Stages of learning

 

The illustration shows in Bruce Lee's own handwriting, the 'three stages of a technique'.  He breaks this down into : Synchronisation of Self, Synchronisation with an opponent, and finally 'application under fighting condition'.    

The first stage is primarily aimed at learning the correct form, developing precision, and to synchronise all this as a 'whole' , building up speed progressively, but never to lose form (get sloppy). 

The second stage is about timing and distance.  Here you may find yourself working with a partner who provides targets to strike at various angles, intervals and distances (focus mitts drills).  Also here the difficulty is gradually increased. 

Lastly you will test these with a (sparring) partner, who will also be willing to hit back, doesn't want to get hit himself etc.   and is the closest you will get to real fighting conditions.  

As you can see, this progression is very similar to anything we learn. You start with the basics, and gradually increase the difficulty and application of those very same basics.  

Many martial artists confuse this with making things more complicated.  

If anything, a fight should be simple, direct and straight to the point, which will give you the best chance of 'scoring', walking away from the encounter relatively unharmed.  The 3 stages of learning are a great way of getting you there.  

Walk On! 

7 deadly sins in martial arts!

As published by Mike Gittleson by JKD Colorado.



The seven deadly sins as they relate to the martial arts...
Pride - making your training about showing off, finding every chance you can to try to dazzle everyone with your "omnipotent" skill
Greed - Focusing on making money and building an imperium of students and followers.
Lust - Lusting after fame, glory and thy neighbor's wife (aka other people's students)
Envy - Spending time watching others in envy of their fame, abilities and accolades. Turning this to ridicule, nitpicking and trying to justify your envy by pointing out everything they do wrong.
Gluttony - Trying to collect an inordinate amount techniques in order to feel all knowing. Training for accumulation rather than simplicity and understanding.
Wrath - Lashing out angerly at others, coveting hatred for those who have differing opinions or practice different styles.
Sloth - Pure laziness in your training. Maintaining the facade that you have earned your skill, all the while, not continuing to practice and hone it.
Don't succomb to the sins. Keep your training honest and focused.


Walk On!

Workshop success

 Wow, that went quick.  One day you're busy organising a workshop with all the hotel/paperwork/venue etc to arrange, and then it's gone.  We had fun!  There were people with prior JKD experience, but also hosted people with a Kali, Taekwon-do, Kung Fu , Kickboxing backgrounds.  They all had a great time, learned new things or got a fresh perspective on things they apply but now have a deeper understanding of.  Walk On!

Jeet Kune Do - Competition or not?

 Jeet Kune Do is amongst the martial arts for which generally there are no competitions held.(* I'll get to some exceptions later). 

The overwhelming majority of people training in JKD (and that includes those training in the JKD Concepts approach) tend to train for personal development, and there is a wide spread view that as JKD is designed for the street, no rules, 'any thing goes', you couldn't possibly hold competitions because there are multiple techniques / actions you'd not be able to do as it would injure your opponents.  

Yet we do train them on a variety of targets, and also with some restraint, on your sparring partner whilst wearing the appropriate protection equipment. 

The main issue is not so much that you couldn't conceive a competition, but by stripping it back to make it safer and introduce rules (amongst which how to award points/ scoring system) you inherently alter the essence of the art, and it is in danger of looking like a kickboxing contest, or any other martial arts tournament.  

*This is exactly what has happened to some (dubious) Jeet Kune Do 'associations/world councils/fill in colourfull name' that have attempted it before and still hold tournaments. (they are predominantly located in Asia, most organisers/participants have no link to actual Jeet Kune Do instructors that have a direct lineage to any original students.) . The motive of these 'tournaments' seems unclear / vague to me, other than a vehicle to 'stroke' the ego of the founder of these organisations, and very little to do with competing in JKD..  There are some good martial artists amongst the competitors, but from I've seen I have not witnessed any JKD, but rather their structure etc looks more that of a Taekwondo fighter or kickboxer..  I posted some examples at the bottom of this article.

If a competition is held at all at any point, some real clear rules need to be established that ensure JKD remains recognisable as it's own art, not just 'anything goes'... The fighters should be encouraged to fight strongside forward, use minimum 80% lead weapons, and scoring should reward elements like trapping (for example a pak sao - backfist combi should score highly) so that people will actually use it and show off an element of JKD that isn't present in other (traditional) systems. 

