The big question is why

[JusticeZero]

...some guy with the last name Lee hodge-podged some stuff together, and it turned out pretty well....

Meh. A guy with horrible personality issues that made him a poor student who, through large amounts of work and natural talent, devised a number of principles of fighting which - had he actually tried learning from his teachers instead of bopping around looking for the next flash in the pan as soon as they asked him to put in a bit of work building a foundation on - he would have been taught.

[tallgeese]

Probibly not, actually.

Lots of things that Lee incorportated into JKD didn't exsist in the traditional Chineese arts that he was studying. And most of the movements that he researched weren't "flash in the pan" things, they were time tested combatives from other traditions that he was able to find a place for in an overall scheme which was different from the monotany of classical arts from which he came.

Natural talent and hard work are key ingrediants in building onesself into a fighter. I don't think you can use them in a negitive light.

You can look at it however you like, but I think most people will see it as solid reseach consolidated around a set of ideals that Lee invisioned for a more streamlined approach to combat.

In my mind, he's one of the revolutionary figures in martial arts.

[JusticeZero]

Well, he did do a lot of research... it's just that when you read his work, he is talking mainly about concepts that were not new, and bragging about them as though he had first come up with them. Also, his huge disdain of spending time learning proper body structure, only to do essentially the same sort of thing himself.

Natural talent and hard work are positives, yes; what annoys me is not that he had those attributes but that he was a poor student, and thus denied himself over and over chances to bypass a lot of the hard work and have someone just -teach- him the ideas he spent years working out.

[tallgeese]

The movements aren't new, that's for sure and I'm pretty sure he never claims they are. In fact in most of the sections of his Tao and Fighting Method books, he's quite quick to point out the origins of whatever drills he's using and then talk about putting them into a workable combative format. There's really not much out there that's new after a few thousand years of killing each other.

And I agree, there are great similarities in the postures he uses. My impression is that he's not so much railing against the postures, but against the classical mindset and training methodology behind them. His brilliance was that he took much of the constraining elements away was able to cast those movements into a framework that was far less rigid and more adaptable to a wide variety of situations.

The ideas he expoused just didn't exsist in the mindset of classical artist at the time. It was necissary to step away from the form of them to find these ideas. His concepts have filtered down into the way that mma is done today as well as RBSD. You see tons of what Lee was talking about in each and you'll see very little of classical thought pre-Lee in either.

That alone should distinguish what he was able to accomplish by breaking the traditional mold.

[Kuma]

While I'm no Bruce Lee worshipper, I do have to give him credit. When he had that fight with Wong Jack Man, he had only his Wing Chun training up to that point. I think during that fight he realized there was something missing from his training (what we know now as "aliveness"). Also there was probably an instance or two where he got himself into a situation and realized he didn't know what to do from there.

You can tell that fight had a big influence on him, because that's when his whole mindset changes and he begins his construction of Jeet Kune Do.

[JusticeZero]

The ideas he expoused just didn't exsist in the mindset of classical artist at the time.

This is the part I disagree with. I see lots of the same stuff Lee wrote about in the teachings, writings, etc. of martial artists preceding Lee; it's just that it's all stuff that you learn once you've built up your form enough to think of 'transcending' it without sounding ridiculous. Lee wasn't one to stick with a class long enough to get a solid foundation in the art, ergo, he didn't run into the teaching of what to do after one reached that level. Probably because those ideas tend to mislead and confuse students before that level.

[tallgeese]

From my experiance, I've never seen the culmination and experimentatin that marked Lee's work in anything else put together in the formats which he arranged. Again, movements, yes. But the overall pattern and strategy is what's important beyond mere movement.

Ceratinly, the training mindset and methods he incorportated we're and still aren't a major building block of traditional arts. Experimentation with the ideal of imporoving on and absorbing into what your doing is still not widely accepted in mainstream trad ma organizations.

You see it more in mma style gyms, whose methods are often decried by trad organizations. You certainly see it in functional sd training, which is again often thought of as a step child of ma's not truely a ma into an of itself.

I also have to say that time is important is certain things. I might be in a confrontation tomorrow, that means that the sooner I start working on a variey of situational responses, the better. I don't have time to "perfect" several forms which may or may not be of use. I need to find that which is useful and start incorporating it into my scheme. That's part of the genius of JKD. It's also a major break from the traditional mindset that Lee would have been a part of prior to his formulation of JKD.

[tallgeese]

Ok, after reading that last post, I might seem a bit over critial of trad arts. I'm not. I've often said that there are a vast number of reasons to do ma's. There's certainly nothing wrong the classical apprach. It's just not the only method and depending on what you're doing ma's for, it might not be the best.

That's all.

[bushido_man96]

...some guy with the last name Lee hodge-podged some stuff together, and it turned out pretty well....

