Understanding Rhythm and Broken Rhythm in Sparring by Badger Johnson

I’ve talked in other essays about the use of music and tempo and time, and the use of beats to augment your martial arts training. Someone was asking me what the concept of ‘broken-rhythm’ meant. They said that Bruce Lee was actually listening to ‘weird’ Indian and maybe African music with headphones and trying to use that to give him an advantage. Then they said that Joe Lewis, his partner and student back in the day, and a tournament and early full-contact European and American kickboxer champion said that Bruce Lee was a master of broken-rhythm.

To clarify I said that the first kind of training learning unconventional musical beats was not the same thing as Joe Lewis was talking about. To simplify I said that the first kind was ‘internal broken rhythm’ in which you would be trying to move in a way that was not ‘standard’, or the convention beat of say 1-2, or 1-2-3-4, which we see in typical music, but was trying for a non-standard type. The second type involved a person finding the opponent’s rhythm or beat and following it for a short period then ‘breaking their rhythm’.

What is Internal Broken Rhythm?

For simplicity's sake you could say the first type was Internal Broken Rhythm, and the second type was External Broken Rhythm. Both are equally important methods but to understand them it’s better to explain each one separately.

The use of 'unconventional' or unusual beats in music is a way to give a person/fighter a library of internal beats in addition to his normal standard way of moving. In music we have a number of different notes and rests of different duration and other elements, such as grace notes, and triplets, which are 'off the beat' or 'insertions' or moves or rhythms which are between the normal beats.

We also have things like long beats and staccato beats. By adding to your internal repertoire or library you can then almost 'hum along' and use that internal song to guide your external movement and footwork. In Filipino Martial Arts (FMA) they make use of 'insertions' inside an already non-simple way of moving their stick(s) so that while the opponent is following their sticks, they are adroit enough to put in between their strikes or parries, a quick insertion, deluding, or eluding their attempt to follow, or parry and thus gain a 'hit'.

This is what Bruce Lee was trying to do. You can google 'grace notes' for a better explanation if you don't understand the musical notation or subsequent movement. One of the great ways that FMA can work to 'defeat' a typical eastern or western martial art is that they tend to follow a triplet or 'three-in-one' beat, while typical martial arts in the past at least followed a one-two-three-four or in music, 'standard time'. This move to a non-synchronous three-beat follows somewhat 'in between' the beats of standard time and essentially can 'get there’ (to the target) first.

The .gif below is a pretty good example of ‘Internal Broken Rhythm’ (IBR) in Return of the Dragon. Look near the end of the .gif just after Bruce Lee does a low leg check kick. Just before he follows with a high kick watch his right hand. He does three quick, though slight hand movements. This is a pretty good indication that he’s doing a triplet count in his head to subdivide the beat and initiate the kick to the head on an odd beat (maybe on three or five of six ‘beats’).

Another advantage to IBR is that it allows you to move 'faster' than someone doing 'standard time' even if that standard time is already fast. If you go 1-and 2 and I go 1-and-a-2, then you have two movements and I have three counts. So you might be playing an internal 'song' of 1-2-3-4, and I'm doing '123-123-123-123' on each downbeat (triplets) which is the Filipino timing in Sinawali (which means 'weaving' in Filipino), and you see here you can have an opportunity for two insertions or a parry and an insertion to each of your opponent's single 'beats' which they would perceive as faster and also a bit confusing to them as they struggle to keep up but even if already moving quickly will be, for a moment, behind the beat and thus miss a parry and get hit.

What is External Broken Rhythm?

The other type (Joe's reference) of "Broken rhythm" or what I’m calling external broken rhythm is the visible movement and footwork and then changing that and attacking in a way to try to find the opponent's 'natural rhythm' and then kind of follow it so that you're almost 'taking turns' as you see in a lot of dojo sparring or a ‘match’, then suddenly, using various changes ups, you 'break the opponent's rhythm' and get them on the wrong foot or moving the wrong way or get inside their movement, allows you to 'score' while they are caught up in their natural rhythm. Those might include a ‘stutter step’, a switch step, a switch kick and things of that nature. Bruce Lee was a master of this using his understanding of the way people move.

The .gif below is an example of ‘External Broken Rhythm’, in that Bruce Lee has timed Bob Wall’s own rhythm and is waiting or timing an ‘insertion’ or ‘interruption’ (a type of interception that his style is based upon), and as Bob initiates, Bruce Lee is ‘spring loaded’ to land his kick as Bob squares up, proving a good target, and getting a direct and solid hit.

How do we use this in practice?

To give a quick how-to addition to the topic of 'Internal Broken Rhythm', if you go to the workout area and throw some light strikes while humming a waltz, which is ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, (emphasis on the first beat is a waltz beat), then suddenly change your internal 'song' or tune you're humming to a Jazz tune or another type which might be 'ah-One-ah-Two-ah-Three' and put in a quick little flick before the previous 1-2-3 you'll find an 'insertion'.

Layering all these concepts lead to his impression of extremely fast speed

So I suspect what Bruce Lee was doing to seem 'super-fast' and able to get in his technique, is he was combining (with his natural speed advantage and use of 'non-intention' speed and MPH speed, and non-telegraphic speed), moving while humming an internal tune which was so 'strange' or unconventional to the normal person doing a waltz or a standard 1-2-3-4 beat internal rhythm that they just could not keep up. When he combined this with his natural ability to break your rhythm using footwork and timing and being able to see what you were likely to do next, he not only had you at speed and rhythm, he also had you on the 'wrong foot' as well. No wonder his student-opponents’ would be flummoxed. (See my other essays on what non-intention speed is.)

Now consider this, which was ahead of its time, that all of this he was doing was invisible to the student, and I seriously doubt he would explain it quite well enough for them to know what he was doing, let alone learn it themselves, it made him seem truly magical. Yet it's a simple layering of several concepts which can be learned fairly well by an intelligent and dedicated trainer using progression and practice, even solo practice. Even his direct students say that broken rhythm is not understood and I have doubts they understand it themselves (as combination of internal and external broken rhythm, breaking up your own rhythm and also breaking the opponent’s rhythm to your advantage).

One very common method of seeing external broken rhythm was Muhammad Ali's 'Ali-shuffle'. This was not used to showboat, but was use to distract and to break the opponent's rhythm, because the opponent could not tell when he was going to 'break out of the shuffle and throw a strike, but it also increased his internal 'hummed rhythm' so he was on super-speed and got in as an 'insertion'.