What about fingerjabs? These could be given their own category, where participants have to score on a moving target within a certain time (maybe wearing gloves dipped in an ink or similar so that a clear visible mark is left where fingerjab landed) and speed and accuracy can be awarded in this way. 

Add the points from the fights to the points awarded to the 'finger jab' element, and the highest scorer is the overall winner. 

It is going to be difficult to organise and get sufficient participants however. There are not many genuine JKD schools compared to other martial arts.  That said, JKD students could still participate in other (open) tournaments, restricted to the rules of that tournament, if only to experience what it feels like to be under pressure in a fight (a higher level of pressure than you would experience normally at the school, where sparring is done to help eachother learn, not to win a match).  

Thoughts?  Here are a few links to a 'JKD' tournament: (copy and paste the text in your browser).

 https://youtu.be/MlAOXT2JkIE?si=VsJTnC-RqF2LCrHk

https://youtu.be/TqJSuNJ_2J4?si=xiTD0HWtkUolTfDa

https://youtu.be/HPUEw8MiZ7A?si=ubD49lCRriGCK2Mh

https://youtu.be/9_HufeuhsdI?si=TMtKKy7CaG_1z2KV

Walk On!

Getting Down with it

 Often the discussion comes up that people should practice grappling because thats what will happen in a fight.  Often they mention that 70% of fights end up on the ground. Whilst personally I don't subscribe to that high percentage, it is almost guaranteed that 100% start with both feet firmly planted on the ground.

What contributes to this view is the popularity of BJJ and MMA, with the latter responsible for the popularity of BJJ as it is seen that in the environment of MMA fights, grapplers were often dominant. So it's no surprise that this is the opinion held by many.  Is it therefore important to train lots in grappling? 

I say NO.  Let me clarify: Firstly, I'm going to state that it is good to get a bit of grappling experience, so you know what it 'feels' like.  But I'm saying NO to training it a LOT.   Why? First off, it is very unlikely that in a street fight, you will be facing an (experienced) grappler.  I can say this because of statistics. In the UK (where I live) there are approximately 67million people, of this, according to sport England data of 2022, about 237 thousand practice martial arts. That's one in 280 persons.  Of that amount a large proportion will be children. In practice it is probably about 2/3rd children and teens, vs adults.  That changes the ratio to about one in 5-600...  All other potential opponents have no martial arts background whatsoever so their fighting skills are not going to be of a high quality. That doesn't mean they won't try it (they see it on the TV all the time), but as a trained martial artist, you should be reasonably succesful in fending off their attacks from a stand up position, which is far more favourable. You retain mobility, so you can run away as soon as there is a chance, but one other big factor is important: Once on the ground, you are very much in a one on one environment with very little to no situational awareness. YOu're not going to see his budy (or a stranger) suddenly getting in on the action and kicking you in the head or worse.. Also you're not going to see any concealed bladed weapon he might be carrying so you could get stabbed in this situation, another reason to stay on your feet and keep him at a distance. 

So instead of spending time learning intricate grappling techniques and submissions etc, learn take down defenses, and how to get back up QUICK, when you're on the ground. Focus on those elements of ground fighting, and you will be best prepared for the majority of street encounters you are likely to find yourself in, at least in the UK.  Your mileage may vary, but thats the situation where I live. 

Walk On! 

Cross training in other arts?

 In my previous post I wrote about the importance to look at the 'root', and not the branches.

Subscribers to the JKD concepts method tends to train in various martial arts, often combining the strengths of many into a personal expression of JKD (not Bruce Lee's ),and/or looking at similarities (but you'd then invariably need to know the original material too, that's a lot of time invested), whilst those on the other side of the fence focus on the fundamental material, (just learn to punch and kick etc etc.) and apply Bruce Lee's teachings on strategy and structure..  One trains the root, the other the branches (you should by now know which is which).

However, if you are on the 'original JKD' side of the fence, does it matter or is it even beneficial to train in other arts?  The answer is obviously not a one size fits all.  Firstly, you need to be mindful how you approach that training. Why are you cross training? Is it because you simply enjoy it, are you in to the sport element of the other art(s) perhaps? 

Me and one other student recently did a little of this. We went to a workshop hosted by a local kickboxing school, who had invited Bill 'Superfoot' Wallace to teach.  Truth be told, we went primarily to meet with this legend of the martial arts world, after all he's not getting any younger. (79 by the time of writing). 

