This essay is not designed to denigrate Jeet Kune Do (JKD), its standup skills, or various aspects which are quite valuable to learn, including short power, fast close footwork, trapping skills, and over-development of various muscle and core systems. It is an outline to provide practitioners a set of guidelines to help individuals to understand the system and even work on methods to deal with holes in the pure standup game.
A layered skill set involving good standing grappling, ground grappling, wrestling as base arts can definitely use JKD type principles added in support of those abilities. In addition to the normal methods, knowing various tie-ups, traps, wrist locks and short power moves are good ways to get from top control into a submission.
1. Almost all of the moves we have seen (movies, instructional) are stage fighting. Examples of this in the movie Enter the Dragon:
- The fight with O’Hara, which is staged with both fighters starting hands back to back. Even though O’Hara knows he is outclassed he still goes back and puts his hand back against Lee’s.
- The fight with multiple opponents who come one after another, very similar to the classic sword-fighter movies.
- Bruce Lee has said to his students that he would not fight in a real combat situation as you see in the movies.
- Many of the fights rely on camera angles and in truth Bruce Lee is not in position to hit multiple times with his triple kicks.
- All of the other fights are done in an exciting style, not long and drawn out, but they are still cinematic in nature.
2. You can’t do JKD without Bruce Lee level attributes. In order to do interception you have to have high skill in non-intention attacks, and non-telegraphic movements. You must have an unbendable arm to do trapping and keep the opponent at that range. People who try to do JKD invariably set up in demo-mode, and are having the “attacker” feed them movements which allow trap-hits and pak-sao energy. In similarly skilled matches you will not see any JKD/Wing Chun (WC) type movements.
3. Trapping distance is an artificial construct. The actual techniques which are employed at this artificial range are moves such as wrestling single-collar tie-ups, boxing hooks to the head and body, or standing grappling rapidly occurs. It may be compelling to think simultaneous block-and-strike and trapping methods would work the distance quickly collapses or is subsumed by wrestling or throwing moves. Can a trap of a more general nature work, such as a grab and strike? Yes, but the notion of a flurry of WC trapping and tie-up is rare and trying to pick strikes out of the air (guarding gates) usually ends up with the attacker/defender reaching for a parry and they get hit with a flurry of hooks or uppercuts.
4. On the ground (ground fighting) striking is almost nullified. The typical kind of strikes you rely on in WC or JKD, straight punches, even short power, rely on a power chain that comes from ground path or the drop step or other type of power chain. Typically, if you can fight back, you are limited, sometimes to frantic elbow strikes from the bottom. From top control it’s still not simple to hit if the opponent can deflect or cover. Anyone who only has standup skill will find it greatly reduced in ground fighting. What you see in current UFC fighting in ground and pound is employed by people with wrestling skill backing that up allowing them to maintain top control.
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| You are not going to get anyone to start a fight as you see Lee and O’Hara use with hands touching. |
5. Interception works primarily in one venue, the standing start confrontation. Someone with special skills in close combat, i.e. contact reflexes and short power, can do a lot of damage in a very short time frame in a special venue, that of standing start sudden confrontation. This is what Bruce Lee would have excelled at, since he could sense the opponent’s line of attack and use interception and short power and eye jabs and eye attack feints to quickly end the fight. You are not going to get anyone to start a fight as you see Lee and O’Hara use with hands touching. While it’s true Bruce Lee would often get the upper hand in demonstrations by rushing forward so he could get some contact and empty contact reflexes, this is hard to acquire in a real, unstructured fight.
6. Nobody has shown JKD in a dynamic match neither sparring fighting, nor demonstration. Without compliant stuntmen it can’t be sustained.
7. JKD ground work or throwing range was still in the ‘collection of tricks’ stage. Even years later when you see various of Bruce Lee’s students doing ground fighting it was a quick set of moves with a cooperating opponent, starting with an agreed upon start point such as a wrist grab or bear hug. They did not even show rolling or flowing using guard and mount in some of Dan Inosanto’s JKD grappling DVD instructional, even though by that time rolling was a known methodology. It was because he had not yet developed grappling flow, nor did he understand how to do BJJ or JKD with a BJJ flavor.
