The longer I’m in the business of figuring out how to get results for people from exercise, the more I notice there are lessons to be learned from all walks of life, not just ones inside the gym. If you’ve followed my stuff before, you may remember I’ve made correlations to the financial world and the animal kingdom before that contain lessons that will help you improve your level of fitness. Of course I should note that they were two separate articles: the jokes about correlating the financial world to the animal kingdom would be too easy.
Today I’m going to tell you what Bruce Lee can teach you about how you should approach exercise.
Bruce Lee’s impact on exercise was enormous: reciprocal inhibition was a cutting edge topic in the late 90’s and early 2000’s – Bruce wrote about it in the 1960’s. Back when the bodybuilding/nautilus machine/Schwarzenegger at Gold’s Gym culture was just taking off, Bruce was the one who called “BS”, and said, if you want to be truly strong – functionally strong – you needed to get off the machines and do total body training.
But it’s not his thoughts on exercise that we’re going to use today – again, that would be too easy. It’s his philosophy – specifically his philosophy on the martial arts.
Bruce was a huge reader of philosophy, and he used his education to see mistakes others had made in the past, and to formulate new ideologies that would lead to greater success, both in martial arts and in life.
One of these philosophies was the need to stop naming particular martial arts, or calling each art a particular “style”. He thought it clouded things when we call Kung-Fu, Kung-Fu, and call karate, karate, etc. He felt it limited the practitioners of each particular style to the strengths of that style only, and in doing so opened up vulnerabilities and weaknesses when outside the realm of that style.
To him, each particular style only worked if you used it against someone who operated within the rules of your style. Karate, for example lost its effectiveness when a good wrestler didn’t want to play by karate rules and just took the karate fighter down with a wrestling takedown. Judo lost some effectiveness when someone trained in Muay Thai said: “No, I’m not just going to let you grab me and throw me.”
So Bruce Lee’s point was that you need to know EVERYTHING in order to be a good fighter. If you painted yourself into a corner by naming your art and insisting it was the best art, ultimately your short sightedness would work against you and limit your progress, both in competition and in life.
It occurred to me one could say this holds true with exercise programming as well. If you insist on labeling your workout, and limit yourself to the confines thereof, you ultimately will limit your own progress, both in the exercise world and life.
Core training, flexibility, strength training and conditioning are pretty much useless in and of themselves – unless you do all of them.
You need to do everything. Core training, flexibility training, strength training and cardiovascular conditioning - when combined - present a totality far greater than the sum of the parts.
Mixed Martial Arts and the UFC taught us that Bruce Lee’s theory about fighting was correct: karate, BJJ, Judo, boxing were pretty much useless in and of themselves. Only the fighters who combine all of them are truly effective.
Similarly, my experience and observations in and of the exercise world have taught me these things:
People who only “do cardio”, generally speaking, are weak as shit.
People who only work on flexibility are slow as sloths AND weak as shit.
People who only strength train can’t even look at a kettlebell without getting winded.
People who only do macho bullshit interval conditioning are orthopedists dreams they’re so injury prone.
Don’t even get me started on workouts with actual names like we discussed earlier: “Zumba”, “P90X”, and that insult to brain cells, the “Bar Method”…uugghhh…If it has a name, generally speaking, it’s replaced common sense with marketing, and is absolutely useless.
You see where I’m going with this. If you truly want lead a life of looking and feeling great, you need to be proficient at everything. And I can hear your voice already:
“But I don’t have time!”
Most people don’t. That’s why most people who exercise fall into one or more of the categories above that I mentioned, despite their well meaning intentions.
The issue is can you combine it all? We do. We get all of it done in a few hours per week. Anyone who tells you it takes longer doesn’t know how to do it very well. Frankly, I’ve always maintained that if you exercise more than 5-6 hours per week and you DON’T look like Ryan Reynolds or Jessica Biel, you really need to re-evaluate how effective your training is, because it probably sucks.
Every single session we address mobility, core training, strength training and conditioning. We emphasize certain aspects as we de-emphasize others on a rotating basis (undulating periodization) to provide active recovery for those that aren’t being emphasized and to reduce the monotony found in the other “named” workouts.
This is why TR members get results – they get everything done in a few hours per week.
Does that make me the Bruce Lee of training? No, of course not, it just makes me someone who’s seen thousands of people try and thousands of people fail. And quite often, it’s because they trap themselves into a style: “I have to do yoga,” “I have to do cardio”, “I have to bench press”, etc. And end up becoming proficient at those particular disciplines without recognizing that’s only a small percentage of their overall health and fitness levels. And unfortunately, this ignorance leads to the exact opposite of the desired goal: frustration, weight gain, joint pain, etc.
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