That said, it was fun to spend about 2 hours training kick boxing combo's and techniques , predominantly his approach of course (and boy, does he love the side kick, we threw a lot of them).. But what did we learn from it?  

What stood out for me personally is that all drills we did, were aimed at the 'competition' strategies you may encounter. All kicks/punches were above the belt etc, so the structure/approach and execution of all we did was aimed at that.  If you have trained in JKD for a while, this should hopefully be immediately apparent.  Some of the combo's we trew, could be simplified if used on the street. (why bother trying to make the opponent move his arms so I can kick him in the ribs), when just as easily I could have kicked him in the knee or groin?   

Nevertheless there were some pointers for me personally that I found helpful. It is always good to have another person pick up on little habbits you may have (bad or good, but usually you want them to pick up on 'bad' stuff, that's how you learn and grow) and Bill found a few on me. 

Truth be told, I wasn't used to fight on barefeet (and I developed blisters about 15 minutes in that continued to distract me for the rest of the session), and I'm not used to a kick boxing approach so I naturally didn't perform certain techniques the way he wanted me to (muscle memory can be a dissadvantage sometimes, I wrote about that before..). Personally, I wasn't too happy with my personal performance, but that's OK, I picked up a few pointers and had a great time! 

My main focus will always be JKD, but it was fun to get some other insights and to learn how others approach a fight. You can get a lot from books and videos, but occasionally experiencing it helps further your understanding.  And in this case, if you can learn from a legend,  then take the opportunity if you can, it's fun!

Walk On! 

The style of no style, system without a system, what's all this about?

 Bruce Lee was a man seemingly contradicting himself.  On the one hand, he is known for remarks or quotes as those in the title, and actually named his personal art 'Jeet Kune Do' and if you know the translation / meaning it would appear to seeminly solidify it into a 'style'  on the otherhand, he advocated to go 'beyond style', or beyond system.

For us living in the 2020's, reading Bruce Lee's notes and articles about him, it is often a little difficult to understand, particularly if you do not know in what phase of his personal development he made such statements or notes, and if they were for himself or a certain audience.   All in all it hasn't helped in making things easy to understand.  If you read earlier notes or annecdotes by others who knew him, you'd be forgiven to think  that Bruce was on a path to gather the best of many styles, and put them together into one coherent system, but he soon discovered that various systems varied in their approach, and they just didn't work well (together), and he then  came to the realisation that he approached it all wrong. Instead of looking from outside in, he decided to look inside out. In other words, rather than looking at the branches (the various martial arts systems/styles out there), he looked at the root of all human combat, which is the way a human being moves-functions. No matter what art you take, there's a human at the core(root)! This is where his statement 'it is futile to look at all the decorative flowers and branches, if you understand the root, you understand all it's blossoming', originates. 

He then started approach martial arts scientifically, to focus on how humans moved, which movements were more efficient than others for a certain task etc. This allowed him to become efficient, and fast. 

Yes, he had 3 arts at the root of his development, but he had found that these already had a fair degree of scientific approach behind them, he only needed to refine and adapt them to his needs. These were chiefly Ving Tsun, Boxing and Fencing, and by doing so, they no longer were 'fencing (he used no bladed weapons), boxing (he didn't use gloves and his footwork resembled more that of a fencer), and the forms in ving tsun were no longer important, rather he used the theories of centreline, 4 corners and others etc to develop his strategies.  The useful elements of each of these 3 arts were modified to a degree to work seemlessly together, and elements of grappling arts were studied to cover the ground fighting aspect, but all whilst being very consious not to move from style to style, depending on the situation, but rather which action / human movement is the most efficient/direct/effective at any given moment.  He didn't throw a boxing punch, followed by a wingchun trap and a kick, he 'just punched', 'kicked' , 'grabbed', 'pulled', 'threw' as it came naturally, not labelling things any longer.  The movements were purely based on efficiency as performed by the human body, and as such he transcended systems/styles.  This is also where the statement comes from that Jeet Kune Do, trancends all styles. 

This is what the true art of Jeet Kune Do is all about.  It can still be called a style, but I hope that you understand that this is not a 'style' in the traditional sense, but the rather the style of human combative movement.

The label Jeet Kune Do serves this purpose to identify we're studying/practicing Bruce Lee's teachings, and not anyone elses.

Walk On!