The Physique of Bruce Lee

As a follow on from my previous post on kettlebells I found this article by John Little on Bruce Lee's physique on the web recently, describing how he trained for function, not size. Although I don't go to the gym anymore, I use to be a gym rat when I was in my late teens and early 20s, before the yoga and martial arts. It talks about how his physique and philosophy influenced such body building luminaries such as Bodybuilding luminaries, including Lou Ferrigno, Lee Haney, Dorian Yates, Rachel Mclish, Lenda Murray, Flex Wheeler and Shawn Ray.

Some choice exerpts:

There has seldom been seen - this side of a jungle cat -- the incredible sinewy and ripped-to-the-bone quality of muscle displayed by Bruce Lee. He was ripped in places that bodybuilders are just now (28 years later) learning they can train. Every muscle group on his body stood out in bold relief from its neighbor -- not simply for show (unlike many bodybuilders) but for function. Lee was, to quote his first student in the United States, Seattle's Jesse Glover, "above all else, concerned with function." Lee's body was not only a thing of immense grace and beauty to watch in action, but it was supremely functional. Leaping eight feet in the air to kick out a light bulb (as evidenced in Lee's office-wrecking scene in the MGM movie Marlow), landing a punch from five feet away in five-hundredths of a second and catching grains of rice -- that he'd thrown into the air -- with chopsticks were things Lee had trained his body (and reflexes) to accomplish. In fact, during his famous "Lost Interview" Lee referred to his approach to training as "the art of expressing the human body." Indeed, perhaps never before has there been such an incredible confluence of physical attributes brought together in the form of one human being -- lightening fast reflexes, supreme flexibility, awesome power, feline grace and muscularity combined in one total -- and very lethal -- package.

According to those who met him, from Hollywood producers to his fellow martial artists, Lee's muscles carried considerable impact. Taky Kimura, one of Lee's closest friends (in fact, the best man at Lee's wedding in 1964) recalls that Lee was never loath to remove his shirt and display the results of his labors in the gym -- often just to see the reactions of those around him. "He had the most incredible set of lats I'd ever seen," recalled Kimura, "and his big joke was to pretend that his thumb was an air hose, which he'd then put in his mouth and pretend to inflate his lats with. He looked like a damn cobra when he did that!"

Lee's physique holds up under scrutiny and has survived the passage of time simply because it possessed what many consider to have been the perfect blend of razor-sharp cuts, awesome muscularity, great shape and an almost onion skin definition. The muscles that bulged and rippled across the Lee physique were thick, dense, well-chiseled from their neighbor and, above all, functional.

Dan Inosanto, another of Lee's close friends and himself an instructor in Lee's art, adds that Lee was only interested in strength that could readily be converted to power. "I remember once Bruce and I were walking along the beach in Santa Monica, out by where the 'Dungeon' (an old-time bodybuilding gym) used to be," recalls Inosanto, "when all of a sudden this big, huge bodybuilder came walking out of the Dungeon and I said to Bruce, 'Man, look at the arms on that guy!' I'll never forget Bruce's reaction, he said 'Yeah, he's big -- but is he powerful? Can he use that extra muscle efficiently?"

Lee's feats of strength are the stuff of legend; from performing push-ups - on one hand! - or thumbs only pushups, to supporting a 125-pound barbell at arms length in front of him (with elbows locked) for several seconds, or sending individuals (who outweighed him by as much as 100 pounds in some instances) flying through the air and landing some 15 feet away as a result of a punch that Lee delivered from only one-inch away, the power that Bruce Lee could generate -- at a mere bodyweight of 135 pounds -- is absolutely frightening. Not to mention some of his other nifty little habits like thrusting his fingers through full cans of Coca-Cola and sending 300 pound heavy bags slapping against the ceiling with a simple side kick.

According to Glover, however, Lee wasn't particularly pleased with the added mass; "I noticed that he was bigger after he was weight training. There was a time after he went to California that he went up to 165 pounds. But I think it slowed him down because that was real heavy for Bruce. He looked buff like a bodybuilder. And then, later on I saw him and this was all gone. I mean, one thing that Bruce was [about] was function -- and if stuff got in the way, then it had to go. Bruce wanted his weight training to complement what he did in the martial arts. A lot of what Bruce was doing was about being able to maintain arm positions that nobody could violate in a fight. Like, if you take most people who are into bodybuilding or weight training, most of them are interested in simply building up their muscles to a bigger size, particularly the major muscle groups -- not much attention is paid to the connective tissues, like ligament and tendon strength. Well, Bruce's thing was 'let's build up the connectors and we won't worry so much about the size of the muscle.' Again, Bruce was about function."

Bruce Lee's "Lethal Physique" Bodybuilding Program
(performed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays)

Exercise	Sets	Repetitions
Clean & Press	2	8
Squats	2	12
Pullovers	2	8
Bench Presses	2	6
Good Mornings	2	8
Barbell Curls	2	8

Warm Marble, The lethal Physique of Bruce Lee