Bruce Lee's Training & Workouts

too many people Bruce Lee represents the absolute peak in human physical performance and athleticism he was renowned for his incredibly low body fat which gave him this wicked looking for Zeke but what was much more impressive than the way his physique that looked was what it could do Bruce Lee was capable of some incredible feats of power and he may well have been one of the strongest people alive pound for pound during his lifetime so let's take a look at the way Bruce Lee trains if we can learn something from his notes and see if perhaps we can apply some of the principles he used to our own training methods the first thing that makes Bruce Lee unique among his contemporaries was the fact that he trained with weights at all at the time most martial artists believe that if they train with weights it would make their muscles big and bulky and slow and this would make them less effective as fighters Bruce Lee did the research however and he knew that he could use martial arts training in combination with bodybuilding and powerlifting type techniques in order to develop more explosive power through that fast twitch muscle fiber and that mind-muscle connection and that's what his training was all about he wasn't really interested in building size he was much more mature than building pure power so he used some quite unique training methods that are slightly different from what you might be familiar with as a bodybuilder perhaps or just as a regular gym rat but allowed him to build this kind of insane strength without packing on that much exercise recently only weighed about 135 pounds so it's quite a small guy but the stuff you could do with that such as the one the two finger push-up such as apparently holding barbells out at arm's length for long periods of time weighing 40 kilograms they demonstrate that he had a awful lot of power behind him the first thing that really sets Bruce Lee apart is his philosophy and the emphasis he put on philosophy in his training I've written recently about the importance of a training philosophy and Bruce Lee epitomizes this idea Bruce Lee didn't just train because he wanted to look good Bruce Lee trained because he wanted to be a better fighter and beyond that he believed the martial arts were the perfect way to express yourself he wanted to have the ability to be in full complete control of his body so that when he wanted to do something it was right there so that he could be completely in sync with his emotions he used to say when he wants to punch you better believe he's gonna punch it so he had to develop that speed and that power and this is the driving force behind what he did this is why he was so committed to training it's why he truly believed in it and that's why he was willing to put in so much work he wasn't training for a goal just training for the love of training he was like a real-life Goku or something always coming up with new ways to push the envelope and that's the other thing about Bruce Lee he didn't just settle for following a training program highly personal trainer as your I might instead he was constantly experimenting with brand new techniques of pushing the envelope developed jeet kune do-- believing that he should do away with a classical mess of martial arts he also didn't just follow conventional bodybuilding wisdom he did the research he looked into the studies and he tested on himself in that way he's very much like one of the earliest biohackers he was constantly experimenting with new ways to not just gain incremental increases in strength but to push the envelope and to actually exponentially unlock entirely different kinds of power and you're going to see some of the ways he did that in a second so in terms of just a general training program Bruce Lee would do a fairly regular combination of compound movements isolation movements and CV he did a lot of functional training so that means deadlifts and squats and clean and presses because he believed that would give him more power you see pictures of him doing one-armed presses using the muscles in unison in order to make them more useful but he did also do isolation training there's lots of images and videos of him doing bicep curls and I heard somewhere someone said if you think bicep curls aren't functional then you've obviously never wrestled and clearly bruce lee agreed with that idea on top of all that weight lifting bruce lee was also do a lot of cv apparently he would run nearly every single day when he could and he was constantly adding progressive overload by running faster doing tempo runs trying to pushes anaerobic threshold or even running with resistance running with weight strapped to his back to make it more difficult on top of this he also did early interval training which wasn't really a thing at the time he did this in the same way that you might structure a boxing round so he'd do two minutes of intense training and then one minute rest which would be the rest between rounds and then you go again bruce lee like i said was something of a pioneer something of a davinci of the body constantly discovering things ahead of his time interval training being one of them now many people recommend interval training but like I said he's also partial to a lot of CV and steady-state CV and the reason for this is that he believed it was better for his overall ability to continue to output energy for long periods of time and he explained that if you're going to be a fighter you really need this ability it's no good to get a punch and kick