How to Teach Jeet Kune Do Like Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee felt that Wing Chun techniques stifled his potential and traditional martial arts were too formal and rigid for street fighting. He developed his own form of martial arts and called it Jeet Kune Do. His focus was on "practicality, flexibility, speed and efficiency." Learn to teach the "Way of the Intercepting Fist."

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

The Philosophy

1. Lead your students to success by beginning with weight training to build strength. Include running for endurance and stretching exercises for flexibility.
2. Teach stop-kicks, stop-hits and other moves in a format of drills, but unlike other martial arts, there is no specific way or pattern and no set rhythm necessary to perform. Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques or means that serve its end.
3. Focus your teaching on some basic drills. Drills include fake to the fade, reference points, matching and unmatching leads, sensitivity energy, broken rhythm, speed packs, the six sectors, five-way neuro-muscular response drills, triangular foot work, aggressive sticky hands and others (see Resources).
4. Offer a variety of technical drill options, but allow the students to be creative with the moves when completing the drill. Bruce Lee explains, "Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless and add what is specifically your own."
5. Allow your physical execution of Jeet Kune Do to evolve within a spirituality that is void of conscious, deliberate systematic action. When you teach like Bruce Lee remember, "The consciousness of 'self' is the greatest hindrance of the proper execution of all physical action."
6. Instruct students regarding tempo. "The success of a movement, defensive or offensive depends on whether we perform it at the right time or not. We must surprise our opponent and catch the moment of his helplessness," according to Bruce Lee (see Resources).

Stop-Hit and Counter-Time

7. Consider using a stop-hit in the beginning of an attack with a forward step. "A stop-hit is more often useful and successful against attacks that begin with a step forward where the margin of time allowing for success is greater than against attacks not preceded by a step. You can therefore say that generally the stop-hit is the stroke chosen to deal with the stepping preparation," said Lee.
8. Arrest the aggression of your opponent with the stop-hit concept. "It can be direct or indirect. It may be used as he steps forward with a kick or punch, when he is pre-occupied with feinting or between two moves of a complicated combination," teaches Bruce Lee.
9. Find the speed of your opponent's reactions and his rhythm. Lee explains, "Counter-time is the strategy by which an opponent is induced or provoked to attack in tempo, with the object of counter-timing or alternatively taking possession of the opposing hand or detaching it and executing a subsequent attack or riposte. It lays not so much in drawing the stop-hit as in correctly timing the parry, which deflects it."
10. Give your students the opportunity to learn counter-time through practice and experience. Teach about exact timing, accuracy and contact reflexes.