When meeting the right girl, even Bruce Lee smiles.

When meeting the right girl, even Bruce Lee smiles.

— The karate kid

“Being still and doing nothing 

are two very different things.”

- Gichin Funakoshi

Train with both heart and soul without worrying about theory. 

Very often a person who lacks the quality of deadly seriousness will take refuge in theory.

Karate-do

Karate-do begins and ends with bowing.

一、空手道は礼に始まり礼に終る事を忘るな

Hitotsu, karate-do wa rei ni hajimari rei ni owaru koto o wasuru na

— Karate Kyokushin

“Cry in the dojo - Laugh on the battlefield!”

- Ryu

Never rush anything.
Allow your body to grow.
Let your mind develop.
Cultivate your character.
Nurture your spirit.
Soften up your heart.
True progress will come.

Keep Calm and Train Hard!

— Bruce Lee

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

To those of your who practice truly traditional martial arts, meditation as part of training is nothing new to you. Most of you either start or end your classes at your dojo with meditation. Those of you on the combat sports side of martial arts may have never even thought about meditating.

Meditation for most of us goes against the grain of who we are as Americans. We go to yoga to stretch and get flexibility, not to achieve enlightenment. While you are off contemplating your navel, I’ll be lifting some weights! Lets see who wins now! heh! Or we feel like we are going to be sucked into some sort of pseudo religious craziness, and that isn’t what we signed on for.

That said, no one seems to have a problem with all the odd mental crutches we use to fight our best. This is something a lot of traditional martial artists might not have had to deal with, the stress of fighting. Knowing that there is another human being who has trained and pushed him/herself for the chance to hurt you is difficult on the mind. Now bring in the crowd. Hundreds of yelling people all watching you… judging you. Then there’s your team, they might be your teacher, your friends, your family, the people who’s opinion of you matters most. All of these people are waiting for you to walk out and…screw things up. No stress (tries to control facial tick), so we have our lucky gi, or our shorts, or even that groin cup that we wear every time we win. We’ll be OK if we have it, right?

These crutches are the weird childish way we have of coping with the stress. No matter how prepared you are, going into a fight with your brain in a knot will make you loose every time. Great fighters like GSP, Rich Franklin, and Keith Jardine hired a sports psychologist (Brian Cain) to help them with their mental training. For those of us who don’t have sponsors paying for things, we have meditation.

The Samurai were admonished to meditate every morning on every possible way they could die that day, that way if they did indeed meet some misfortune, they would already have thought about how to act, what to say, etc. George St Pierre explained his point of view now that he has gotten his head together like this, “…there are so many things out of my control in a fight — where the opponent moves, how the opponent reacts, calls made by a referee, etc. Rather than focus on things out of control, focus on my preparation before the fight which trains him to instinctively respond to as many of the different situations as possible.” Sounds similar, take a few minutes each day and visualize what you will do in different situations. Most of the time in a fight, things happen outside of your control, so prepare yourself mentally for that. Control the only thing you have a handle on, your own response. What will you do if he turns out to be faster than you thought? What if you end up on the ground with your opponent on top? What will you do if you loose? Going to act like an idiot and really shame yourself? Take a few moments each day to close your eyes and give yourself a good going over. You’ll find that you’ll be calmer facing a fight if you got your self doubt out before you step onto the mats or into the ring. GSP summed it up nicely “I’m not the strongest guy in the world. I’m also not the best wrestler. I’m not the best submission specialist or the best striker either. But on the night of the fight because of the way I’ve prepared (he began to point to his head), up here, I am the best in the world.”

So there you go. Its not some crazy hippy new-age dogma disguised as martial arts, its the finishing touch to make sure you get the chance to use what you have been training all this time.

Bruce Lee had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace.

“Bruce Lee had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a-half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “Were going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can't go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him,”Bruce if I run any more,”- and we’re still running- “if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

-Unknown

Don't practice until you get it right. 

Practice until you can't get it wrong.

~ Bruce Lee

“Do not be tense, just be ready, not thinking but not dreaming, not being set but being flexible. It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.” 

— Gichin Funakoshi

“You may train for a long, long time, but if you merely move your hands and feet and jump up and down like a puppet, learning karate is not very different from learning to dance. You will never have reached the heart of the matter; you will have failed to grasp the quintessence of karate-do.”

Kumite

-Bruce Lee

“Man the living creature, the creative individual, is always more important than any established style or system"

okay, just because I'm having a little tough right now, this animation actually manages so crack me up. It's a Black belt dude dancing really good and funny :P

Dr. Benjamin Spock

The main source of good discipline is growing up in a 

loving family, being loved and learning 

to love in return.

Bruce Lee

“When you’re talking about fighting, as it is, with no rules … well then, baby, you’d better train every part of your body.”

When two people cooperate....

When two people cooperate instead

 of competing against each other,

 their teamwork accomplishes far

 more than either of them could 

have achieved on their own.

– Bruce Lee

“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” – Bruce Lee