Picture yourself at the top of Brisbane’s towering buildings. How would you get down? If you’re like most people, you might stroll down the stairs. But if you’re Dylan or Brodie Pawson, the 25-year-old Aussie professional parkour twins, all you see is possibility. You might sprint and jump into the wall, plant your feet, and then leap and flip off it, landing on the stairs below. Or you might grab the lip of the wall, lower yourself halfway, push your feet off, and flip onto the ground. Then maybe you’d hop up to the railing, run down it, and side-flip to the landing at the bottom.
“There have been a few amazing jumps in Brisbane we have done that we are proud of,” they explain to us over email. “We’re lucky enough to have travelled the world training in places like France, Greece and Italy – a few of our favourite jumps have been in Singapore, the UK and Santorini.“
This is how you see any space with walls, ledges, and railings (or any space outdoors) when you’re a professional parkour athlete, the daredevil sport/art/way of life that’s growing in popularity—and is a workout in itself.
“We both watched a parkour video on YouTube after school one day, and we’ve pretty much been hooked ever since! That was over 13 years ago. We started just by jumping over little things like chairs, bins, stuff in the park like benches and moved up from there,” they add, revealing that they look up to legends in the discipline like David Belle (the founder of Parkour), Team Storror and Dominic Di Tommaso.
Parkour focuses on “usefulness,” pushing you to find efficient ways to move. Becoming a professional looks at developing the fundamental attributes required for such movement, which include functional strength and fitness, balance, spatial awareness, agility, coordination, precision, control and creative vision.
“We do strength and conditioning training two to three times a week, plus two to three days of parkour,” the twins explain. “Our strength and conditioning training is usually around a two-hour session, which involves back squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, tricep dips and bench press. We tend to stick to heavy weights, low reps (5×5).”
With hopes of being able to travel again to ‘be able to take on places like Santorini, the UK and the States’, the pair have partnered with GoPro, just in time for the release of the new GoPro HERO10 – which features the company’s new high-performance GP2 processor, allowing the camera to deliver breakthrough image quality and speed. A pretty good fit for all the jumping around these boys do.
“We had so much fun testing out the new GoPro HERO10 Black against the HERO6 with the old GP1 processor. The new HyperSmooth 4.0 feature gives us next-level stabilisation during our jumps. We were honestly amazed at how high the image and video quality was as we could crop and zoom in footage without losing any of the detail. As well as using speed tools like slow-mo – perfect for some epic parkour edits.”
Check out the twins in action below.
@brodiepawson Ahead of the @GoProANZ HERO10 Black’s global release, we compared it side by side to the HERO6 to show how incredible it is #GoProHERO10 #parkour ♬ A-O-K - Tai Verdes