Muhammad Ali demonstrates his "Ali Shuffle" for Wilt Chamberlin

As advanced as it was, I think that if Ali had 'hired' Bruce Lee as a trainer, and Lee was willing to tell him about internal and external broken rhythm (which I think Ali did almost naturally, not as an intellectually derived plan), and was willing to explain non-intention and non-telegraphic movement that he could have made Ali even better. However, at the time, these were all closely guarded secrets for Bruce Lee. He did let out the 'name' broken rhythm, because that was an already known subject, but he didn't really explain it in depth as I just did above.

It also explains why Bruce Lee was not terribly "interested" when Dan Inosanto introduced him to FMA and tried to sell him on the sticks, since Lee was already doing triple times and insertions and had learned it on his own, so FMA didn't really have a huge amount of new stuff there to teach him. He did use double sticks, but he did it his own way which did look a little like the FMA methods anyway. I would hasten to add that FMA is not just about timing and insertions. I'm just talking about that aspect for brevity. Bruce Lee would have looked at it for the cinematic and screen-fighting aspects and thus found it nice to have Dan Inosanto represent an aspect (single stick and long and short) Filipino martial arts in Game of Death. Bruce again uses a lot of broken rhythm in his match against Dan’s character, and even Bruce’s character’s weapon (the wikit stick) can move so much faster and unpredictably that it incorporates an innate capability to break rhythm.

© Badger A Johnson

September 20, 2020

For StickGrappler’s blog

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Please check out Badger Johnson's other essays:

• A Martial Framework
• How To Exceed Your Plateaus
• Adding to Arnold's Six Principles of Success
• 10 Tips on how to analyze a martial art for effectiveness
• "To be a master is very different from being an expert."
• Addendum, Clarification and Expansion of Paul Vunak's Fighting Secrets
• Expanded Ways of Attack
• "Fifty Important Elements in Martial Arts"
• Can Trapping Work?
• The Genesis and Development of Zone Theory
• A few aspects of self-defense training
• Some of the important ten things…
• Over-speed Training - Accessing the Subconscious and the Power of Threes
• Coaching, self-coaching, talent, experience, genetics, opportunity, motivation
• Thresholding
• "I'd Like to Teach the World to Dance"
• Some thoughts today
• "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" 
• Beyond Martial Skills
• Some of the Major Misconceptions or Fallacies of JKD 
• How Bruce Lee may have improved skill using biofeedback 
• The Art of Fighting Without Fighting   
• Not Martial Trained, But Fighting Fit
• Against One Who Scares Us
• What Bruce Lee Taught Us 
• What is Mobile Kicking? 
• Fighting Fit Part 2 - The Seven Essentials 
• How Bruce Lee Trained His Quick Kill 
• Seeing Deeply - the Method and Intangibles 
• Big Picture - Training Martial Arts and Self-Defense 

Read More

Big Picture - Training Martial Arts and Self-Defense by Badger Johnson

Let’s try and break down the martial arts/self-defense/physical training into some large concepts.

Big Picture elements:
Layering your defense methods, for example in the home having motion-control lighting, improved entryways and upgraded window treatments, removing obstructions and so forth. You want to analyze your systems from the top down, from the bottom up, and from the 10,000 foot view and also the low level analysis of details every once in a while. Your system should look like a pyramid, or a dynamic pyramid, which has life-long base training at the bottom and specific techniques or methods at the top, and all of them energized and synergized by the parts which are below and support them (tracking, base-training, physical attribute training, competition, and so forth).

Find the best, sustainable options for improving self-protection and training.
Making the most of your training elements by tracking and journaling.
Being able to critique methods and to self-critique and how often to do it and why it’s important (we tend to have trouble seeing our own faults).

Learning how to see deeply. Better than reading what various martial masters from the past, like Musashi or Sun Tzu, is to learn how to see below the surface yourself. See my essay on ‘Seeing Deeply’ on Stickgrappler’s page.

The Method
One of the best training regimes is the methods of Dog Brother Benjamin Rittiner (Lonely Dog) which is very specific and very effective and even though he focuses on stick fighting it’s adaptable across the board.

It’s important to learn the best way to do solo training, because most of the time you will be training alone except for grapplers, obviously. It’s also important to learn how to work best with training partners. In the realm of what gives the most bang for the buck, be aware that consistency is the most important element, followed closely by frequency and sustainability and these trump what people often focus on which is duration and intensity these last two often being overestimated.

However, you need to know how to be consistent and at the other end when and how much to have intensity.

Another important element is finding a way to get feedback on your training. Nowadays we have performance gear, timers and impact trainers and other things, we have a myriad of training bags and pads and torso-shaped targets. In addition, part of tracking and journaling are needed to get an over-all picture of where you’ve been and where you’re going.

Self-Coaching. I’ve already written an essay on self-coaching and this includes things like learning how to taper and peak for any competitive events either formal or informal things (like fun runs or recreational gaming), how to recover from training and injuries. When you get an injury journal about it and it will help if it comes up again.

As you track your training on a spreadsheet or other tool, you’ll find trends and see if you are improving or not. By tracking I see that I have a period of improvement where I peak about four times a year and have a super-peak about twice a year during a seven day a week training regime (including hard and easy days).

You should be doing monthly or yearly re-analysis of your methods and even throwing out everything and trying something else or building up something else. This took me for just martial arts to jogging and biking and swimming and Filipino martial arts (weapons).

The Mode
The mode is using a template of Systems Management methods and Delivery System analysis tracking to design your training. You can write out a spreadsheet, for example and record your thoughts on what is your delivery system for accomplishing a goal or a technique or a method. How do I get a takedown? The delivery system includes training with wrestlers, learning how to lower your level, time your insertion with a penetration step and get the takedown. The delivery system for improving your timing might include speed-bag work, flow drills and using reflex timers. You can think up your own methods, but the point is that every part of your method has to include the path to success and that means there’s a delivery system. The concept (conceived by Matt Thornton) is defined as the method both concrete and conceptual that takes you from plan to goal. If you don’t know the correct delivery system then your self-analysis is incomplete.

You must ask “What am I trying to accomplish?” This is a very big question.

