Bruce Lee's Innovation Unleashed
The Independent Broken Blast
The name Bruce Lee has become associated with something legends are made of.
No different from Hercules of Roman folklore or Achilles from Greek mythology, Bruce Lee has been elevated to an almost god-like status.
The story tells of a man so fast, so powerful, he is virtually unbeatable.
While I believe that all men are flawed and no man is divinity, I find the reality of Bruce Lee much more interesting than the god-like persona that everyone seems to embrace on the silver screen.
The Bruce Lee that interests me was an innovator, a revolutionary, and a master strategist.
He seemed to have this uncanny ability to recognize the true nature of combat and be honest with it, with himself, and translate it into a functional reality.
Bruce Lee was all about attribute development, and I would like to focus on Bruce’s attribute of innovation today.
Areas of Innovation
There are many domains in which Bruce contributed new and innovative ideas that helped revolutionize modern martial arts.
However, there are three critical areas I would like to zero in on.
These areas are aliveness, broken rhythm, and independent motion.
Aliveness, broken rhythm, and independent motion are concepts that work together and, when harmonized, can converge to supercharge one’s fighting technique.
As a starting point to delve into these three areas of innovation, let’s take a step back and begin our discussion with one of Bruce Lee’s signature moves: the straight blast.
What is the Straight Blast?
The straight blast is a fighting technique in which you pump a series of vertical punches down an opponent’s centerline.
These vertical punches are sometimes referred to as chain punching.
The volume of punches maybe three, four, five, or six; the actual number of fists unloaded during a chain punch is academic — it is the way the punches are applied that is more important.
These punches are fortified with intense forward pressure down an opponent’s centerline.
This forward pressure causes a person to backpedal, robbing them of their fighting attributes and rendering them helpless for that moment.
What does the straight blast have to do with innovation and the concepts of aliveness, broken rhythm, and independent motion, one may ask?
To answer this question, we must look back to the origins of the modern-day straight blast.
The concept of chain punching down an opponent’s centerline predates Bruce Lee.
The original move from which the straight blast was inspired was born from the art of Wing Chun and is known as the Jik Chun Choi.
It was Bruce’s training with the grandmaster Yip Man where the seeds of this move were born.
By all accounts, Bruce had great respect and appreciation for Wing Chun and used core components of the art as a baseline for his martial art of Jeet Kune Do.
However, Bruce had a significant sticking point with Wing Chun, which can be summarized in one word: footwork.
Compared to Western Boxing or fencing, why was Wing Chun’s footwork so lifeless, static, and unalive?
The answer to this question, and to solve this problem, Bruce’s innovation attribute kicked in.
Bruce took the framework of the Jik Chun Choi and modernized the footwork, making it more combative, athletic, and alive.
This thought process is the birth of the idea of “aliveness” and is central to Bruce Lee’s fighting method.
How does one create maximum aliveness?
To develop maximum aliveness in one’s fighting, it starts with rhythm.
Initially, fighters naturally tend to form a cadence, a steady beat in their motion, when trying to establish rhythm. It’s no different than a monotone drumbeat.
While a cadence is a valid form of rhythm and an improvement over static position-based combat, it lacks the twitchy, unpredictable nature of organic athletic movement.
A cadent rhythmic beat does not achieve authentic aliveness. It is merely a starting point.
For example, how many NFL players move in a cadent beat once the ball is snapped throughout the entire duration of play?
The ball is snapped, the quarterback steps back, and an initial cadence is established.
The rhythm changes when the ball is handed off to the running back.
Bruce solved this monotone cadence problem in martial arts by introducing the principle of broken rhythm.
The idea of broken rhythm is that once a cadence is recognized, it needs to be quickly changed.
This change can be achieved by staggering the beats or hitting a half or quarter-beat tempo.
To put it differently, apply different timing changeups.
This idea of breaking the cadence and the rhythm gives footwork an aliveness booster. It adds an unpredictable element to both a fighter’s offense and defense.
Take into consideration the diagram in Figure 2.
This figure illustrates the “Pyramid of Aliveness.” It shows that aliveness is not a binary state, alive or not alive.
Instead, aliveness is a spectrum of three basic levels: static, movement with cadent rhythm, and broken rhythm.
