Bruce Lee s Secret Aikido Techniques

Welcome back to Aikido Flow. It's been a little while since I've been on. Today we're going to be looking at my favorite martial artist Bruce Lee. It's about time that we looked at him because he is the Don. He's the reason that I first started martial arts in the first place. When I was a kid he was such an inspiration to me. He was so charismatic, so interesting and he inspired me to start martial arts. Now we're going to be looking at some secret techniques that Bruce Lee did and guess what? They were Aikido techniques. We're going to go through them step by step in this video so watch it all the way through to the end. So I hear you cry. What the hell are you talking about? Bruce Lee didn't do Aikido. He did Wing Chun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know but I'm telling you now Bruce Lee was doing Aikido techniques and I'm going to prove it to you. We all know that he studied with Yip Man. Okay really, really famous but what a lot of you don't know is he studied with a Taekwondo master called Joguri and that's where he got all of his kicking styles from. First technique that we're going to look at is something that we call Hijishimi. Now have a look at the way that Bruce Lee does this. What he does is he throws his arm right the way out and it comes under the person and as it goes under what he's actually doing is he's actually rotating the elbow. Once you keep on rotating it you reach a point where it can't rotate anymore then you can lift up the person and then they will drop to the floor. Beautiful technique and this is an elbow rotation technique. Now if you can rotate the elbow then you can rotate the whole body round. Okay let's look at the second technique. Now this technique is one of the holy grail techniques of Aikido. It is a truly advanced idea and that is Kokunagi or Kokyunagi depending how you pronounce it. Now this technique is a system to absorb the energy from the attacker, join in with that energy and project them somewhere else. Now Bruce Lee does this beautifully. It's a beautiful way that he does it. What happens as the person is running down the stairs Bruce Lee just simply joins in with his energy and projects him off somewhere else. Kokunagi beautiful technique. Have a look the way that he does this. The person comes down the stairs, Bruce Lee joins in with them, he doesn't disturb their energy. The key to this technique is allowing the energy to continue and the person just simply rolls over him and then Bruce Lee stands up in the stylish charismatic way that only Bruce Lee can. Okay another beautiful Kokunagi by Bruce Lee. His attacker comes in, punches the attacker in the stomach which destabilizes him and then he puts his hand around the back of his head and he spins round. So together they spin round and as they spin round the attacker spins out. Another beautiful idea of blending with your energies. It really shows me that Bruce Lee had a really good understanding of what Aikido really was and Aikido really is about energy and blending and Bruce Lee did this beautifully of course. The second Hiji that Bruce Lee did, again a beautiful technique but this is slightly different. This is more like a Hiji lock. So what happens is that his attacker comes in, grabs hold of him, first thing Bruce Lee does is elbow his attacker, swings the arm over his head and gets into a Hiji lock. So what happens is that he locks the elbow at the same time in Bruce Lee style. Bruce Lee's holding on to the back of his hair okay but that's just Bruce Lee. So he's holding on to that and he's got him in a lock and then of course afterwards he does his usual style of which is great. I love Bruce Lee. Now this is probably my favourite clip. What Bruce Lee does is that he starts off with a Nikkyo and he goes through and he ends up in an Ikkyo, what we call Ikkyo. Let's have a look closely what he does. So he begins with what looks like a Wing Chun move because his hands are out. It's that close Wing Chun style and as he moves into the movement he rotates the wrist around so the wrist locks which we call a Nikkyo and it rotates round so he ends up behind the person and then what happens is that he then rotates into what we call a Ikkyo where the pressure is on the elbow. So it goes straight down and then he can do anything that he wants with a guy. Beautiful technique. In fact the eloquence of what he did was he joined up a couple of different things which is really what makes it so interesting. You can see that he's beginning to choose what he wants from different styles and he's beginning to make his own style of it. Lovely. And finally Bruce Lee's last technique that I'm going to show you is a technique that I actually demonstrated a long long time ago on this channel called Ikkyo Toshi and it's a knee drop. Bruce Lee does this of course beautifully once again and the way this technique works is that you grab hold of the knees and you lock the knees and you roll over and what happens is is the weight of your body rolls them over. Okay let's have a look at how Bruce Lee does this. He's holding on to the knees and Bruce Lee is actually lifting the person up. You don't have to lift up the person but that's just what Bruce Lee does and obviously what happens is is that it collapses away and you fall down and at the end of course Bruce Lee just punches him in the nuts. Well that's Bruce Lee. Beautiful technique. Once again Bruce Lee does it with his own suave and style as always. Of course Bruce Lee has all kinds of techniques that he uses throughout his films. You can see Wing Chun, you can see all of the kicking, you can see boxing. Let's not forget that Bruce Lee actually did boxing for a little while and you can see it in his style. Okay so in conclusion Bruce Lee had unbelievable charisma and style and passion for what he was doing. I think that really came across really most of all in all of the books that he wrote and all of the interviews and all the films was his passion for what he was doing. Really really important. Passion will allow you to move into areas that you never thought was possible. Bruce Lee brought martial arts to the masses. In those early days we still had all of those kung fu films and all those those those late night martial arts films and they were fantastic films but Bruce Lee brought it to the world and that's the reason that he's so famous. He made martial arts exciting. He made martial arts interesting. He made martial arts innovative and this idea of mixing different martial arts was a radical idea in those days. Nobody had ever even thought about that. Basically when you really look at the detail it's all the same thing. Yeah sure there are philosophies and points of view but really all that is really about is where it is that you want to draw the line in the sand and what you're prepared to do and what you're not prepared to do. It's all the same thing. I hope you enjoyed this. This is a video that I've been longing to make for a long time. Bruce Lee is my hero. I think he's fantastic. Anyway enjoy your training and I'll see you on the next video.