Speak to any parkour athlete and they’ll tell you, “parkour is 80% mental.” But people often understand the remaining “physical” 20% better than they understand what’s said to be the majority of the sport. In this article, I’d like to discuss some of the psychology of parkour and what might be going on in your brain when you practice it.
Every jump you do in parkour involves an interaction between yourself and your environment. There is a process of perception, planning, expectation, and action. Here, we’ll focus on the planning and expectation stage, looking specifically at how your brain integrates information to guide your behaviour.
Your Brain is a Prediction Machine
Inside your head you have a brain (hopefully). Put simply, the brain handles information from two streams:
Take the example of crossing a road. Your brain is processing sensory information: it’s a quiet day, but you see a car approaching in the left lane. You predict that the car will pass before you step into the road, and that nothing else is coming (safe to cross!). You step out, but a bike suddenly swerves past in the right lane, narrowly missing you. Shocked, you step back onto the pavement and reevaluate.
What you just experienced was a negative prediction error. Your brain predicted safety, but the sensory data proved otherwise. This error updates your internal model for the future (and probably stresses you out a little to help you learn some road safety).
That’s the basic predictive model the brain uses to guide behaviour (for those interested, it’s called predictive coding and is based on Bayes’ theorem). While it might feel like there’s just one prediction happening, in reality your brain is constantly predicting everything and comparing it to incoming data.
Positive Prediction Errors
In the road-crossing example, the prediction error was negative: your brain expected safety, but reality was more dangerous. But what happens when your expectations are negative, and reality turns out better?
Imagine it’s early autumn. Summer’s over, your friends are all at JOD (Join or Die, hosted in Boston each year), and you’re one of the first to arrive at the spot. You hop onto a wall to warm up. There’s a rail in front of you at a reasonable distance, and you start evaluating…
You probably could make the jump — you’ve done it before — but it’s the first jump of the session. You’re stiff from the cold, wearing a jacket that might restrict movement, and the thought of bouncing the rail this early makes you hesitant. Still, the spot is dry, so the risk of slipping is low. You weigh all this up: environmental cues (dry spot, reachable rail), internal signals (stiff muscles and tendons; confidence and experience). You’re leaning against doing it, but clips from JOD replay in your mind. You want to push yourself.
You decide to try it. You aim for an overshoot to avoid the bounce. You take off, you land on the rail and comfortably bounce backwards to your feet. Immediately (or more accurately, as you’re in the air) your brain starts evaluating your predictions. Your legs are colder than you thought, so the extra power is welcome; and even with that power miscalculation, you’re still making it to the rail easily. The outcome was positive, or at least more positive than your prediction. Amongst a slew neural firing, with dopamine flooding your synapses and cortisol pumping through your veins — through a barrage of positive and negative prediction errors emerges one key positive error…
“That wasn’t so bad! I reckon I can stick it”.
This is the power of positive prediction error. There’s a skill element involved in evaluating whether you can do a jump or not (we all know people with out-of-whack judgment). What’s being trained here isn’t cold, calculated biomechanics and power output calculations, but a broader evaluation of yourself, your environment, and your actions in them. You’ve increased your sense of self efficacy through positive prediction error by engaging with a challenge. You’ve directly influenced your belief that you can go out into the world, engage with it (despite the potential confrontation of chaotic unknowns), and be (statistically) more successful than you initially thought.
Self-Efficacy in Motion
What’s crucial to take away from this example is how self-belief and self-efficacy improve through parkour. This is what people mean when they say parkour is “80% mental.” The work isn’t only in sending or succeeding in doing scary challenges, but in preparing yourself mentally to attempt them. Each session is a process of recalibrating your predictions under uncertainty. Everyone attempting the same jump will be handling a different predictive model in their head. What we, as parkour athletes, are interested in is the process of updating that predictive model to successfully bring about a desired result. We all implicitly seem to know this, but it’s often hard for us to put into words.
And it’s not unique to parkour. Skaters, gymnasts, dancers, climbers — they all experience similar processes. But parkour’s accessibility makes it stand out. Most people can jump, and that’s enough to begin building self-efficacy. Even untrained beginners go through the same predictive process as advanced practitioners (I’ve seen crowds of professional athletes watch in awe as a beginner attempts their first challenge — even if the challenge could be done with relative ease by any one of them).
Parkour and Mental Health
This way of thinking about prediction errors also helps explain why parkour can be valuable for people dealing with mood disorders such as depression or anxiety. In these conditions, the brain’s predictive models often skew toward expecting negative outcomes — anticipating failure, danger, or rejection — while filtering out positive surprises.
Parkour offers a practical counterbalance. By repeatedly experiencing positive prediction errors (“that wasn’t as bad as I thought,” “I actually could do that”), practitioners train their brains to update pessimistic models with more realistic — and often more optimistic — evidence. Over time, this can strengthen resilience, reduce avoidance, and help shift the balance from fear and doubt toward confidence and agency.
More Than Movement
Parkour is more than just movement. It’s embodied predictive coding training. Every jump is a negotiation between what you expect and what actually happens. Every success against fear is a recalibration — strengthening not only your body, but also your belief in yourself.
That’s the invisible 80%...
If you want to read more about the psychology of parkour, feel free to send me a message on Instagram (@charliehavill) with a topic you’re interested in. There’s plenty to explore — from the biology of fear and stress, to motivation and reward, to social identity.