hard if you can be out of breath after the third kick and then you have to lie down he said something along the lines of if you don't have a good cardiovascular system then you need to look into a more peace full activity as your hobby for that interval training Bruce Lee would be using punches and kicks and jabs against the heavy bag which makes sense as a martial artist and he would also train each of his different strikes on different days splitting them like a bodybuilder might split body parts to do kicks on one day's punches on another day etc so when you combine all that running the lifting the striking you realize Bruce Lee was just completely dedicated to his training and it's no wonder that you had this incredibly low body fat and just looked like something out of a comic book because you know if you're going to train for those kinds of hours then that's how you go end up looking and like I said Bruce Lee used some more interesting training methods as well he didn't just do lifting when he was doing his weight training he thought that bit outside the box again and this is where he came up with some really unique and interesting ideas one of them being speed training so on these days Bruce Lee would try and increase the challenge of his workouts but he wouldn't do it the way most of us do it by increasing the weight or by increasing the number of repetitions instead he'd do it by increasing the speed at which he completed the workout so the same workout would try and compete it faster times a little bit like something that CrossFitters are doing these days but the reason this was interesting to Bruce Lee in particular is because when you use explosive fast movements you're essentially engaging more fast twitch muscle fiber you're telling the body it needs explosive force and the body can't tell the difference between resistance and acceleration forces force that's what it needs to generate to get fast that's what it needs to generate to lift something heavy so by lifting the same weights faster as far as the muscles are concerned it's the same thing as lifting them heavier it'll engage more fast twitch muscle fiber but it probably won't result in quite the same muscle damage and micro-tears meaning that he could potentially develop more strength without creating quite so much hypertrophy apart from anything else this is just a great way to mix things up and I recommend trying it and you'll see right away that it definitely challenges you in a slightly different way to what you're perhaps used to so why not give that a go another thing Bruce Lee did that was quite different whether you use a lot of isometric training isometric of course means that you're holding it's the opposite of plyometric instead of explosive movement you're holding one position so for instance you might hold the bicep you might hold the bicep curl position using dumbbells and then slowly allow them drop as you completely use up all of your strength recently believe that because you're holding it in the point where there's the most resistance to it's the most difficult as opposed to having the arm straight or up here you're engaging the most strength however at the same time you're not going to the full range of motion they bruce lee you use combine this kind of training with regular training why just describe there where you're holding the weight and letting it gradually fall that's called yielding isometrics that's where you're holding the weight and then letting yourself fatigue but that's not the only type of it's from our isometric training bruce lee used and it's also probably not the most interesting the most interesting kind of isometrics that bruce lee would use was called overcoming isometrics and here what he would do is he'd hold on to a really heavy weight that he literally couldn't lift so for instance he'd lie under a bench press and he'd load up the bar to be 200 kilograms or 300 who knows obviously can lift and then he would just strain to try and push it he did the same thing with squatting he'd have a squat rack where the bar was on his neck but it was locked in place so we just try and push up this bar that wasn't going anywhere likewise you do the same with curling by chaining a bar to the ground and then trying to curl it obviously he could not you hold that position for a few seconds let it go and try again this is the definition of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object bruce lee being that unstoppable force i've actually talked about this kind of overcoming isometrics in the past and again what makes it interesting is its ability to recruit those faster twitch muscle fibers when you're pushing against something that won't move or pulling against something that won't move again your brain and your muscle fibers they don't know the difference between something that's locked in place and something that's just really heavy so to begin with you're just pulling and pushing as hard as you can and you're recruiting all of the vast mass twitch muscle fibers so you're training your ability to exert maximum strength at a given time not only could this potentially strengthen those fast twitch fibers but more importantly you can strengthen the mind muscle connection the mind muscle connection is a concept in bodybuilding that describes obviously the connection between the mind and the muscle phoo from the brain through down the nervous system through the neuromuscular Junction and then to the muscle itself when you tell yourself to move you send the signal it travels there and then