8. Bruce Lee did not have mobile kicking. Mobile kicking incorporates bridging the gap in one move. Mobile kicking invokes a sequence in which, from a fighting stance, the body is unweighted and the energy of chambering the lead leg pulls the body forward and the rear leg slides forward along the gap to be bridged and the kick is thrown with a high chamber immediately. It is not a 1-2-3 movement you see in step kicks. It’s sometimes seen with a hop but the back leg does not move first. This is seen primarily in early TKD kicking even as far back as the late 70s and early 80s. Against a mobile kicker, a static or step kicker has almost no chance of getting in a kick. You can see this in some of the backyard videos that Bruce Lee did with James Coburn.
9. Bruce Lee did not have any takedown skills, such as a penetration step, lowering the level and shooting, neither did he have a takedown defense. Though some people can use a knee or elbow or side-step against a takedown it is non-standard, requires takedown training to perfect, and thus without actual skill in wrestling it is usually very easy for grapplers and wrestlers to get a takedown against pure strikers. Since Bruce Lee did not have to regularly contend with wrestlers or grapplers, he realized he had to be very careful to stay out of range. However, wrestlers are very adept at getting under a jab or getting the opponent to step into their penetration step. It’s a definite weakness and a hole its the typical game of someone who trains in standup only.
10. None of Bruce Lee’s students have solved these problems, including Dan Inosanto, of the lack of aliveness, removing the scripted nature of ‘demo sparring’, nor did they seem to realize the need for hyper-development of attributes and strengths. Among the few in JKD who did strive to solve these problems were most notably, Matt Thornton/SBG and Erik Paulson and their students.
11. Though people have extracted some of the principles of JKD they are stuck in the ‘what’ and don’t have a conception about the ‘how’ to enable developing them.
12. In the late stage of JKD Bruce Lee was actively hiding his methods even from the inner circle. (See below the list of 25 most common things that Bruce Lee was hiding to prevent another from following in his path, since he was reluctant to give those who were bigger and stronger abilities similar to his.) He was OK with giving some of the surface moves or some of the derivational moves he uncovered, but he would be very careful about showing how he did various moves and the build up needed to do some of his stunts. If you don’t know how some of the stunt are developed over a long time with lots of methods of training and conditioning seeing the final stunt does not give you the means to duplicate it.
13. They did not routinely practice leg kicks at or near the level of MMA and MT. JKD kicks are done at the level of stop kicks and are at a good skill level but without consistent practice against a variety of strong opponents they will not be developed beyond a certain level. Certainly stop kicks and simultaneous block and kick methods are good against rudimentary kicking certain aspects found in MT and MMA do not get trained.
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| The ability to handle multiple opponents is actually just stage fighting. |
14. The ability to handle multiple opponents is actually just stage fighting; it’s not reality based. Against even three people who work in concert and who have some experience it is very unlikely that any fighting method can work. It makes for exciting movie-making but is not realistic.
15. Bruce Lee had good infighting abilities but he had not developed certain aspects seen in modern boxing, such as side-stepping, staying in the pocket, the bob and weave, and the modern MMA peek-a-boo blocking cover reflexes. He was still espousing a distance parry and interception method which doesn’t work against capable opponents, even though he recognized that these Western boxing skill did exist. Being able to demonstrate them is not the same as using them against a skilled boxer.
16. His ground fighting skill methods were still in the mode of JJJ (Classical Japanese Jiu-Jitsu) or a collection of tricks. Though he may have been close to uncovering the idea of ‘aliveness’ many of his proponents didn’t figure it out for many, many years. Subsequent JKD students did realize that grappling was important, but they had not realized the method to do so, which is using BJJ, guard and mount and rolling as a delivery system to ‘aliveness’ which is movement, timing, resistance, lack of scripting,
17. Bruce Lee did not yet understand ‘aliveness’ or timing, movement, resisting opponent and he had not understood the delivery system needed to develop skills through rolling.
18. His biggest draw back was that he did not have a wide variety of opponents near his level to allow the best progression and almost all of his students and partners were well beneath his ability - no fault of his, to be sure.
19. One of his biggest problems, pointed out by Joe Lewis is his ‘untested chin’. Many gym fighters discover to their dismay when they actually fight that their abilities in the ring are not comparable, either due to lack of durability, glass jaw, or adrenaline dump or nerves.