• Am I trying to hide behind a poor sense of self-worth?
• Am I actually being a bully (wanting to control or beat others), or am I reacting to bullying?
• Am I finding a threat where there is none (modern society)?
• Am I training too hard or too casually and how to know this (threat analysis)?

Besides being based on delivery systems, the training and methods must have high specificity, precision and be highly adaptable and be built on the individual innate skills and abilities.

The Analysis
How do we analyze our training? It takes a combination of experimentation, experience and study and stress-testing, with an eye to how to do time-management. We can go all out but that’s not sustainable.

How to we analyze the threat? Is there really a need for self-defense or is this really just a hobby? If it is determined to be a hobby that does not mean that you can’t go at it with a full press effort. But it also puts it in perspective. It can let you know that there might be other important things to do such as anger-management, de-escalation, avoidance, awareness, conflict resolution and it’s important to look at these things as well.

Do I have a serious self-defense need such that all this physical training is necessary? If this is the case it might be a good idea to investigate firearms training and weapons training. You should be doing drills in the home involving everyone and giving them a role and instructions on what to do. If you are in a low crime area and never had a threat then you can reduce some of the emphasis on this and view it more as a hobby, but that’s no reason to be haphazard in your approach.

You can’t analyze in a vacuum. So you can’t do self-defense training in a vacuum where you go to a class three times a week and think ‘OK, I’m covered’. Have you done a threat analysis? Where do you live, how safe is your locale, who needs protecting, who is vulnerable and how. Using a spreadsheet to help you analyze this or journaling to brain-storm are good ways to do this assessment.

Behavioral Aspects
Am I a person who is able to ‘keep to the task’ and go for the long run? If not how do I change my ideas so that I can take the long view. It’s better to be efficient and consistent enough so that in 20-30 years down the road than be one of those great athletes as a kid and then get fat and out of shape in later years, when as an elderly person you will need healthy habits and stuff and have neglected all that to try to be a physical specimen in your youth and give it up later. Many military guys go this route having been as high as being a SEAL as a soldier and end up in later life being out of shape and in a sad state. I suspect part of this is the duration and intensity is so high during their regime that they can’t sustain it. This is where I got the idea of sustainability by the way.

Training, Coaching and Partnering
I’m a firm believer that though you will probably be doing this all by yourself for a majority of the time, it’s the best possible if you can partner up. That’s a training partner or group, and a life partner who can spend some time working in a Self-Defense mode as a partner, say with firearms or weapons or practicing drills at home (like you do a home fire drill for your family). In fact, as I’ve said in other essays, you can even recruit a partner on the fly (for example asking a store manager to have someone walk you to your car).

How to create habits.
Part of creating habits is to learn how to journal. You cannot see your progress from three weeks ago when you look at the current time. It’s hard to remember. So with the advent of computers and online stuff it’s so much easier to journal than when we had to write stuff down in a notebook. I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s been journaling over the years and tracking my workouts which helped me many times to not miss a workout because I didn’t want a blank page in my training journal.

How to analyze what you are doing and how to see your progress
This goes back to journaling and tracking your thoughts, the evolution of your ideation, your training and all that you are doing. Are you working everyday on base training? Are you analyzing your training to improve specificity and precision? Are you mindful of how you peak and improve and are you seeing overtraining or are you on track? Most people who are training consistently and frequently will discover a system of peaks which is called ‘super-compensation’ where you improve then have a slight dip in performance and then have a super-peak. This is common knowledge among track athletes. Tapering and peaking are specific to the type of sport or activity.

How to deal with self-sabotage and negativity
We all self-sabotage and it’s very hard to see. You have to work at learning to spot it. You will have negativity and you will self-sabotage so leaning how to recover and get back on plan and back on track is just as important a skill as how to perform any individual technique.

Focus
Along with reanalyzing your methods and practices periodically, be sure to step back and look at your life in general. Are you happy with good relationships and good financial management and not neglecting other areas of your life, in other words, becoming a gym rat type of trainer can be compelling but you have to be on guard that you are not hiding from life by obsessing on your training? Likewise, you can hide from the training you know you should be doing by over-emphasizing the needs of your daily life (poor time management and making excuses).

If you have a problem, such as making excuses, you can deal with that head-on by using your journaling. For example: I’ve been making excuses not to train. What are three hypothetical ways for getting around this problem? Brainstorm but don’t pressure yourself at first. Sometimes the answers to ‘self-sabotaging’ can dawn on you.

One thing that was always on my mind is ‘Wouldn’t it be great to be a black belt in personal finance and not just a gym rat?’. I finally achieved this at the advanced age of about 60 years old when I learned how to do online banking and how to deal with buying my own house and saving money. I’m still only a beginning blackbelt in finance since I’m not good at investing (except in property investment), but it’s a far cry from my youth when I’d almost focus on training in order to ignore real life. I would pile up my bills on a table unopened and once had to have a bail out for my student loans. It made me feel a lot more well-rounded and part of the solution harkens back to my other topic about partnering. It’s important to have your partner be a good team player in managing your money and be able to handle their finances and even, as in my case, teach me her methods.

Self-Mastery
More important than all training and practice is to have an on-going plan leading to self-mastery. That includes anger management, learning good habits, team work, and having a moral platform that you make up yourself (not copy from a popular book or something).

You might have great athletic skills but if you haven’t learned how to manage your anger you are going to self-sabotage. If you still keep up with bad habits that lessen your training progress then you are not going to be able to be consistent and sustain your path.

Unlike what some people who train martial arts might imply, you are not in this to learn to dominate others. You want to learn how to dominate yourself, your fears, your weaknesses your short-comings and over time be better than you were at the start. You win a much bigger battle by learning how to self-master than you ever will by trying to beat other people, or be overly concerned with competing.

Testing your methods
It’s important to test your assumptions, your methods and your progress. You want to have high specificity, as high as possible precision and it has to reliably give you the results you want (maximizing your training dollar), you want it to be logical and sustainable (something you can do over a long period of time and maintain interest).

You might do something as basic as set up a spreadsheet, which will help your cognitive process and then after filling in things you want to get from your training and then be able to sit back and look at it.

Part of the lesson of the difficulty of self-coaching is getting that 10,000 foot view and being able to honestly see yourself. You also want to find a way to monitor what you are also spending time on other important areas in your life because being balanced and well-rounded is also important in the whole area of being able to protect yourself and your family.

