Adam McClellan has been doing parkour since 2006. He coaches, and when this conversation was recorded he was also training other coaches and building a parkour facility. Partway through it, unprompted, he puts a question to himself and then leaves it standing.

“Are you automatically taking some of the spirit of parkour away? As soon as you add a structure to it?”

He is asking from inside the problem. He teaches a children’s parkour program, and he is blunt about what it passes on. The classes teach what he calls “a bag of tricks of movements,” one move and then the next and how to do each one better next time. What they do not teach is the rest of it, because “there’s that deep exploration essence that we really can’t […] build into a curriculum so we don’t focus on it. So we kind of don’t teach it.” Which leads him to “So are we teaching parkour? […] I don’t know.”

The parallel he reaches for is martial arts, and it is where the question stops being a matter of feeling and becomes arithmetic. One instructor can hold a real teaching relationship with a handful of students. Put a hundred of them in a temple and that stops being possible, so, in his words, “there needs to be a chain of command now.” Someone below the instructor takes twenty of them.

He follows the same shape into business, where a vice president is responsible for a general manager and the general manager takes care of fifty employees. Then the cost of it:

“The relationship between the employees and the CEO now is so distant. And if the CEO is the one who’s sparking the culture, then there’s going to be a disconnect no matter what you do.”

He thinks that disconnect is inherent: on his account, not a management failure that a better chief executive would avoid, but what distance does to culture once the chain is long enough to need links.

Set that beside one of the things he says practitioners value about parkour, which is that the hierarchy is not there. No titles, nothing anyone has to be called:

“It’s just, you and me, and we’re hanging out, you don’t have to call me anything […] we’re just training together.”

If teaching a hundred people takes a chain of command, and part of what people value is that there is not one, then growing the practice may cost some of what drew them to it. He has stood on both sides of that. He left a martial arts school because he “wanted something a little more genuine,” and started a parkour community. Now, in his words, “It’s a full business. I’ve got employees, I’ve got a handbook.”

The school he left, he says, “lost some of its culture, which I think is natural to scalability.” Of the cycles his own community has gone through he says “they seem inevitable in my experience,” and that he has “not yet figured out how to not lose that closeness” as it grows.

None of this says structure is bad, or that curricula fail, or that a gym is a betrayal. His kids learn to move. The question is narrower and harder: what happens to the part that cannot go into a curriculum, when the curriculum is what lets you reach a hundred people instead of six.

Is there something in your own practice that only exists at small scale, the thing that works because there are four of you and no one is in charge? If there is, it is fair to wonder whether it would survive being made available to four hundred, or whether the structure that made it reachable would be what thinned it out.

He does not resolve it. He turns it backwards instead. In his telling, the people who started parkour were a group of eight or nine teenagers, and there are tens of thousands of practitioners now. He wonders how much of what that group had is already gone, and says he cannot imagine what has been lost.

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Adam McClellan: Business, coaching, and outreach,” published April 24, 2019.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.