The late, great Joe Lewis talks extensively in his writings about his time with Bruce and how Bruce was fascinated with Western Boxing, particularly with Muhammad Ali.
Lewis accounts that he and Bruce logged many hours together watching, analyzing, and reenacting old Ali footage, trying to build that same aliveness into their fighting.
The output of these sessions is quite notable in the 1970 fight between Joe Lewis and Greg Baines at the US Pro-Team Karate championship in Long Beach[YouTube].
This fight is the first documented full-contact martial arts match in the United States, where knockout was deemed a victory.
With Bruce Lee as his coach, Joe Lewis came out with movement and rhythm that had not been seen before in Western martial arts.
To no coincidence, Lewis’s footwork matched Muhammad Ali’s.
Before this fight, there was little to no rhythm if you look at the early days of Western Karate tournaments.
Three years before the Baines fight, in 1967, the match between Joe Lewis and Chuck Norris perfectly illustrates the difference[YouTube].
Norris and Lewis would square off in their respective leads in this earlier fight and maintain static positions until one of the two fighters initiated an attack.
Conversely, around the same time frame, Ali was in the ring demolishing his opposition, “floating like a butterfly.” Ali was a savant and moved naturally with a broken rhythm.
Bruce recognized this and comparatively identified the lack of athletic rhythm as a significant gap in martial arts training at the time.
Bruce’s ability to identify this difference and bottle Ali’s footwork into an articulable and trainable concept that could be infused into classic martial arts training made him a master innovator.
Bruce’s innovation did not stop at aliveness and broken rhythm.
Bruce’s brother Peter was a reputable fencer.
The influence of fencing helped shape how Bruce applied his martial arts technique.
Bruce observed the method by which fencers fought.
He noted how they moved to penetrate their opponent’s defense deceptively.
The idea was to thrust the foil first, then the body.
This hand-before-body action increases the move’s perceptual speed, making it more difficult for an opponent to defend and react to the inbound attack.
If the foil moves first, this eliminates telegraphing of the body’s primary pivot points, making the strike harder to detect until it is too late to react.
This concept is referred to as weapon first or the independent motion principle.
If this principle works for weapons, hypothesized Bruce, could it not work for a fist?
Being a true innovator, Bruce leveraged the idea of independent motion and integrated it into martial arts.
Like how he borrowed footwork and broken rhythm to create aliveness from Western Boxing, he repeated the same exercise, borrowed an idea from a weapons base system, and fertilized this insight into the world of empty hands.
The fist moves first, then the body, therefore minimizing telegraphing and increasing perceptual speed, thus providing higher penetration speed against our opponents.
While fighters in today’s MMA genera may find this idea commonplace, for its time, this innovation was indeed a significant advancement in empty-handed martial arts.
Application of the Straight Blast
When we wind forward to today and look at the modern matrix of combat, the straight blast reigns as one of the most valuable and street-effective self-defense tools ever devised — to the extent that it has been the centerpiece in the elite branches of US government self-defense programs for over thirty years.
Organizations such as the Navy Seals, DEA, and DOD embrace the straight blast as one of their go-to self-defense techniques. Why?
The blast addresses aliveness head-on and integrates it as a systemic part of its being.
It is a straightforward move to learn, applies mostly gross motor skills, and the effects are devastating to an opponent if used at the correct time during a fight.
How does the straight blast achieve the intense effectiveness required to demolish opponents?
Put quite simply, running.
The straight blast addresses Bruce’s principles of aliveness head-on with the running footwork, but what about independent motion and broken rhythm? How do these come into play?
What if we injected Bruce’s innovative principles into the straight blast and folded them into a unified movement?
Could we further increase the aliveness of the straight blast and enhance its effectiveness?
The answer is yes.
Adding Independent Motion
When we run, we engage the feet first, not unlike a track star poised on the starting line in a race. The pistol fires, and off the track star goes. Their feet dig in, and their thighs engage. The frame lunges and the arms kick in like pistons. The body moves forward — all good, all very athletic.
However, in fighting, we are not track stars, and from an opposing fighter’s perspective, the telegraphing that occurs in this foot-to-thigh-to-body-to-arm engagement can be quite substantial.