20. Finally he had a very limited experience with actual sport-fighting, due, in part to a lack of venues for such things, so we don’t really have a good sense of his weaknesses and limitations. The key point is not these specifics but the great advances and methods he was using are still in use today.
Advanced methods of JKD still in use:
1. Bruce Lee had ‘next level’ capabilities in his lead hand finger jab, including shocking speed, penetration, timing and precision. In theory that weapon, coupled with 1”
fa-jing like power, speed of initiation and ability to get in before being blocked it could handle any opponent regardless of size (but within reach) or weight. Could a boxer with lightweight speed and reflexes have blocked or evaded the eye jab? It’s unlikely.
2. Bruce Lee had next level ability to kick from a distance, using both sudden explosive ability and an ability to break free hanging boards. However, his kicking was not at the level of modern MT.
3. Few, if any successors really understand the non-intention (NI), non-telegraphic (NT) nature of Bruce Lee’s ability, excepting Pat Strong, and fewer still show comparable development.
4. Few, if any successors understand how Bruce Lee was able to intuit his opponent’s attack before it was begun. This is derived from his NI and NT ability, projected outward.
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| Bruce Lee’s ability to call up rage mode in a split second |
5. Few, if any successors understand Bruce Lee’s ability to call up rage mode in a split second, how it was developed and implemented. A few people are aware of it (Bleecker, Lewis, DeMile).
6. Few, if any successors have understood nor developed his core, forearm, unbendable bridge arm, neck and back development. He was driven to make ‘weak aspects’ found in everyone over-developed, including the bridge arm, the finger jab, the fast close (which could have been improved).
7. There is generally an agreement from at least two sources, Jesse Glover and James DeMile primarily, that Bruce Lee was actively hiding his methods of development. We have some hints of ways he did things, and we know from some advanced students like Patrick Strong that there are some known developmental paths that he took. One of them was to break all techniques into three parts or phases. We also know he used isometrics and weight training, and he used various training devices that James Lee built, as well as traditional WC methods, like the Wooden Dummy. We know he emphasized training the waist, core, upper back, wrists and neck for specific reasons. He trained the waist and wrist to help him extend power away from the body, as he called it or short power. See below a partial list of some of the methods that Bruce Lee was actively hiding. These are ideas that I have put together over many years of studying writings, training, and trying to read between the lines and find various clues to flesh out these methods.
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Among the things that Bruce Lee was hiding, I share the following. I have no way to confirm these and I’d ask readers to evaluate my commentary and use these ideas to point the way to their own research.
Here is a list of many of the main things that I believe we have evidence that Bruce Lee was keeping more-or-less secret:
1) How he developed his 'non-intention' methods, both how he knew that non-intention was different from 'non-telegraphic’, and what was needed to exhibit non-intention based preparations.
2) The training methodology for doing the fast close from 3 and 5 feet has not been disclosed. Jesse Glover details how he talked to him about breaking any technique down into three parts. He also subdivided the types of speed into several categories. Initiation speed, mile per hour speed, timing speed and speed in combinations. Today we know there are methods to develop the ability a sprinter has for coming out of the blocks, for instantly reacting to a stimulus. These include certain types of over-speed training, being pulled forward with elastic bands and so forth.
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| Some people have mentioned that the source for JKD were 26 arts that Bruce Lee studied or favored. |
3) Some people have mentioned that the source for JKD were 26 arts that Bruce Lee studied or favored. This is somewhat speculative since Bruce Lee did not create this list but some students have claimed he told them. In other words the reason he chose to detail these 26 arts has been explained in a way that is really incomplete. There was a specific reason, but he didn't articulate it. I think it’s safe to say, that in addition to having some familiarity with these known styles, he wanted an art to represent each of the ranges of combat. Close fighting, medium range, kicking range, fencing range, ground-fighting range and so on.
4) Some things were hidden in plain sight. They were hidden behind aphorisms. It takes some deep thought and digging around to really understand what they actually meant. He talked about the cutting away non-essential things (like a sculptor removing clay), however, if you didn’t have deep understanding of things there was nothing left to be removed. We know Guro Dan has talked about various phrases, such as ‘Absorb What is Useful’, but we don’t actually know the origin of these phrases. They key is to examine these commonly repeated concepts and be sure to know the why of them, and the how of them. How is something accomplished is more important in deep understanding than knowing what the phrase or proverb was.
