Αρχική

Ακαδημία

Εκπαιδευτές

Jeet Kune Do

Filipino Kali

Kuntao Silat

Ομαδικά Τμήματα

Ιδιαίτερα Μαθήματα

Βιβλιοθήκη

Άρθρα

Τεχνικές

Σεμινάρια

Συχνές Ερωτήσεις

Επικοινωνία 

Jeet Kune Do Sparring

Attributes are qualities. They are what make up the street fighter. Your heart, your power, your strength, your killer instinct, your timing. Without these qualities, your techniques mean nothing. That is why Bruce Lee emphasised attributes and practiced 'petty' techniques.

Watch an NBA game, watch the techniques they use, and if you say, "Now I can play the game." No you can't. You have to be able to train it. You don't train the technique so much but the attributes. It's the attributes that make a technique work. Back in the early '50's American football players used to scrimmage five times a week. By the late '50's they scrimmaged twice a week. By the early '60's they scrimmaged only once a week. The rest of the time they spent working on their attributes.

How do you truly do JKD? You have people in this country kickboxing and they say they're doing JKD. JKD is not the art of kickboxing. JKD is the art of interception. To intercept you have to get into trapping distance. And you have to have a training method to be able to get to that trapping distance to intercept.

If you have 2 people in a ring dukeing it out, then the bigger guy wins, and that's why we have weight classes. If someone jabs at you intercept him with an eye jab, then borrow that split second when he's in pain and disoriented and quickly follow up with a furious straight blast of fists or throw at him knees, head butts and elbows - now we're cooking. If, on the other hand, someone out there is fast with the jab and has good structure, it's difficult to intercept. That's why Dan Inosanto came in with destructions from Kali to destroy the limbs. Your opponent throws that jab, intercept it with a raised point of the elbow - "boom" - you destroy his hand. With his weapon out of the way you can now enter more safely and straight blast.

Intercepting and destroying - these are the two main concepts - you'll move from kickboxing to JKD. To intercept, you have to be in the correct range. Everybody fights too close – boxers, kickboxers, etc., because these are sports. What happens? The bigger, stronger guy wins.

The Game Plan

For us to intercept, we need to be a little further, to see the blow coming. So we don't just parry it - that happens when you are too close - you need to be further out to see and intercept it. So the point is - you've got to understand distance, you've gotta be further away. Now you may ask - if I'm so far away, how can I ever hit him? Use those 2 shuffles – the step and slide, and the pendulum shuffle. We spend an hour and a half or two a day to develop the shuffles. That means that when he encroaches on you trying to bridge the gap - "boom" - he gets intercepted.

If you can't intercept, you can't enter, and if you can't enter, you can't head butt, knee or elbow. Bruce was 128 pounds, and Dan is not a big man. But these people could go through a man like a hot knife through butter because they have a formula. Right now it's so important for you to hit each other, but you are not intercepting. I've been traveling up and down the United States and all over the world for 15 years telling people to intercept, and I come back to them and they are still kickboxing.

So instead of asking you to intercept, we're gonna give you a formula, a point system. Let's call it "The Vu Scale." With the Vu Scale, we turn learning how to intercept into a game. Why a game? Because right now when you generally spar you can almost cut the tension in the air with a knife. Your heart is doing 120 miles a minute.

The Vu Scale

The Vu Scale will turn all that heavy duty shit into a chess match. If you make a game out of it, people will tend to pull it off, like magic. Turn it into a game and everybody's intercepting. What the Vu Scale is designed to do is change your priorities. The biggest thing to you right now is hitting. Do that to a six-foot-eight Samoan wrestler pissed off and they wouldn't even know it they're in a fight. To take him out, you must get into trapping range. You have to drive that knee into his groin or you just won't win. If you don't thumb his eyes and head butt him, forget it.

To enter that trapping range, you've got to intercept. The most important thing is to intercept. That's more important in the Vu scale than hitting.

Action Points on the Vu Scale
1. Interception - 5 points
2. Destruction - 4 points
3. Entry - 3 points
4. Fake - 2 points
5. Hit - 1 points

So when you are out in the range we talked of and intercept, you get 5 points for it. Every time he attacks and you intercept him you get your five points. If he takes a step toward you he gets a sidekick in his shin; if he throws a roundhouse kick you straight kick his balls; and if he throws a haymaker punch you intercept him with a finger jab to his eye. So when he attacks, he gets pain. And when you attack, he also gets pain. And if you intercept - 5 points.

With interception you hit the opponent even before his attack fully unfolds. The ferocity of the attack is doubled because you borrow his momentum and couple it with your own – like two cars in a head-on collision. Your opponent ought to be in sufficient pain to be distracted enough - and you borrow that split second to barrage him with your straight blast. You exploit his moment of vulnerability.

