Application of parkour in physical education: agility learning and improvement

With the passage of time, the rate of students who are overweight and obese has increased, in order to reduce it and increase physical condition, parkour-based content was chosen to produce novelty in classroom. However, it was not known if this type of intervention would improve to a greater extent than methods that were normally used in the subject. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the improvement provided by a Didactic Unit based on parkour in student agility compared to a Didactic Unit for team sports, as well as investigating how this improvement depended on gender. So as to clarify this uncertainty, 146 students participated in the study, 67 in team sport group (CON) and 77 in parkour group (EXP). A pre and post intervention agility test was used to evaluate the change provided by the Didactic Units. Results showed a greater significant improvement in the EXP group (p = 0.002) compared to the CON group, suggesting that an intervention through parkour achieves greater agility improvements. In the same line, when the sample was segmented by sex, a greater change was observed in the male EXP group (p = 0.007) compared with CON group, however, no differences were found when comparing female groups (p = 0.099). Therefore, it seems that parkour is a valid method to increase the agility of students in Physical Education in secondary education, getting better improvements than team sports in male gender, although it does not seem to be more favorable than team sports in female gender.