Also, the torso’s center of gravity tends to be right below the arms, leaving the centerline as an easy accidental target.
To help optimize the bridging of the gap against our opponent, we can apply the theory of Independent Motion to our straight blast run to help boost penetration speed.
The quicker we can penetrate and reach the target, the lower our chance of getting hit or missing.
How do we apply independent motion to this scenario?
We fall.
When an opening presents itself, rather than initiate a sprint, we “fall” into the opening with our punches.
Gravity acts like a pulley attached to our fist and pulls us toward our opponent.
The fist goes first, followed by the shoulder and the hip. The feet engage as momentum pulls you far enough forward to catch yourself from falling.
Not engaging the feet would ensure a proper face plant on the concrete. Once the feet catch, you will gain a burst of forward momentum that will rapidly propel your blast to completion.
The feet are trying to keep up with the body.
When applying independent motion principle at first, it feels weird.
Although quickly, you will find that by the time the feet catch, depending on your exact range at the point of entry, the chain punch will be almost ½ to ¾ of the way to the target before the feet engage, thus providing you a considerable penetration advantage.
An additional side benefit is that it keeps our groin slightly farther out of range from an accidental knee that may fly up when the opponent back peddles.
In the following photo, Scott Gehring helps illustrate this concept of the “Independent Motion Blast.”
Per Figure 4, once we have mastered independent motion with the straight blast, working in a progression, we can move to our next concept: broken rhythm.
Adding Broken Rhythm
Since the straight blast is an all-out blitzkrieg-type action, it is rarely thought to be put into the rhythm of the actual implementation.
However, suppose we are to adhere to the Pyramid of Aliveness in Figure 2.
To apply maximum effectiveness, the best martial artist will break the rhythm of any found cadence.
Scott shows in the following illustration how to add broken rhythm to the independent motion blast and create an “Independent Broken Blast.”
Broken rhythm is formally defined as any sudden break in an attack’s speed, direction, or essence.
For example, when attacking, the essence of my footwork may switch from soft to hard.
This sudden change in essence, would indicate a break in rhythm.
Another example of broken rhythm would be when striking, firing with three full beats followed by a ½ beat pause, then three more full beats.
This would be a break in the timing (a change in speed is a change in timing).
The third is a change in direction — perhaps I could hit my blast on an upward trajectory to my opponent’s face and suddenly switch direction, punch him in the groin, then back on to the face again.
For instance, this changeup is optimal if the opponent’s hands come up to protect their head.
Punch them in the groin to bring their hands back down, to then recontinue the pressure onto the face.
Training in a Progression
When we train in martial arts, we always work in a progression.
The following three-phase training progression illustrates the best method to develop a useful independent broken blast.
In one single move, one can look at the independent broken blast the Jik Chun Choi unleashed, using the best of Bruce Lee’s innovations.
There are times when putting this type of sophistication behind your Straight Blast is overkill.
For the average street entanglement, this level of sophistication may be unnecessary.
However, knowing you can sophisticate your technique when needed gives you additional choices against a more formidable, more intelligent, more skilled opponent than you.
When things don’t go as planned, it gives you the confidence to dig out of it. Expect the unexpected, and you shall never be surprised.
There is an old aviation saying that “speed is life.”
The straight blast embodies this idea and has us sprinting down a would-be assailant’s centerline.
If speed is life, and running is our maxim organic footwork speed, layering in the principles of broken rhythm and independent motion into our blasting run equals maximum life.
To hijack the old saying, “If speed is life, then blasting is our life insurance!”
About the Author
Scott-Gehring.com
EPOC Martial Arts
Strategic Engagement of Force | Linktree
Bibliography
Chirashya, I. (2015). Bruce, the world’s most famous Fencer. Retrieved from Academyoffencingmasters: http://academyoffencingmasters.com/blog/
Lewis, J. (2004). How to Master Bruce Lee’s Fighting System.
Paul Vunaks JKD Street Fighting Series, Bruce Lee’s Straight Blast (1989). [Motion Picture].
Trevor West Haines, B. (2000). Fencings influence on Bruce Lee’s Martial Art of Jeet Kune Do.
Gehring, S. (2021). Strategic Engagement of Force. AnewPress https://linktr.ee/StrategicEngagementofForce