you recruit a certain amount of muscle when you need to different people have differing levels of muscle fiber recruitment and it tends to be anywhere between thirty and fifty percent fifty percent being highly trained athlete so even a highly trained definitely can't call upon all of their muscle fibers at once because if they did they could cause injury to their tendons and ligaments and they could likewise completely fatigue themselves which in the wild would leave you completely vulnerable to predators Dennis Rogers is a guy who can naturally by genetics call upon more muscle fiber it's been shown in studies and this gives him fantastic strength for his sizes small guy but he may be currently one of the strongest men pound-for-pound look him up online ingest some incredible things so bruce lee was potentially training this kind of recruitment by doing overcoming isometrics by trying to encourage his body to recruit as much muscle fiber as possible it's just the simple said principle specific adaptations to impose demands if you call upon your fast twitch muscle fiber you will learn to be better at calling upon your fast twitch muscle fiber recently also training this mind muscle connection another way using something called ice attention that just means contracting the entire body following a workout he would then stand up and contract the entire body this is very similar to bodybuilders who might pull a pose straight after doing a set of curls except for the difference being he wasn't just doing the bicep pose he'd be doing an entire body most muscular kind of engaging the entire musculature by doing this he gained made sure that he was constantly thinking about the role of all of his muscles in any movement and if he tried doing something like a press up or pull up and he tense your entire body you'll find it makes you much more rigid and this actually makes you better at performing those movements this might be how lucy was able to do is incredible two finger push-up if you think about it when you're locked in place like this you're rigid as opposed to letting your kind of waist sag and your arms and legs sag and that means that there's it's much easier to move this rigid baton than it is move something's wobbling around at the same time loosely with ten tolas muscles during the workout so whilst doing the curls he did tensing the rest of his body he believed that control came from tension and this makes a lot of sense when you're doing an isolation movement because if you tense the rest of your body it essentially removes any momentum and any possibility that you might be helping the target muscle to actually improve the isolation allows you to train it much harder on top of all this Bruce Lee also was a firm believer in training abs and in training for arms he trained his forearms of this grip every single day and he trained his abs every single day he believes that the forearms and the grip was one of the keys to strength and this is something that he shared with classic bodybuilders he trained his forearms because he knew that strength in your hands gives you strength throughout your entire body if you've got a firmer grip on something you can lift more and of course in martial arts it's very important and yes he trained its core every single day as well because that's where you generate all your power in a martial arts strike if you're punching someone that punch doesn't just come from your arm and your shoulder it comes from your entire waist the torque that you can generate your Bleek's your legs your pushing through the ground like so so it's crucial to build the core and the core is also what's involved in everything else we were talking about tensing the whole body so that you could do two finger push-ups more easily and again that comes from having a strong sturdy core so bruce lee would trade his core every single day and of course is very famous for that exercise called the dragon flag where he would lie with his upper shoulders touching the bench but not the rest of his body and he would lower his legs and raise them again he was one for quite dynamic and impressive looking exercises so there you go hope found this interesting and useful that's how Bruce Lee trained as you could see he took a very different approach to most people and he really was something of an innovator or a pioneer when it came to exercising he was ahead of his time with many of the concepts he used but a lot of them still aren't in YG's today so try incorporating some of these ideas into your training if you're interested in performance overlooks if you're interested in learning to use your muscle as well as just show it so thanks very much for watching guys if you have liked this video please consider liking sharing and subscribing a bit spin useful I might be returning to the subject of Bruce Lee in feature because there's a lot more we haven't touched on am I going to his philosophy in a bit more depth for instance let me know in the comments if that's something you'd like to see and of course I'll be having many more videos coming soon on topics ranging from fitness to strength to running to brain training to productivity to working online all the usual stuff so stay tuned and bye for now

Channel: The Bioneer

Views: 4,846,804

Keywords: bruce lee, workout, training, speed training, one inch punch, overcoming isometrics, static contraction, jeet kune do, martial arts, iso tension, bruce lee workout, bruce lee training

Id: uHc4086gn9M

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2016