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Who Says There Are No Forms in Jeet Kune Do?

A lot of JKD Instructors will tell you that there are no forms in JKD, that Bruce didn’t believe in them. That’s a yes and a no. Dan Inosanto says if you don’t know the three JKD Kicking sets and the JKD Dummy sets you don’t know JKD. Bruce did experiment with both Kicking sets and sets on the Wing Chun Dummy. In the kicking sets, if I’m correct, the first stage was done very traditionally, a steady constant beat between each move.

The second stage the beat was controlled by the instructor by hitting two sticks together, making the kicks become combinations rather then single moves, and every time the combinations changed. This was Bruce’s way of trying to make forms more realistic and spontaneous. The third way was that the Instructor still controlled the beat, but the student could change the direction the kicks went as long as the kicks still followed the same pattern. This wasn’t realistic or spontaneous enough for Bruce and he threw them out. We mortals, at my school still do them, at least the first two stages.

On his hand outs in Chinatown he had two or three in his curriculum, the one we did a lot was the North, South Set. There are other longer kicking sets, that I believe, Dan put together with Bruce’s blessing. There are two hundred moves or more in these sets. Besides the kicking sets there are the hundred and eight moves on the mock Jung, and about one hundred and twenty moves in the Jeet Kune Do set.

-Sifu Jerry-

Contact Jerry:
sifujerry@hotmail.com