Bruce Lee’s Bare Bones Fitness Advice

Originally, this page started to list some recommendations found in Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do. It’s since evolved to include any type of fitness activity that can be incorporated relatively seamlessly as part of daily activity. Have a suggestion? Please use the contact form.

We all know Bruce Lee as the incredibly fast and powerful martial artist. But Bruce Lee was also a writer, scholar, and a philosopher.

In the preliminaries section of the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, he talks about training and lists “Everyday opportunities for exercises.” Below are two separate lists, one from Bruce Lee’s book and one from me.

Bruce Lee’s Everyday Opportunities for Exercise

  • Take a walk whenever you can.
  • Avoid taking the elevator; climb the stairs instead.
  • Cultivate your quiet awareness by imagining an opponent attacking you—while you are sitting, standing, or lying down, etc.—and counter that attack with various moves. Simple moves are the best.
  • Practice your balance by standing on one foot to put your clothes or shoes on—or simply stand on one foot whenever you choose.

Working Man Fitness Everyday Opportunities for Exercise

  • Walk to the furthest bathroom in the building instead of the closest.
  • When ascending stairs, make it a game. Sometimes emphasize your calves more by doing a calf raise each stair. You can take two stairs at a time, or three or four, but the more stairs you take, the more the likelihood is that you’ll want an isolated stair case.
  • Do dips at your desk, in the L-shaped corner.
  • Put your hands on your desk and feet on your rolling office chair (at the bottom, not on the seat of the chair). Tighten your abs and roll your chair back and then forward. It’s basically the same exercise as using the ab wheel.
  • Stop using roller bags and take it like a man!

By an error repeated throughout the ages, truth, becoming a law or a faith, places obstacles in the way of knowledge. Method, which is in its very substance ignorance, encloses truth within a vicious circle. We should break such a circle, not by seeking knowledge, but by discovering the cause of ignorance.

Bruce Lee