students range from teenagers to middle-aged mums, career women and young seniors, the oldest being 70. Beyond exercise, the sport teaches resilience in overcoming physical and mental obstacles that her students can take into their everyday lives, she said.
There is also a spirit of rebellion in parkour, particularly for women, Neo added.
“When growing up, a lot of girls like me were told not to jump or climb, even though boys were allowed to. We were told to sit properly, be more feminine, be more princess-like, do ballet, even if it wasn’t necessarily what we resonated with,” she reflected.
Now, as adults, these women can relish experiences they never had through parkour.
To empower the women’s parkour community, Neo started Women of Parkour Singapore in 2023, rallying female practitioners around the island.
The group holds movement jams and a free introductory workshop every few months. Some 30 members attend each time. The next event will likely be in May or June this year and updates will be posted on the interest group’s Instagram page, said Neo.
Neo (front row, second from left) with the Women of Parkour Singapore community after one of their jams at Jurong Lake Gardens. (Photo: Instagram/@deeenester)
The Singapore group inspired the formation of other Southeast Asian female parkour groups, such as in Thailand. And last year, Neo and the other Women of Parkour were invited to Thailand to train with their Thai counterparts.
Neo knows that her biggest challenge as founder of the academy is in addressing misconceptions surrounding the sport.
“There are people who say, ‘You teach kids how to break up public property.’ That’s the furthest thing from the truth,” she said.
“Our motto is to leave no trace. How you came to the place is how you should leave it. We teach kids to take care of the environment and plants, throw away their trash and we always bring wet wipes to clean up after,” she added.
Another misconception is that parkour is dangerous, she said. When practised correctly, injuries are not common, and coaches constantly check in with kids to make sure they have the strength and technique before moving on to a new obstacle.
Parkour transforms urban landscapes into a playground, said Neo. (Photo: Instagram/@terence_portraits)
After six years of coaching and three years running Lion City Parkour, Neo is heartened that there is an uptick in the sport. In Singapore, she is teaching it in several international schools as a co-curricular activity. However, she has yet to succeed in persuading any local schools to give parkour a go because it is still considered too dangerous, she said.
“If we can eradicate this misconception, parkour can have a pretty good place in the average Singaporean’s lifestyle,” she said, noting that Singapore’s landscape provides the perfect backdrop for parkour. Natural urban structures like railings, walls and ledges are the perfect obstacles for training.
In fact, many parkour practitioners travel to Singapore for parkour tourism – to explore the city while training, Neo added. Just last year, Neo hosted three women from Europe and Asia.
Parkour transforms urban spaces into a playground, she said. “When you learn parkour, you start to look at obstacles very differently. Instead of sitting on a bench, you might do vaults over it.
“Parkour makes you feel like a child again, playfully exploring any place the way you used to in a playground as a child – you’d go over, go under and monkey around. You don’t need fancy equipment,” she said. “It makes you feel youthful no matter your age.”
CNA Women is a section on CNA Lifestyle that seeks to inform, empower and inspire the modern woman. If you have women-related news, issues and ideas to share with us, email CNAWomen [at] mediacorp.com.sg.
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“People would generally shout at us and say we are doing illegal things,” said Neo, who co-founded a parkour academy, Lion City Parkour, with her husband Koh Chen Pin in 2022.
“I even had to call the police on them once because they kept filming the kids, and threatened one of them,” she added. The children were mostly aged six to 10 years old.
This scenario would be unimaginable had the kids been practising any other sport – basketball, badminton or wushu – in the open area. But parkour was different.
Neo has since moved her children’s classes to an indoor gym, although she still conducts some women classes outdoors in Bishan, as well at the Holland Village estate and Jurong Lake Gardens Parkour Park.
Indeed, parkour seems to have garnered a bad rap, especially within some communities where learning to scale walls and performing other daredevil stunts have been linked to delinquency and dangerous behaviour.
Neo teaching a new student the cat hang on a wall at Bishan. (Photo: Instagram/@deeenester)
But the 31-year-old
“If only we can have the support of the public and the government, the sport can really grow in Singapore,” she said.
FROM CURIOSITY TO PASSION
Neo herself used to have misgivings about parkour. When she was first introduced to the sport by Koh, her husband (then her boyfriend) in 2018, she rejected it.
Koh, better known as CP or Denester in the parkour community, is an experienced practitioner who has won international awards, including second place at the 2024 International Parkour Master Tournament in Zhejiang, China.
“My perception was that it is a very extreme sport. I kept saying, ‘I'm going break my leg’,” Neo recalled.
Neo started practising parkour in 2019, and co-founded her own parkour academy Lion City Parkour in 2022. (Photo: CNA/Joyee Koo)
But she was persuaded to join the occasional class, and in 2018 and 2019 helped out at Lion City Gathering, a prominent parkour event organised by Koh, which attracted practitioners from Asia and beyond.
Witnessing a female practitioner from Turkey in the 2019 event changed her perception.
“I watched her jumping effortlessly from obstacle to obstacle that was very high and very far. I never thought that human bodies were capable of this kind of movement. I was like, ‘Wow, girls can be capable of explosive power too!’” she told CNA Women.
This inspired Neo to train earnestly. Within a year, she gave up her videography career to become a parkour coach.
When Neo started coaching, her income ranged from a few hundred dollars to S$1,000 a month and barely sustained her.
