Many of you are seeking something beyond what traditional training can offer. You may even have seen people who dedicated a great portion of their lives to training that didn't actually help much when they got into a hand-to-hand encounter or a life-threatening situation.
I have trained people who've come directly from those types of situations—some have had double black belts in systems that have more to do with training ego than functionality.
The Core JKD Method is an umbrella term defining personal practice, immersion, involvement in our community, teaching, testing, and growth in any of the following or combination of the following curricula: Core JKD, Rebel Wing Chun, CJKD Weapons.
Core JKD is the general and all-encompassing set of techniques, teaching methods, and proprietary applications in all the ranges against resisting opponents that will include Rebel Wing Chun and CJKD Weapons at different levels in the curriculum.
Rebel Wing Chun and CJKD Weapons are pathways for proficiency in only those ranges and methods particular to them. Some people wish only expertise in these areas, and we offer them as pathways for testing and certification as well.
A general guideline of how I train you:
- I build your base, cover, mobility
- I stress-test that base against resistance
- I add simple tools (striking and heightened sensing/perceptual tools) and test those tools against your base so they can function with stability in all the ranges
- I add more tools and stress-test those against your current tool set and base
- I test your tools in transitions so you can move from one attacking tool to another, one range to another, or one opponent to another with a strong, dynamic base supporting your actions.
- I let you free to choose your expression against resistance with your battle-hardened toolset and base and the mindset that you can go anywhere
A necessary part of our training also includes a specific type of CJKD meditation that heightens our perceptual skills, controls emotional reaction during stress, and increases our ability to focus and drive toward a specific goal.
Minimal Breakdown of the Human Being
BASE
Base is your dynamic platform from which to stabilize against resistance from single and multiple attackers.
COVER
Cover keeps the mind aware, present, and functional, interpreting sensory information and initiating action for survival.
MOBILITY
Mobility is essential for providing the body and mind a dynamic structure from which to leverage the body and mind's potential.
It puts us in the right place at the right time for support of upper and lower body attacks and evasions—standing or on the ground.
The following is an excerpt from The Manual of Core JKD, which is in development for publication.
Core JKD’s basis is in physics. The physics of the human body, the physics of the environment you are in at the time of training and during a threat encounter.
Generally, human beings all have the same kind of modality, the way we move our bodies. Two legs pivoting at the hips, arms pivoting at the shoulders and the like.
We have sets of muscles that contract our limbs and cause them to move within a specific range of motion. We contract them at specific speeds and with a specific amount of contractile strength.
Aside from some variations in our gene pool, we generally move in the same way with the number of limbs we have. Until we come across a 6-limbed person, this generality is a stable example tested over the time of our genetic history.
Unique to the individual is how far we can stretch our muscles - this can allow for a greater range of motion than the average person. Also, different people have different rates of contraction of the muscle and different recovery times from heavy exertion.
Generally, we also have the same internal mechanisms for determining our balance, reading our visual field, listening to and smelling our environment.
Our physical bodies can be trained to react quicker, have better balance, to be able to last longer in a strenuous situation.
We also have a mind that can be trained to push through hardships we never thought we could.
Core JKD is about getting the body and mind processing our environment at its optimum levels to succeed against opponents who are a threat to our survival.
When confronted by an attacker—or multiple attackers—who wish to harm or kill us, our options have to be pared down to the minimum required to keep us alive.
That means that a lot of the fancy or flashy moves you might see in other martial arts—techniques kept in a system because the founder of the art determined they were required at the time of its development—may have no basis or function in the Core JKD environment.
"...they work to death trying to maintain the art, where our goal is to maintain the individual."
This doesn’t mean that some of our methods or techniques won’t look flashy—some might—but there is a deeper level of understanding as to why those movements are taught. For example, the Core JKD Hatchet kick can look flashy, but it is actually a very focused, pinpoint kick that applies a lot of force through a small surface area. It can be highly effective for the practitioner who uses it.
Not everyone is able to use it for reasons of injury, flexibility, balance, etc. For those students, it isn’t forced upon them.
That’s where some martial arts fail: they work to death trying to maintain the art, where our goal is to maintain the individual.
Core JKD does this well because of that directive.
Core JKD training
- Understanding near-surface emotions
- Immersion in the emotions to dissolve their influence in threat situations
- Awareness of our senses
- Immersion in our senses
- Directing the mind through the senses to train directed perception
- Perceiving our environment
- Perceiving threats in our environment
- Conditioning the body to physically respond in the shortest time to threats and into the proper pathways for ensuring survival