Using a spreadsheet approach, I would put the big attributes across the top such as I said above, precision, accuracy, specificity, repeatability, sustainability, feedback, stress-testing, or whatever you think might have impact on what you’re doing. You might also want to track the areas of weakness or ‘holes in your game’. If you can’t find some aspects, such as training with a lot of partners there might be ways you can figure out to fill those such as playing a sport even things like table tennis or handball or pickup basketball games, pool, card playing (strategy) to fill some of those gaps. I think it’s important to have some competition there even if it’s what I did which was compete in 10K fun runs. I had to prep and peak for those events and therefore it added to my martial arts game. What you’re doing with tracking is using a systematic method of giving yourself feedback. It takes time to learn this so I’d say just start doing it. Everyone has a computer and can find a free version of a spreadsheet or a journaling app. I used to use Fitday a lot because there’s a notes pages which is linked to a calendar.

Cross-sport adaptability
One thing I liked to do was look at other sports and activities and say to myself ‘What are they doing that I can adapt to my training in martial arts or other fitness methods?’. A trivial example is I might see track athletes running stairs. I say to myself, ‘Hey, maybe running stairs would be a good way to improve my chambering for kicking?’. I might see swimmers doing breath hold methods and think, ‘Hey maybe breath-hold training would help me?’ (Note that MMA star BJ Penn did significant breath-hold training in his MMA career).

Positive and negative self-talk
I’ve talked about this in other essays but both positive and negative self-talk (self-goading as motivation) are important. You have to find out what part of these are important. Some people do better with positive self-talk some include a sprinkling of negative self-talk (sort of making yourself ‘mad’, for example saying ‘you’ll never run a mile in 6 minutes…’the hell I won’t’ (to the ego)).

Discussion:
I’m including an online discussion I had with Stickgrappler to round out the gist of this essay:

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So one of the things that is missing from 'martial activities', be it practice, or method, or understanding or all those things is that this whole area is multi-factorial. One example is looking at, reading about and trying to get some understanding if not skill in body language analysis. In other words, anyone talking about self-defense and not talking about types of opponents and how to tell if you're in danger (or not) is missing a huge part of the equation.

Back in the day we had people who were band nerds in a big class wearing white pajamas, throwing strikes in the air taught by people who had never had a fight. We thought we were "learning how to fight". It couldn't be further from the truth.

Could SOME of these people fight and win? Yeah there were some tough guys who somehow got into the class and weren't on the football team for whatever reason but they weren't fight winners because of the white pajama brigade stuff. We all bought into the idea back then that a collection of tricks would allow us to fight with big tough guys who were athletic. It’s a myth. You need to use things like leverage and timing and precise training and competition to do this.

So in taking the big picture, we have to analyze more than just 'what am I doing in a physical sense' as to how is self-defense made up and how to 'do it' best.

We need a Lonely Dog (Benjamin Rittiner) type training regime for when it's solo, which is it going to be 99% of the time. We need a layered defense. We need partnering up training with a partner. We need to understand the opponent. We need to understand and master ourselves. We need to understand what tools we have, what tools we can cultivate and how to maximize our training dollar.

We need to be able to self-critique and see where we have behaviors or methods which are ineffective or even working against us. We need to know how to self-coach and how to practice self-coaching in specific ways.

Well-rounded. Ground view as well as 10,000 foot view. We also need to 'model' successful behavior without being self-deluding too much. (a little self-delusion is OK especially in the beginning).

So in effect people who go to seminars and collect certificates and wear camouflage and have a weapons room and drive around looking for trouble are not the way to go even though that's the standard thing now. Watching movies and trying to be a superhero. It's a person who is not serious about their self-defense or self-improvement needs.

It's so hard to see where you are doing the wrong thing, though it's pretty easy to see it in others, as Robert Burns said, and we are our worst enemy, although mostly in small ways as Walt Kelly (Pogo) said. And furthermore it's a constant vigilance to guard against these pitfalls, because we get lazy and they creep back in. We lose focus, we can't sustain, and we backslide, gain weight, get out of shape.

The reason is that nobody, or few people can be in a state of heightened vigilance and they revert to that which is easy.

You can guard against this by having a program element which you CAN sustain over a long period of time with not a huge amount of effort, for example riding your bike to work (at least 5-10 miles) every day.

© Badger A.Johnson
September 15, 2020
Essay to Stickgrappler’s page.

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Please check out Badger Johnson's other essays:

• A Martial Framework
• How To Exceed Your Plateaus
• Adding to Arnold's Six Principles of Success
• 10 Tips on how to analyze a martial art for effectiveness
• "To be a master is very different from being an expert."
• Addendum, Clarification and Expansion of Paul Vunak's Fighting Secrets
• Expanded Ways of Attack
• "Fifty Important Elements in Martial Arts"
• Can Trapping Work?
• The Genesis and Development of Zone Theory
• A few aspects of self-defense training
• Some of the important ten things…
• Over-speed Training - Accessing the Subconscious and the Power of Threes
• Coaching, self-coaching, talent, experience, genetics, opportunity, motivation
• Thresholding
• "I'd Like to Teach the World to Dance"
• Some thoughts today
• "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" 
• Beyond Martial Skills
• Some of the Major Misconceptions or Fallacies of JKD 
• How Bruce Lee may have improved skill using biofeedback 
• The Art of Fighting Without Fighting   
• Not Martial Trained, But Fighting Fit
• Against One Who Scares Us
• What Bruce Lee Taught Us 
• What is Mobile Kicking? 
• Fighting Fit Part 2 - The Seven Essentials 
• How Bruce Lee Trained His Quick Kill 
• Seeing Deeply - the Method and Intangibles 

Read More

Seeing Deeply Part 2 by Stickgrappler

This is my followup to yesterday's entry "Seeing Deeply - the Method and Intangibles" by my friend Badger Johnson.

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3 months ago I had shared Badger's essay on his thoughts on How Bruce Lee Trained His Quick Kill to a Facebook group. Badger was "seeing deeply" by connecting the dots and reading between the lines from various sources. He came up with, in my opinion, a convincing hypothesis on how Bruce Lee trained his quick kill.

