Living like a Gentleman Spy means being able to navigate your environment with ease and speed.

A chase through the streets. Clamoring up the sides of buildings, jumping off the roofs, and rolling right back into a dead sprint. Whether it's 007 chasing a bomb maker in Uganda or Bourne running over the rooftops in Tangiers, parkour is about moving through your environment as efficiently as possible.

Running a 5k every morning might be a waste of time but being able to sprint at full speed and negotiate any obstacle in his path is a mandatory skill; one that may come in handy even if you never have to chase bad guys through crowded streets. But how do you get started?

First, check out the myriad YouTube channels, playlists, and guides that contain great information:

• American Parkour (APK)'s Parkour Guides
• Tapp Brothers How to Parkour
• American Parkour's Getting Started page
• Ryan Ford's YouTube playlists
• Ronnie Street Stunts Parkour Basics

You can begin training on your own, in an apartment, back yard, or public park, with nothing but the skills and progressions you find online.

Skills to work on include your balance, rolling, landing, precision jumps, vaults, climbing, tic-tac, and more as your skills progress.

Balance, jumping, and landing are all fairly basic skills, although you can and should practice to get better. But other valuable skills are not something we practice or use on a regular basis.

Shoulder rolls are not necessarily an everyday skill for most people but need to become second nature. Being able to fall and roll safely, when completely surprised and off-balance, will keep you safe and injury-free. Check out the video tutorials, then start practicing on a soft surface like grass, sand, or even carpet inside until you have the hang of it. From there, start from standing, and add momentum, until you can do it from a full run or jump off an obstacle.

After the shoulder roll, work towards mastering at least a few of the other basic parkour moves:

• Wall run
• Cat leap
• Safety vault
• Lazy vault
• Speed vault
• Monkey vault
• Kong vault
• Tic-tac
• Underbar

You don't need to take your parkour skills to the extreme. You don't need to master all the moves on the list or be able to jump off 20-foot walls. You do need to build competency in moving through your environment as quickly and efficiently as possible.

You don't need to spend hours working on your parkour training either. A few minutes of practice can easily be integrated with (or used as a warm-up for) your weekly running workouts.

If you decide to step things up more, find a local parkour/traceur/freerunning group and start practicing with them. Facebook groups, Meetup.com, and parkour forums are great places to find people in your area to train with.

In many cities you can find dedicated parkour/freerunning gyms or facilities. These will be able to give you top quality instruction on everything from the basics of rolling and falling, through advanced moves and acrobatics if you decide to go that route.

Like swimming and parkour, learning some basic climbing will allow you to move through your environment at will. Not everybody has access to a climbing gym, or an outdoor area suitable for rock climbing, but if you do, it is highly recommended that you learn enough to at least have a basic capacity in the vertical realm.

Many people believe that climbing is a game of strength. It is, and it isn’t. While you do need strength, especially in your grip and arms, climbing is a sport of skill and finesse. The guys that try to muscle themselves up the wall are the ones that will tire quickly and not be able to climb as difficult terrain.

In order to learn the finesse skills required of the climber, your best bet is to either take a class at your local rock gym or find an experienced guide or trainer to help you learn outside.

If you do have access to a gym, they should be able to rent you all the required equipment to get started climbing safely, and you might be able to try out different types of gear before purchasing it.

If you’re getting started outside, there are some basic equipment requirements that you need to have taken care of before you ever go on the rock. You will either need to purchase these yourself, or have a guide provide them for you to get started.

You will need:

Depending on where you intend to climb, there may be requirements for specific gear above (e.g. no alpine harnesses allowed in climbing gyms), or additional gear not covered (quickdraws, cams, nuts, runners, crash pads, etc.). This is especially noticeable in various indoor gyms as they may have specific requirements on the type of harness or belay devices that they require of their climbers. Contact the gym or the guide that you plan to use and get recommendations from them.

Once you have some basic instruction complete, the most helpful thing you can do is find some local climbers that you get along with and start climbing with them. This is especially helpful if they are better than you — you’ll never progress that far if you’re always the best on in your group. You need to test yourself to improve.