Intensive Purposes

What is Jeet Kune Do?

Good question. I guess, technically, you could say I train in Jeet Kune Do, or JKD for short. I mean, my instructor is a certified instructor under Guro Dan Inosanto, who was the only person to hold all three certifications that Bruce Lee awarded. But I have a hard time telling people who ask that I train in JKD. Mostly because I don't feel like people would understand what that means. In my opinion (possibly wrong, but this is my understanding), JKD doesn't have a certain body of moves, a certain stance, things like that. JKD is a martial arts philosophy, a method of training. Jun Fan Gung Fu was what you would actually call the martial art that Bruce Lee created. That term encompasses all the punches, kicks, traps, parries, etc that he used when fighting.

At PMA, we train in a bunch of different arts. Now, there are many schools of thought on crosstraining in martial arts. If done haphazardly, then it can be detrimental to the skill and undersanding. But for us, JKD provides the glue that binds the pieces into the whole. We train a lot of Muay Thai for the striking and standing clinch work. We train Inosanto Blend Kali for the weapons as well as the striking. Boxing gives us some more options, and provides a nice bridge between the two. On the ground, we use mostly Brazilian JiuJitsu and some wrestling, with a healthy portion of silat mixed in. The silat also brings us back to the striking and takedowns. While training these different systems we emphasize the pieces that fit together. We blend them together in a way that they support each other.

This is Jeet Kune Do. Using that which works.

posted by Sir Phobos on 16 Feb 2006 at 14:17

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