5) The method of development and the reason for developing his bridge arm is not widely discussed. We now know he relied heavily on isometrics, and Jesse Glover related that Bruce Lee talked about how he used to press his arm against the underside of his desk in school because he was bored. One day his hand slipped off of the desk and he was surprised at the way energy was suddenly released. This concept formed the basis for some of his fast attack movements.
6) The methodology behind being able to 'read' an opponent's intention is not well explained. At this point only one of his students talks about it (Pat Strong). Part of this was being able to go into a mode similar to that kind of perception where things seem to slow down. Various sports experts talk about how they perceive the game ball to move slowly, to be much larger than normal and to feel they had a lot of time to react, far beyond the mere micro-seconds that went by in real time. Ted Williams talked about being able to see the seams in a fast ball. Jimmy Connors said that he perceived the tennis ball in a fast serve to actually be larger than reality. It’s not quite clear what the brain mechanism is that accounts for this. Some people seem to have a knack for calling it up spontaneously. There may have been a procedure that Bruce Lee used to develop ‘fast perception’ and perhaps how to get into the state where time seemed to expand. Since it’s not an uncommon phenomenon, it is worth exploring.
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| Bruce Lee's highly developed forearms |
7) We know Bruce Lee had a reason for his developing his forearms to such a high degree, but there are few discussions on why. Though people might quibble with this, bear in mind only one or two JKD practitioners worked on things like this. If people wanted to do JKD and omit this that shows they don't understand what the importance was. Obviously, it takes genetics, and a lot of time and energy to develop these kinds of attributes, many of which are beyond those of the normal trainer. Part of the ability of hitting hard is having a very tight fist - there is no give in the hand. In addition the closing of the hand and the classic ‘wrist tilt’ which occurs in a vertical punch is magnified if there is hyper-development of those muscles.
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| Bruce Lee developing core and abdominals |
8) We know there are obvious reason why someone wants to develop their core and abdominals. It’s fairly obvious that if the opponent does not have this kind of development then they may be unable to use some of the methods of accumulating power and issuing energy. He went to such extremes because of his idea of making weak things strong, things that were weak even in strong individuals. Only a few people who claim to be JKD or JDK concepts students or instructors did that, and almost none of this other inner circle did. Without an ability to tie the upper and lower parts of the body together you can’t stabilize various high speed movements and you can’t transmit power from the ground and the legs to the arms and hands. We know that types of
fa-jing (Chinese internal power) require a type of store and release involving the pelvic floor muscles and the internal core muscles.
9) Though we now know about the existence of various training tools and equipment, there’s some doubt that his second and third group of students were not exposed to the use of training equipment, particularly some of the things that James Lee build for him. I wonder if his students even knew he was using that equipment. Yes, there are pictures of him using various things but he did not, to my knowledge, go over those in depth when he was teaching in the early 70s.
10) He hid his 'x-rated' moves. He discussed those with Dan and Jesse and we have some inkling that he would not fight in a real life-or-death situation like we see in the movies or any of his media or comments. By ‘X-rated’ a term he shared with Jesse Glover, he meant deadly force, not just hitting but one-strike kills or one movement kills such as neck wrenches hitting the area near the heart, or using eye attacks. An equivalent method would be a single-strike incapacitating move.
11) Bruce Lee had an extensive number of supplements and vitamins and other substances, including prescription items that he used. We do not really know completely what he used and what his dosage level was. Even if we largely discount much of what Tom Bleecker says in his book “Unsettled Matters”, nobody really knows what he was doing as far as diet and supplementation. In order to try and duplicate such things it would be helpful to know what Bruce Lee used to develop such a high degree of muscularity and low subcutaneous fat. There are regimes we know of now, but it’s possible that this was not natural. When one looks at photographs of Bruce Lee in his mid-twenties he had a normal athletic build, but it is not on par with the extreme muscularity and low subcutaneous fat.
We do know he had friends and associates who could acquire performance-enhancing substances, and there are stories of unusual dietary practices he engaged in. There are no clear diary records which have been released which describe his supplement and medication dosages. We do know he had prescriptions for cortico steroids.
