Origins
Parkour started in 1988 in Lisses, France.
David Belle, inspired by his military firefighting father, became very athletic and was trained by Georges Hèrbert
Georges Hèrbert observed natives interacting with their environments athletically, and studied this idea for a while.
Herbert created the methode naturale, based off of how the natives used their bodies to interact with their surroundings.

"Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant, and yet they had no other tutor in Gymnastics but their lives in Nature."
-Georges Hèrbert

Georges Hèrbert's philosophies, along with Belle's love for martial arts movies (especially Bruce Lee), led Belle to the beginning of parkour.
Just as Bruce Lee did with martial arts, Belle focused on adaptability as opposed to a rigid structure, which is the very idea of parkour itself.


David Belle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Belle

Freerunning Freerunning is a form of parkour, commonly mistaken for parkour because of the similarities. Freerunning is a more stylistic form of parkour, focusing on flips and movement as opposed to efficiency. Freerunners employ the same ideas as parkour, with a different objective: to have fun with it. Freerunning takes the physics to a new level by including a lot of angular velocity and momentum to rotate the body in every way possible.