A member from a Facebook group I posted that essay to commented that Bruce Lee did not teach a quick kill method. He asked me for evidence in Lee's writings. I replied that Lee in fact did not divulge his method publicly and acknowledged that Lee didn't have it in the published writings. However, if one analyzed some facts, put two and two together, one would arrive at the same conclusion as Badger did. Basically if one were to see deeply into Bruce Lee's persona and training methods, one would discover the quick kill method. This member in effect responded with "Aha! I knew it." He wrote that we were making stuff up about the legend. I pointed out that some of the sources that led Badger to his hypothesis included 2 of Bruce Lee's students, namely Dan Inosanto and an early student, James DeMile. Inosanto had mentioned Bruce's quick temper as well as NOT teaching his students certain techniques e.g. the double pak sao. DeMile is a clinical hypnotist and mentioned that he taught Lee self-hypnosis. It would not be a reach for Badger to conclude that Lee would NOT teach his quick kill method and keep it on the downlow. I asked that group member if he knew who Dan Inosanto and James DeMile were. He was done with me having either blocked me or turned off his critical mind after "winning his argument". He did not discuss it further with me.

I was a bit amazed at this member's reaction. He only accepted what Bruce Lee wrote. He did not see deeply. He did not dig deeper. In my opinion, had he delved further with secondary sources and kept an open mind, he should've come to the same hypothesis as Badger did. However, as Badger points out, some people may not know HOW to see deeply. This member's reaction to my post was a case in point. I do not know if this member had a case of idol worship and it affected his thoughts or what. Badger is one of the biggest Bruce Lee fanboys I know. And through his research he came to the realization that Bruce Lee had insecurities, was hot-headed at times, and was secretive shattering his image of Bruce Lee. After all, Lee was human like the rest of us with our temper, insecurities, etc.

I mentioned above that some people may not know HOW to see deeply. Badger mentioned a few ways in his essay.

Here are 8 ways that helps me to see deeply:

1. If you can perform a technique with your Dominant side, can you perform it with your Complementary side?
2. If you can perform a technique while advancing, can you perform it while retreating or sidestepping?
3. If you can perform a technique fast, can you perform it slowly?
4. If you can perform a technique while standing, can you perform it while flat on the ground? Squatting? One-legged?
5. If you can perform a technique in a linear fashion, can you perform it in a circular way?
6. Research other sources. With the added insight of the other sources, one may be able to see beyond the surface. The other sources may present the material differently than your initial source and help you open your mind to possibilities. For example:  the Facebook group member above only learned from his primary source and should he have checked out secondary sources, in this case, direct students of Bruce Lee's, he would've expanded his knowledge.
7. Research the time period. Sometimes the circumstances in the time period gives clues on why things were done the way they were done. Now apply that to your current situation. For example:  While Okinawa was under Japanese rule, the Okinawan farmers used everyday tools in their defense. The millstone handle became the tonfa and the rice flail became the nunchaku. Are you able to see that you can apply the principle of what the Okinawans did to a pencil, a magazine, a book, an umbrella, etc and use in your defense?
8. One principle, many techniques. Dig deeper for the principle so that your understanding of it can help you with many techniques. 

Hope this helps you to see deeply in your sojourn of septillion steps!

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"Seeing Deeply - the Method and Intangibles" by Badger Johnson

Everyone wants to be able to see below the superficial. They know about terms such as reverse engineering, deconstruction, going back to the original source, changing the paradigm, but they don't know how to do this in practice.

One way is going from the general to the specific or from the specific to the general.

Another way is going from the external to the internal.

An example of the latter is analyzing the phrases related to dealing with the 'enemy'.

You hear phrases such as:

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

This is by Sun Tzu notable Chinese philosopher.

Then we hear the infamous phrase by Walt Kelly:

”We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Pogo by Walt Kelly

Thus you can take every phrase or advice about the external enemy and search for meaning in the internal.

By doing this you find more layers and often can stumble upon something that will really reveal an inner truth to yourself.

There are other similar methods. It's just a matter of creating a framework for applying non-superficial analysis to concepts.

A further example.

People ask 'What do you do if...?' and then post a difficult problem.

The first step is to say, 'You've asked for a solution to a problem that has already developed, and the answer is found in anticipating the problem sooner'.

Another example is, people say, 'just use this method', but if you really think about it, everyone says that but in reality, it never actually works as intended.

Look for different than intended aspects. Look for unintended consequences that invalidate the original rule. Most rules apply up to a point and then near the threshold the reverse becomes true.

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Can you think of any other methods?

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And now, let us look at the Intangibles of Seeing Deeply.

Delivery systems

Subdividing the beat

Transparency

Apply a metaphor which works in one area to another. In music, you subdivide the beat. It helps to understanding attacking on the half beat or the one and a half beat. People don’t really understand how to do that, because it’s the footwork not the hand movements.

Lomachenko took off a full year to learn ethnic dancing. Everyone seems to know he’s using footwork to put him out of reach of opponent’s counters, but they don’t exactly see how he’s doing it.

Vasaly Lomachenko (blue) X Domenico Valentino (red) /WSB 2013/Apr 19,2013

People can see a result, but they don’t know the build up. People want to know how the end result was achieved and you can tell them but if they haven’t done it, they’re missing all the intangibles.

I’ve asked myself about the people in Jeet Kune Do (JKD) concepts, Tim Tackett, Taky Kimura, all of the second generation students. If I can see why they are missing the point, not seeing that their idea of JKD is based on Bruce Lee’s stage fighting and thus won’t work in the real world, and I’m very far removed, why can’t they see it?

If I can see that Bruce Lee had to have an non-collapsible bridge arm to make things work, and if you don’t have it, then you’ll never be able to do interception. If you haven’t figured out how to do ‘non-intention’ and ‘non-telegraphic’ then to make any of it work you have to rely on brute force. They’re all brute forcing it and think they have true JKD.

It’s as though it’s hero-worship gone mad. If you’re so entranced by the founder that you feel you can’t find your own ‘JKD’, it will actually stand in your way.

For example people are amazed by Houdini. They try to recreate his stunts, even if they haven’t figured them out they’re willing to fake them. Some stage magicians will work up their own tricks. Some will do the old stuff in a different form. One of them was the Balducci Illusion a way to make it look, based on perspective, that they were levitating. Instead of innovating, current stage magicians use camera tricks (David Blaine) to make it look better than it is.

