Nivla Parkour
Tricking
Tricking — often called martial arts tricking — is a movement art that blends kicks from martial arts, flips from gymnastics and twists all their own into flowing combos. It grew out of martial-arts demo teams and extreme martial arts (XMA) in the late 1990s and 2000s and became its own global sport, powered by video and online community.
Here's a plain-English guide to the tricks you'll hear named most, and how to start training them. Every trick below lives in the Nivla Parkour trick library, where you can see exactly what it is and track your progress from "not started" to "yes, I can".
The core tricks
Foundations
Most trickers start with the cartwheel and round-off, then the aerial (a no-hands cartwheel) and the butterfly twist (often shortened to "btwist"). These build the takeoffs and body awareness everything else is built on.
Kicks
Trickable kicks include the tornado kick, hook kick, cheat 720 and cheat 900 — spinning kicks that add rotation and style, and combine into longer combos.
Flips and twists
The headline tricks: the backflip and frontflip, the gainer (a backflip travelling forward), the cork (corkscrew — an off-axis backflip with a twist), the raiz and touchdown raiz, and rotation add-ons like the full (a backflip with a full twist). From there the combos and variations are endless.
How to start tricking
A safe order that most trickers follow:
- Flexibility and conditioning. Kicks and takeoffs need mobile hips and strong legs — warm up and stretch every session.
- Rolls and cartwheels. Forward and backward rolls, cartwheels and round-offs build the base.
- Aerials and basic twists. The aerial and butterfly twist are the classic first "real" tricks.
- Use soft surfaces. Learn flips into a foam pit, on an air track or over a trampoline before taking them to the ground.
- Get coaching. A gymnastics or tricking gym, or an experienced spotter, makes flips dramatically safer to learn.
Never rush a flip to hard ground. Progression is everything — and it's exactly how the Nivla Parkour app is built: every trick has clear checkpoints, so you always know the next safe step toward landing it clean.
Explore the other disciplines
Tricking sits alongside parkour (efficient movement, vaults and jumps) and trampoline (freestyle flips and twists on the bounce) in the Nivla library. Many athletes train all three.