“My parents were very against it because they thought that there was no future in it. For the first three months after I became a coach, at every dinner, they would ask me if I had gone for an interview for a ‘proper job’,” she said.
But she loved coaching so much that two years later in 2022, Neo and Koh co-founded their own parkour academy. They held their wedding ceremony two years later in 2024.
NO SPIDERMAN STUNTS
Put simply, “parkour is about getting from point A to point B in the most efficient manner”, Neo explained.
In an urban environment, this may include running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping, and rolling to overcome obstacles. Developed in France in the late 1980s, it was largely influenced by French military obstacle course training.
“A lot of people think that parkour is about jumping from building to building and doing flips. But actually, that is pretty advanced,” Neo said.
“At the start, you are usually crawling on the ground, doing on-the-ground jumps and landing on small obstacles. You also learn how to fall safely in case you don’t make your jumps, which we call ukemi (the art of falling) in the parkour and martial arts scene,” said the coach, whose students are aged between two-and-a-half and 70 years old.
Parkour students at Neo’s academy range from teenagers to middle-aged women and young seniors. (Photo: CNA/Joyee Koo)
Well-meaning friends warned Neo that the sport was too niche and Singapore parents would much rather enrol their kids in established sports like badminton.
But some parents saw it differently and signed their kids up. Many had active kids who tended to jump on the sofa or from the top of playground equipment, and they wanted their children to learn to fall safely.
She also has many students with severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which affects impulse control. This makes it important for them to learn to fall properly and learn risk assessment, said Neo, who was also diagnosed with ADHD last year.
She also offers private classes to kids on the autism spectrum, some with dyspraxia, a developmental disorder that affects coordination and motor skills. She works with them to build muscles and learn to engage different muscle groups.
WOMEN IN PARKOUR
At Lion City Parkour, Neo helms the women’s classes. In fact, coaching women was the reason she became a parkour coach in the first place.
Parkour is traditionally a male-dominated sport, she said. As such, some male coaches may struggle to teach women how to clear certain obstacles.
A women’s class led by Neo. (Photo: CNA/Joyee Koo)
“A woman’s body weight is distributed very differently. A lot of it sits on the hips. For guys, it sits higher up, around the chest and shoulders,” Neo said, adding that she started women’s classes to offer tailored training advice to women.
Her female students range from teenagers to middle-aged mums, career women and young seniors, the oldest being 70. Beyond exercise, the sport teaches resilience in overcoming physical and mental obstacles that her students can take into their everyday lives, she said.
There is also a spirit of rebellion in parkour, particularly for women, Neo added.
“When growing up, a lot of girls like me were told not to jump or climb, even though boys were allowed to. We were told to sit properly, be more feminine, be more princess-like, do ballet, even if it wasn’t necessarily what we resonated with,” she reflected.
Now, as adults, these women can relish experiences they never had through parkour.
To empower the women’s parkour community, Neo started Women of Parkour Singapore in 2023, rallying female practitioners around the island.
The group holds movement jams and a free introductory workshop every few months. Some 30 members attend each time. The next event will likely be in May or June this year and updates will be posted on the interest group’s Instagram page, said Neo.
Neo (front row, second from left) with the Women of Parkour Singapore community after one of their jams at Jurong Lake Gardens. (Photo: Instagram/@deeenester)
The Singapore group inspired the formation of other Southeast Asian female parkour groups, such as in Thailand. And last year, Neo and the other Women of Parkour were invited to Thailand to train with their Thai counterparts.
PARKOUR CAN BE FOR EVERYONE
Neo knows that her biggest challenge as founder of the academy is in addressing misconceptions surrounding the sport.
“There are people who say, ‘You teach kids how to break up public property.’ That’s the furthest thing from the truth,” she said.
“Our motto is to leave no trace. How you came to the place is how you should leave it. We teach kids to take care of the environment and plants, throw away their trash and we always bring wet wipes to clean up after,” she added.
Another misconception is that parkour is dangerous, she said. When practised correctly, injuries are not common, and coaches constantly check in with kids to make sure they have the strength and technique before moving on to a new obstacle.
Parkour transforms urban landscapes into a playground, said Neo. (Photo: Instagram/@terence_portraits)
After six years of coaching and three years running Lion City Parkour, Neo is heartened that there is an uptick in the sport. In Singapore, she is teaching it in several international schools as a co-curricular activity. However, she has yet to succeed in persuading any local schools to give parkour a go because it is still considered too dangerous, she said.
“If we can eradicate this misconception, parkour can have a pretty good place in the average Singaporean’s lifestyle,” she said, noting that Singapore’s landscape provides the perfect backdrop for parkour. Natural urban structures like railings, walls and ledges are the perfect obstacles for training.
In fact, many parkour practitioners travel to Singapore for parkour tourism – to explore the city while training, Neo added. Just last year, Neo hosted three women from Europe and Asia.
Parkour transforms urban spaces into a playground, she said. “When you learn parkour, you start to look at obstacles very differently. Instead of sitting on a bench, you might do vaults over it.
“Parkour makes you feel like a child again, playfully exploring any place the way you used to in a playground as a child – you’d go over, go under and monkey around. You don’t need fancy equipment,” she said. “It makes you feel youthful no matter your age.”
CNA Women is a section on CNA Lifestyle that seeks to inform, empower and inspire the modern woman. If you have women-related news, issues and ideas to share with us, email CNAWomen [at] mediacorp.com.sg.
Continue reading...