12) He hid his true level of sparring ability. We hear he never sparred except for brief demonstrations when training Joe, Chuck or Mike Stone. Some have suggested it could be because he didn’t want anyone to know how good he was, or perhaps what weaknesses he had. If one examines the large number of sparring and fighting principles he left behind, including those specific ones that Joe Lewis details in his books, it’s clear that he was espousing methods that far advanced beyond what most people were using in those days. We have to remember the majority of karate instructors, when asked, would say things like ‘do more kata’ or work harder. He was one of the first people to systematize the use of weights and specific resistance machines.
13) He carefully shielded all of his pro-level students from sharing what he was telling them. Both Joe Lewis, Mike Stone and Chuck Norris and other pro-level students he worked with said that he always kept their training separate.
14) He hid the double pak-sao. He specifically told Dan never to disclose that. One has to realize that what he meant by this move is probably not the same as the typical WC version. Perhaps hit was an over-trained method.
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| It's said that Bruce Lee could penetrate an old style coke can holding the can in his hand with a finger stab. |
15) The degree of his ability as to his finger jab was not often talked about except in years after he had passed away. There are 'stories' that he could penetrate an old style coke can holding the can in his hand with a finger stab.
16) He hid the nature of his EDC (everyday carry). Some stories are out there that he carried nunchaku and some that he was occasionally armed with a firearm.
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| Bruce Lee hid the power of his back fist. |
17) He hid the power of his back fist. There are stories in the last year of his life he was able to dent the face mask of their sparring masks with a back fist and that this mask was of above average gauge steel mesh, almost a grid not a mesh.
18) He hid his ability to ‘take a punch’, and by that I mean a punch to the face/head. There’s some speculation that he may have had a good chin and some that he may have had a glass jaw and didn’t dare spar lest that be exposed. There are other indications in direct opposition to this, in that he trained his neck and jaw muscles which are known to help resist being knocked out.
19) He hid some of his conclusions about the efficacy of JKD and we see some of this in his letters to other Yip Man students particularly Hawkins Cheung (HC) which he discussed it privately which have now been published. He talked to HC about how he felt that JDK was ultimately a failure, though he didn’t explain what that meant except to say he could not make ‘interception’ work in all cases.
20) He hid some of his extensive training notes, though later some of that came out when Linda Lee and Gilbert L. Johnson compiled and published them in The Tao of JKD. It’s possible he didn’t share much of this with any of his students. We tend to think of these things as ‘not hidden’ because Linda and Gilbert published the notes, but the truth is, I don’t think Bruce Lee had any intention of letting much if not most of this out to his students, much less the public. Much of what was put together in The Tao of JKD were obvious cribs of various boxing manuals, fencing manuals and quotes taken from Jiddu Krishnamurti, a noted philosopher.
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| This acrobatic stunt was performed by Yuen Wah and not Bruce Lee. |
21) The fact that the stunt men in his movies were the ones doing the more acrobatic things and not him was not forthcoming until much later. In fact, to this day it’s not common knowledge that all the aerial acrobatics in Enter the Dragon were performed by a stunt man (and he had his own team of stuntmen), and not him that stunt was actually done by Yuen Wah. Bruce Lee did not have any unusual tumbling or aerial aerobatic skills.
22) He hid his physical flaws, inducing his leg length discrepancy and his vision problems, though now we know about those.
23) He hid how he developed his ‘kill word’ or his ‘instant ramp up to killing intent’ (James DeMile explains it involves self-hypnosis and using a ‘pre-programmed kill word’ that you say silently).
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| The Chinese audience called Bruce Lee ‘the man with three legs’. |
24) He showed the public a side which was a bit different than his real abilities. We all thought he was a super kicker, and the Chinese audience called him a name something like ‘the man with three legs’ for his triple turning kick. But we all found out later his real power was in his hands.
25) He presented a stage image of a ‘fighter’ using essentially sparring techniques which were really equivalent to ‘stage fighting’ like you see in the old Douglas Fairbanks sword and swashbuckling movies. The reality is that he told Dan ‘
a real fight now will be over in about 3 seconds, I don’t play around’.
© Badger Johnson 2018
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