Meh. A guy with horrible personality issues that made him a poor student who, through large amounts of work and natural talent, devised a number of principles of fighting which - had he actually tried learning from his teachers instead of bopping around looking for the next flash in the pan as soon as they asked him to put in a bit of work building a foundation on - he would have been taught.

I don't think he was looking for "flash in the pan" stuff. He looked at Boxing and Fencing, two things that have been around for a very long time in one form or another. He did do a lot of research, and what he found useful he plugged into his training ideas.

I don't think he espoused a "learn this, then this, before you can learn this" approach that is found with kata and bunkai. I think that Self-Defense is something that an MA instructor can begin to teach from day one, not only after time has been spent learning basics and forms.

I think Lee's approach was if you were going to learn a form, and eventually learn to do it with a partner (bunkai), then why not just go straight to the partner work, and take your feedback from there?

[tonydee]

I don't think [bruce Lee] espoused a "learn this, then this, before you can learn this" approach that is found with kata and bunkai. I think that Self-Defense is something that an MA instructor can begin to teach from day one, not only after time has been spent learning basics and forms.

I think Lee's approach was if you were going to learn a form, and eventually learn to do it with a partner (bunkai), then why not just go straight to the partner work, and take your feedback from there?

I agree with your interpretation of the thrust of Bruce's approach. I disagree with his conclusions. I think the problem is that too often instructors don't know, let alone teach, the core skills that enable a family of movements to be mastered, and an optimal selection made based on a momentary situation. They get so caught up in enumerating a few points on the outside of the circle, while keeping the crucial inner area opaque. This is so unnecessary! But, it's nothing to do with using set forms versus ad-hoc freeform drills. It's just that - in some systems - the set forms weren't addressing the training needs squarely.

For example, most people learning TKD employ no significant use of body mechanics while executing patterns. Given I think anyone posting themselves on youtube is inviting critique, positive or otherwise, take this for an example: a 5th dan from Poland - where I know ITF is very strong with many North Korean instructors, and I know from personal experience there are some savagely powerful and fast kickers produced - executing a yellow belt pattern, but if you watch the knot on his belt carefully as he executes movements you'll see it barely rotates with the movements. It's pretty obvious that he's not employing sine wave technique to any meaningful degree. How can his training exercises not have developed him past that stage? How can it go uncorrected by his seniors after so many years of training?

I'm so sick of it, I have moved the core hip rotation movement down to white belt level. That required distilling the essence into a simple movement. The way I make them practice it is by standing in a forward/walking stance, keeping the hips level, back foot facing nearly forwards, rotating the hips as the back knee bends and straightens. It's demonstrated perfectly here. As well as this hands-on-hips version, I use a "swinging arms" version as it encourages the student to relax and turn further in both directions, getting more explosive force, as well as giving them more direct feedback on the extent of explosiveness in the way the arms are ripped around by the hip movement. A similar arm movement is used to train fa jing explosiveness in some tai chi and chi gung systems.

I'm not saying the ITF should do this exact exercise - for better or worse they have their own mechanics - but I'm saying that if traditional arts don't teach the core essence of whatever they do have, at least in a reasonable timeframe (by black belt), then they deserve to have people give up on them.

As for the thread topic, I think 99.5% of the people creating their own styles shouldn't consider them a new style per se, just tell students they're teaching a mix of whatever it happens to be.

If they've integrated the arts is some profound new way, changing each at strategic and technical levels to help set up the other, and assuming there's no existing martial art that doesn't already do as well or better at the same kind of hybrid space, then it becomes vaguely reasonable, but there's no need for them to call themselves a 10th dan grandmaster at 30 years of age, as many do.

There are also a few people who train in some style, then find issues with it, evolve it but aren't allowed to teach their modifications within their organisation, and in branching out are forced to take a new name for legal or political reasons. Again, if they don't have an attitude problem about it represent themselves as the new Einstein of martial arts, it doesn't bother me.

There are also people like me who don't have a good name for what they do, don't have anyone to grade them, and are vaguely frustrated but don't care that much.

I've met precisely one person who had actually done the leg work (with master level credentials from top masters in about five diverse arts and black belts in a few more) and research (e.g. a comprehensive technique by technique, point by point critique of scores of core techniques as executed by each of the (3?) major international hapkido federations, and their equivalents in tai chi, shaolin chin na, various jujitsu systems and aikido). Obsessive. And, realising he believed the hapkido he was teaching had to evolve to be practical and that he couldn't do it from within his international parent organisation, he created his own style. His Hapkido grandmaster supported him in doing this. His new style is genuinely and fundamentally different from any other art I've ever seen, in guarding stances, strategies and tactics: a bit like wing chun in having frontal stances and simultaneous use of both hands, mixed with hapkido/chin-na joint locks and JKDish interception principals. I personally think it needed a bit of rough-and-tumble maturing and pruning, but entirely credible as a new martial art.

Cheers,

Tony