People want to be like Bruce Lee so badly they obscure the truth from themselves.

This was a situation where they had an example of how to see deeply and they chose the superficial, though augmented superficial. They only performed martial arts, they didn’t do it, staying on a ‘stage’ of seminars, to try and recreate the magic that died when Bruce Lee passed away.

Funny how people know there’s truth but decide to use elaborate methods to hide from it.

© Badger Johnson

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EDIT ON 9/5/20 - Posted Seeing Deeply Part 2, a followup to this essay.

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Please check out Badger Johnson's other essays:

• A Martial Framework
• How To Exceed Your Plateaus
• Adding to Arnold's Six Principles of Success
• 10 Tips on how to analyze a martial art for effectiveness
• "To be a master is very different from being an expert."
• Addendum, Clarification and Expansion of Paul Vunak's Fighting Secrets
• Expanded Ways of Attack
• "Fifty Important Elements in Martial Arts"
• Can Trapping Work?
• The Genesis and Development of Zone Theory
• A few aspects of self-defense training
• Some of the important ten things…
• Over-speed Training - Accessing the Subconscious and the Power of Threes
• Coaching, self-coaching, talent, experience, genetics, opportunity, motivation
• Thresholding
• "I'd Like to Teach the World to Dance"
• Some thoughts today
• "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" 
• Beyond Martial Skills
• Some of the Major Misconceptions or Fallacies of JKD 
• How Bruce Lee may have improved skill using biofeedback 
• The Art of Fighting Without Fighting   
• Not Martial Trained, But Fighting Fit
• Against One Who Scares Us
• What Bruce Lee Taught Us 
• What is Mobile Kicking? 
• Fighting Fit Part 2 - The Seven Essentials 
• How Bruce Lee Trained His Quick Kill by Badger Johnson 

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How Bruce Lee Trained His Quick Kill by Badger Johnson

I've had another new insight into Bruce Lee and his ability and training.

If you want to be the 'best' at the one thing that martial arts is supposed to be able to do, what three things would you spend time developing?

And it's not 'movie martial arts' I'm talking about.

The one thing that martial arts is supposed to be able to do is to kill someone rapidly. The truth is Bruce Lee trained SPECIFICALLY to be able to kill someone in 1-2 seconds.

1. Having specific targets and apparatus that allow one to explode full power into them and generate the real ability to do a shock-power kill shot. James Yimm Lee built him these gadgets.

Very few people train exactly what is needed to do a quick kill AND test it out on specialty equipment.

People hit things, hit other people but there is gear, rules, non-specific stuff. You need super feedback. Just how hard does that hit? How fast? How easy to block? Can it penetrate or are you guessing? Gotta take all guesswork out and make it 'sure'.

Bruce Lee training on a gadget James Yimm Lee built for him.

Obviously you can't actually kill people but you could come close with specific gear as to what is needed.

Lee's method was to overtrain. Dan Inosanto has said that Lee was training to poke his fingers through a thin steel drink can so that he can puncture a person's body, eyes, neck, etc.

2. Having the ability to generate 'kill intent'. This is key and is where I failed until I made myself a 'kill word'. Lee specifically trained with a hypnotist (interestingly James DeMile) to develop a self-hypnotic kill word such that when he thought it he could go from 'sitting on the couch mellow' to wanting to rip your head off and drop kick it out the window. A kill word is ESSENTIAL and anyone who plans to do hand-to-hand self-defense (which I don't) should have one and have practice calling it up. We see Lee doing this on screen when he goes from normal to demonic.

Badger Johnson:  "You can see him go from near-peaceful

to sudden rage right on screen and you can't fake that."

3. The ability to stage or set things up so that you are in charge of the situation and can put the opponent in the least favorable position. Lee was a master of staging things from having a lot of charm and being able to lure you in to his paradigm, to being able to hold back until the last minute making the opponent think they are safe and then suddenly hitting demonic mode and exploding into them so they have no chance.

Smiling with charm to disarm and then suddenly explode in demonic mode.

He did these three things which I don't think anyone else did (besides Sonny Umpad - which people talk about his 'dark side').

Now, going back to what I said, NONE of those people specifically trained to have a 1-2 second kill capability, which included developing a 'kill word', and having machines specifically built to allow him to train those skills, which nobody else was doing. He also understood how to set things up to his benefit and he knew how to lure people in with charm and personality. He also had a temper, which he knew about, and he had some trouble controlling it.

None of these other people worked with a hypnotist to develop a kill-word. None of these people trained to kill their opponents in a matter of an instant. But you have to have the right venue and that is not an octagon and padded gloves. It's not a large area where people are surrounding someone in a circle.

What Lee could not do was the majority of things we saw in his movies. He couldn't fight 10 guys in a circle (realistically) and beat them all. He couldn't jump up into trees. He had little to no acrobatic skills (that was his stunt double Yuen Wah), and he didn't train to kill or hit people (realisitcally) with things like the nunchuks. That was all stage fighting.

Yuen Wah doubling for Bruce Lee's acrobatics in Enter the Dragon.

Most of what he did in his movies was stage fighting, just like when you see old time fencing movies, that's all stage fighting.

Chuck Norris was good, but he was not Bruce Lee good. But he did do a lot of tournament fighting and he might have been able to outpoint Lee in a more-or-less friendly sparring match.

So there it is right out there in plain sight. And for years people missed it because...well because they're not homicidal maniacs.

In other words, Chuck might have been a good kicker, a good tournament fighter and even served in the military but he did not train to be able to really kill someone, with very specific methods in 1-2 seconds. Lee did.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
~Bruce Lee

Again, amazing how most of the stuff is right out there in plain sight but we were not seeing it. Same thing with the comment that Jesse Glover and others had made that when someone showed Lee something and he came back in a day or two, having done 10,000 to 100,000 repetitions of that move and he was better at it than the guy who showed it to him. We only see him in kind of posed, passive looking pictures of him throwing a finger jab. But in reality in demon mode working that machine which James Lee built would look quite frightening.

