Introduction

What's the connection between flying through the air on a parachute, shooting down a mountain valley on a snowboard and skating across water powered by a kite? The answer is that they are all Extreme Sports. Extreme Sports in the UK are really catching on and there are more and more places you can find access to these exciting, unconventional activities.

Unlike conventional sports, in which you are pitted against an adversary and often as part of a team, in extreme sports the main competitors are you, the elements and your own skill. There are a huge range of extreme sports available in the UK, all being highly exciting, challenging and huge amounts of fun.

Extreme Sports have been around in one form or another as long as man himself has sought to challenge nature with his own skill. In this constant pursuit of mastering themselves, extreme sport enthusiasts have taken traditional sporting activities and pushed their boundaries beyond the merely functional into a new realm of expertise. Thus parachuting has been transformed into sky surfing and BASE jumping.

Similarly, alpine skiing has styled out into snowboarding with its radical curves and pantheon of tricks. Meanwhile BMX, the Frankenstein lovechild of bicycle and motocross, has adopted what was meant to be a simple mode of transport and transformed it into an iconic sub-culture whose top riders are capable of performing double back somersaults in a single move upon giant ramps.

Add to this kite surfing, canyoning and a host of other outdoors pursuits designed to test your skill and raise your adrenaline levels and you can see why extreme sports are one of the fasting growing leisure activities in the UK and across the world today.

Every day of every year the boundaries of extreme sports are pushed further, so you can choose your arena and pick from an ever expanding range of sports adapted to that element. Do not be put off if you have no intentions of laying claim to a skateboard 900 degree flip, there are extreme sports that everyone can take part in. Whether surfing on sea, sand, water or the sky - if you are after excitement then extreme sports may be just the thing for you.