If you didn't intercept but you instead destroyed a limb - e.g. he throws a jab at you and you meet it with the sharp point of an elbow and damage his hand - you get 4 points. Same if he throws a high kick and "bang" - you destroy it with an elbow to his shin. If he throws a low roundhouse kick at your thigh, you meet his shin with a bent knee putting him into unbelievable pain. All limb destructions carry 4 points.

Destroying a limb thrown at you makes it that much easier for you to exploit his moment of weakness to enter into trapping range so as to employ your most barbaric tools – knees, head butts and elbows - to finish off the fight.

The whole idea of the Vu Scale - and JKD, of course - is about getting into trapping range in the most economical way. We do maximum physical as well as psychological damage to the opponent from the word go so as to open him up further to our most barbaric tools of stopping the fight. Because our very opening shot puts him in pain and into a defensive mode we have much less to worry about his offence and instead take control and efficiently follow up with our dispatch tools - knees, head butts and elbows. Only with such a strategy can we fight out of own weight class. Without it, we'd be forced to dukeing it out – and the bigger guy will usually win.

If you didn't/couldn't either intercept your opponent or destroy his limb but somehow timed him and entered with a straight blast or managed to grab his neck - you earn 3 points. The straight blast is an aggressive, purely visceral attack - an overwhelming barrage of straight punches that are very difficult to defend against. Opponents are usually left hopelessly back-pedaling with little defensive structure. Grabbing his neck leaves you with a good structure to knee, head butt or elbow. Because you are in a superior attack position, you earn those 3 points.

The fake is a concept that allows you to get into trapping range very quickly - it's called Progressive Indirect Attack (P.I.A.) - a method of striking. You "sneak" up on your opponent with a fake and cover distance - you progress - and attack him on the second, or sometimes even the third beat - on a different line. It's indirect because your real intention is not the first strike, a fake. You want to gain distance to launch the 2nd attack in order to throw his timing off.

The best boxers are excellent fakers. You can't fight a good opponent with a Simple Direct Attack (S.D.A.) or with an Attack by Combination (A.B.C.). You've got to fake your opponent one way and attack him another way. For example, fake low and attack high, or vice-versa. You get 2 points for a fake.

Our final on the Vu Scale - last and least - is a strike - 1 point. If you attacked him straight with a thigh kick - one point. A straight punch to the face? 1 point.

Using this Vu Scale, you learn to reprioritise your brain. You teach it that the most important thing is intercepting. A big man comes in? I just see his set of balls coming - "boom" – I intercept him with a hook kick to his manhood. Huge guy swinging a punch at me? "Boom" - finger jab to the eye.

So someone throws a heavy-duty attack on you, intercept or destroy a limb, and now you're in a position to enter - straight blast! - and that's when the shit hits the fan.

So now that you understand the Vu Scale, you train it by first isolating one tool at a time. For example, your training partner throws only haymakers (a wide, swinging, street reverse punch) at you and you intercept them with eye jabs. Then you move on to maybe intercepting roundhouse kicks with straight kicks to the balls. Build up a progression. It doesn't help to try to intercept all possible tools all at once. Isolate, then progress, that's the key. Then proceed to learn to destroy limbs. You can spend 2 months perhaps learning only to destroy a jab. But you can be sure that at the end of that period no jab will get past you. The way you train is going to dictate the way you fight. If it's important for you to intercept - and it should be - then you have to train that way. If you kick box and then hope to intercept then it's like playing basketball and hoping that your chess game gets better.

The above system teaches us how to enter on an individual. It's not techniques that really matter; it's how you do it. I've been asking Dan what would Bruce do when sparring. "He liked to kick the face, spin kick… I saw him cartwheel and do a back fist…" I asked him what he'd do when he was really serious. "Intercept and straight blast." All the time? "Every time when he was serious, which was once a week."

So you need a foundation. Techniques come from the foundation. You can't make techniques work unless you have a training method - our foundation. You need to intercept and blast. This is how I taught the U.S. Navy Seals. There is no better way to take somebody out of commission.

Techniques are only there if you screw up - which happens in 1 out of 50 times. So why emphasise techniques? The foundation, or training method, or philosophy, or whatever else you choose to call it, first. So get out some blackboard and give yourselves points - as detailed in the vu scale. A fun way of learning some serious lessons - intercept first. If you can't, then automatically destroy limbs. Fail that, time a straight blast entry. If the opportunity doesn't occur then fake out your opponent and hit. If not, hit directly - and that counts as a single point. At the end of your training sessions laugh it off. Do this and your priorities in a fight change.

Now you will be practicing JKD. You are no longer kickboxing. You've moved out of your weight class. You can now hurt a bigger opponent. Put on some sparring gear once or twice a week - the motorcycle helmet, boxing gloves, shin guards, kneepads, thigh pads and groin cups and dish it out. Full force sparring using the game plan as per the Vu scale.

That is Jeet Kune Do.

Liberate yourself - from blind conformity to styles and systems.

Paul Vunak