© Badger Johnson

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Please check out Badger Johnson's other essays:

• A Martial Framework
• How To Exceed Your Plateaus
• Adding to Arnold's Six Principles of Success
• 10 Tips on how to analyze a martial art for effectiveness
• "To be a master is very different from being an expert."
• Addendum, Clarification and Expansion of Paul Vunak's Fighting Secrets
• Expanded Ways of Attack
• "Fifty Important Elements in Martial Arts"
• Can Trapping Work?
• The Genesis and Development of Zone Theory
• A few aspects of self-defense training
• Some of the important ten things…
• Over-speed Training - Accessing the Subconscious and the Power of Threes
• Coaching, self-coaching, talent, experience, genetics, opportunity, motivation
• Thresholding
• "I'd Like to Teach the World to Dance"
• Some thoughts today
• "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" 
• Beyond Martial Skills
• Some of the Major Misconceptions or Fallacies of JKD 
• How Bruce Lee may have improved skill using biofeedback 
• The Art of Fighting Without Fighting   
• Not Martial Trained, But Fighting Fit
• Against One Who Scares Us
• What Bruce Lee Taught Us 
• What is Mobile Kicking? 
• Fighting Fit Part 2 - The Seven Essentials 

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Fighting Fit Part 2 - The Seven Essentials by Badger Johnson

This essay is about the seven essential abilities (plus intangibles) of being fighting fit. It is a follow-up to Not Martial Trained, But Fighting Fit.

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Consistency, Frequency, Duration, Intensity, Sustainability, Specificity, Adaptability plus Intangibles 


Consistency
Including the ability to have enough interest and ease that it can be done as a daily activity and not lose appeal.

Frequency
Including the ability to recover and do active recovery such that taking days off is not really necessary. In addition the ability to do it twice a day (such as riding to work, or doing two-a-day workouts) is easy and interesting.

Duration
Within a range duration can be as low as 30 minutes, and as long as 90 minutes but after about 45 minutes, there are diminishing returns with regard to training effect and recovery, as well as risking becoming a chore or onerous.

Intensity
It’s well known among bikers and joggers that there is a ’no-man’s-land’ in training intensity where you are working too hard to allow good recovery and enjoyment or progress that isn’t available through frequency and duration (long, steady distance), and an optimal point for improving VO2max or burst which only needs to be done at infrequent (but consistent) intervals. In addition there is a ‘pacing’ component where intensity and recovery are modulated. Burst, recover, burst, recover while trying to decrease rest and increase tempo or intensity or speed. Various tricks you can do on a bike are things like moto-pacing where you ride behind a car and then break out and try to keep up that speed. This is something you can’t really do while jogging and it allows you to adapt to the higher workload by gaining experience and increasing expectations.

"One of the most important things ... is that an activity has to be sustainable." 

Sustainability
One of the most important things that allows the above attributes especially consistency and frequency is that an activity has to be sustainable. There is the short term sustainability of an activity often perceived as fun, and the long-term sustainability which includes the ease and enjoyment and lack of injury periods.

Some people have good sustainability in jogging but if they are not biomechanically able to do that over a long period without breakdown of joints and connective tissues, and the pounding of the feet take in this medium impact activity, it can’t be sustained well into advanced age as well as cycling or circuit training or even swimming. Interestingly swimming, though of high value in many areas has some downsides with repetitive injury and various issues with swimmer’s ear and problems with chlorine eye problems. In an ideal setup, a routine which included an indoor private pool without other people using it, a jogging track with high tech materials and a bike riding course without the problems of cars or other foot traffic, one could do 30-40 on the bike, 30 minutes of light jogging or maybe repeat intervals for 15 minutes followed by a swim of 300 meters and have a great sustainable routine that might not take more than an hour a day, where the intervals and swimming are only done 3x a week with biking being the mainstay.

Just like cardio-dancing an activity with high sustainability in the short term, it draws you back in so that you're eager to sweat and get over the burn and keep doing it. So Sustainability has two or more components. Short term, means compelling, joy producing and long term means you can recover and do it again every day. I talk abut how you should measure your activity in terms of 'sessions'. So I could do 330 sessions per year easily which is 26 days a month plus three weeks of two a day and barring weather, get almost twice as many sessions than a 3x a week faithful weight trainer, and weight training day after day is boring over 10 years.

Specificity
One of the important things about sustainability might be that it be tied to a sport or a fun activity such that they interconnect and support each other. If you have a favorite sport such as martial arts, tennis, handball, basketball, skiing, horseback riding or even group games, and you find it is improved and enhanced with some base training it adds to the ability to sustain it over a lifetime.

Photo credit:  Shutterstock/Active Stock

Adaptability
The activity has to be something that can adapt to your lifestyle, your time constraints, availability of the activity (good roads or good skiing slopes or good running areas) and have that important element of safety. It’s important to consider that not all people thrive at the same level at an activity or at base training in general. Some people live to surf and will do everything and anything to get out there on that wave. Similarly some will find that downhill skiing gives a similar impulse or drive. Some of that might be due to biochemical differences or genetic gifts. (See the essay, The Safecracker and the Fighter, on high risk activities and being dopamine-based receptors vs serotonin-based receptors.)

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Intangibles and essentials - by intangibles I don’t mean hard to define but things which are part of a support system, helping recovery and defining motivation and mental aspects.

Motivation - training partners. Drive, energy, urgency, payoff, high risk/low risk individuals.

Diet and tracking - diet requires good food selection, a purpose and plan and that requires some tracking of foods and bodyweight. Along with this comes intelligent use of vitamins and supplements.

Belief in your system and yourself - part of stress reduction and also motivation is that you have a belief in the efficacy and value of your training systems, while at the same time being able to move and transition as required. Obviously going out and doing someone else’s system is not as beneficial as being able to design and understand your own system. Part of this and of motivation is learning how to self-coach, learning what motivates you and what is de-motivating.

Mental aspects - moving meditation, breathing and self-affirmations.

Non-injurious - one of the most important parts of an activity has to be a low potential for injury.

Low, high and no-impact activities - due to the importance of maintaining bone density, we must include some medium impact activities and not focus only on low impact, like cycling and swimming and rowing and doing an elliptical. Sometimes one’s sport serves this purpose sometimes a fun activity can help, and sometimes you have to be creative or just find it in walking or stair climbing.

Photo credit:  Shutterstock/BigFootSLV

Rest and sleep - we improve with rest and the output of human growth hormone comes during periods of 45 minute naps in a dark room.

Research and development - keeping up on the research available to allow improvements in routine, rest, nutrition or equipment. It’s important to know when you should replace your equipment (shoes) and have the right fit in things (bike fit).

