A specialist martial artist, at their most focused, tunes their training toward a single discipline and a single context. This type of specialization is something that perhaps came first to us in the Western Martial Arts with duels. For these one-on-one conflicts, individuals would train to fight within a fixed set of rules and conventions,…
Read More... from Specialization versus Generalization in Martial Arts
In my last post I wrote about some of the things that Bruce Lee’s martial art of Jeet Kune Do has to offer practitioners of Bartitsu. To be clear, I am not suggesting that Bruce Lee had any knowledge of the articles published by E. W. Barton-Wright, the founder of what we call “canonical Bartitsu”.…
Bruce Lee needs little introduction to those who are interested in martial arts. Chances are, readers of this blog have seen at least parts of one or more of his movies. In our classes on pugilism, we sometimes talk about the mechanics of his notorious “1-inch punch” as a way of reminding students to use…
Throughout the history of cinematic fights, a variety of stunt coordinators have come to prominence, and with them their iconic styles. When a movie becomes popular and has fight scenes that are appreciated, the market is flooded with imitators. Sometimes their style is overgeneralized to apply to every weapon. These days, if you wield two…