Cost - the best activities have low cost or one time costs. Some, such as gym memberships, fees, lift tickets, expensive gear can have an impact.

Breathing - one of the crucial aspects is the ability to breathe. You can use nose only breathing to center yourself and improve positive affirmations, you can use breath-hold methods to rapidly improve and test cardiovascular ability.

Testing - testing would include having an event, such as timed course, a fun run, a race, or an activity (such as swimming underwater for distance). It’s important to explore periodic testing as well as learning how to taper an activity so you can experience supercompensation.

Photo credit:  Shutterstock/Rey Borlaza

An aside about cardio, when I was in my late teens and was in good cardio shape, and worked at a pool, I would test my ability to swim laps underwater. The best I could do without training it (just tried it a few times) was 2.2 laps in a 25 yard pool. Olympic pools are 50 meters or 162 feet, versus about 165 feet with two turnarounds (which uses up energy). In my 60s I did another test, coming off of a lot of biking and elliptical work, and I did repeats of two laps in a pool or one lap of an Olympic pool we have here in Westmoreland. I was happy to see I could meet the kind of aerobic ability I had (relatively) as a kid. Of course aerobic and anaerobic and burst are used in fighting/rolling/sparring, so on the bike, with hills and sprints you get both types.

Base-building - why? - Base training gives you the energy, the biochemical traits, the drive and motivation to pursue all other activities. It gives a sense of well-being partly due to reduction of rumination and use of moving meditation and partly due to the release of good neurohormones. The best way to assure motivation is to have the energy to get up and go train and that comes with base building.

© Badger Johnson

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Please check out Badger Johnson's other essays:

• A Martial Framework
• How To Exceed Your Plateaus
• Adding to Arnold's Six Principles of Success
• 10 Tips on how to analyze a martial art for effectiveness
• "To be a master is very different from being an expert."
• Addendum, Clarification and Expansion of Paul Vunak's Fighting Secrets
• Expanded Ways of Attack
• "Fifty Important Elements in Martial Arts"
• Can Trapping Work?
• The Genesis and Development of Zone Theory
• A few aspects of self-defense training
• Some of the important ten things…
• Over-speed Training - Accessing the Subconscious and the Power of Threes
• Coaching, self-coaching, talent, experience, genetics, opportunity, motivation
• Thresholding
• "I'd Like to Teach the World to Dance"
• Some thoughts today
• "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" 
• The Safecracker and the Fighter - the effect of serotonin and dopamine receptors
• Beyond Martial Skills
• Some of the Major Misconceptions or Fallacies of JKD 
• How Bruce Lee may have improved skill using biofeedback 
• The Art of Fighting Without Fighting   
• Not Martial Trained, But Fighting Fit
• Against One Who Scares Us
• What Bruce Lee Taught Us  
• What is Mobile Kicking?

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What is Mobile Kicking? by Badger Johnson

What is Mobile Kicking?

The main difficulty in landing a strike, getting an entry, and even getting a takedown is the ability to quickly close the gap between the attacker and the opponent.

To do so is also an opportunity for the opponent to increase the gap as they sense an attempt. The opponent can do one of three things. He can jam, he can lean back, or he can sidestep. He can also block which is less reliable since it requires almost perfect understanding of the angle and attack being attempted.

This essay will describe the method of closing the gap known as ‘mobile kicking’.

The components of mobile kicking can be broken down into a few components:

1. The dynamic chamber
2. Unweighting
3. The subtle skip step

The purpose of the dynamic chamber is to begin the attack in a non-telegraphic manner, while not disclosing the exact target of any subsequent kick or other attack. The chamber may result in a subsequent kicking attack or it may involve a fake which is followed by a hand strike or even a penetration step to a takedown.

Unweighting is the movement involved in reducing the friction with the ground by slightly lifting the weight either by a slight dip or a slight rise in the body’s center of gravity. It’s most often seen in skinning as the skier will unweight to get the body weight off of the turning ski, allowing carving a turn.

In sparring it reduces the friction with the ground of the standing leg allowing a sliding forward which is impelled by the motion of the dynamic chamber (lifting the lead knee).

The skip step happens not as a conscious movement but as a result of the dynamic chambering and the unweighting, and allows the standing leg to slide forward very quickly in either a straight line or a vector off of the angulation of the body, and causes a near instantaneous closing of the gap, disguised behind the subtle distraction of either a hand feint or fake and the dynamic chamber (which can be a fake or a feint as well).

You can most easily see the procedure by watching the GIFs of Michael Jai White:

Sidekick realtime

Slowmo sidekick

Spinning back kick realtime

Slowmo spinning back kick

Above GIFs made from "Michael Jai White on Covering Distance (part 2) full frame and slower"

You can also see it in the below 2 GIFs from this video of Raymond Daniels:

Realtime

Slowmo

and an early version in these 2 GIFs (1st, 3rd and 4th kicks) by Bruce Lee against Bob Wall in Return of the Dragon:

Real-time of the 4 kicks in this scene

Slow motion on the initiation of the 1st, 2nd and 4th kicks

Now that you know what mobile kicking is, the next time you see it used you will be like:

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Please check out Badger Johnson's other essays:

• A Martial Framework
• How To Exceed Your Plateaus
• Adding to Arnold's Six Principles of Success
• 10 Tips on how to analyze a martial art for effectiveness
• "To be a master is very different from being an expert."
• Addendum, Clarification and Expansion of Paul Vunak's Fighting Secrets
• Expanded Ways of Attack
• "Fifty Important Elements in Martial Arts"
• Can Trapping Work?
• The Genesis and Development of Zone Theory
• A few aspects of self-defense training
• Some of the important ten things…
• Over-speed Training - Accessing the Subconscious and the Power of Threes
• Coaching, self-coaching, talent, experience, genetics, opportunity, motivation
• Thresholding
• "I'd Like to Teach the World to Dance"
• Some thoughts today
• "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" 
• Beyond Martial Skills
• Some of the Major Misconceptions or Fallacies of JKD 
• How Bruce Lee may have improved skill using biofeedback 
• The Art of Fighting Without Fighting   
• Not Martial Trained, But Fighting Fit
• Against One Who Scares Us
• What Bruce Lee Taught Us 

Read More