August 29, 2025

Attack the Attack! The Essence of JKD

Wouldn’t it be great if we were getting younger rather than older? Wouldn’t it be nice if every traffic light was green on the way to work? And our kids didn’t need to be reminded to put their stuff away? Ah…yes…life would be quite sweet if things always worked optimally. 

We can apply the same thing to self-defense. JKD’s goal is to stop-hit – that is, intercept the attack at the earliest possible moment. That’s the primary objective. The nefarious bad dude signals his intent, begins his launch sequence, and then we expertly nail him with a long, beautiful power jab. Or a banger of a side kick to the knee. And that’s it. Fight over. All is well. Women love you. Men admire you. Children smile when you walk by and it’s always sunny. 

Of course life has this thorns and thistles thing going on ever since Genesis 4 and no matter how good we are, nor how sincere in our preparations, the simplest thing doesn’t always work right away. This fact of facts causes quite a bit of philosophical confusion. Some take it to mean that since the stop-hit (the simplest, purest thing) can’t always be executed immediately that it should be replaced by other things. And by other things we mean more complex tactics and techniques. But note carefully what we said. 

Simple doesn’t mean easy. 

It means direct. It means logical. 

And straight hits aimed at the enemy’s weakest targets (eyes, nose, groin, knees) supported by footwork and generalship are always more logical than roundhouse hits and the like. Yes, landing stop-hits clean enough to take the enemy out of the fight is difficult. Simple – again – doesn’t mean easy. It requires timing, accuracy, mental toughness, and precision training. It also requires an integration of elements within one’s self-defense system. 

What we mean here is that we have simple fall-back plans in place due to the reality of the situation. You don’t leave for work based on the hope that you’ll make every light. You don’t plan a budget based on everything going perfectly either. It’s the same here. Jeet Kune Do’s systematic is the integration of elements. It is, as Fran Poteet wonderfully puts it, philosophy in motion (still jealous she thought of that before me!). 

We don’t expect the stop-hit to work perfectly so we develop brutal combination hitting too. We stack blistering straight hits on top of our stop-hit game. It’s not one-shot kill; we aren’t Captain Jack Sparrow with only one bullet in our JKD gun. The idea is to be ready to launch withering combinations of hand and foot in concert with single shot counters. A heavy stop-hit jab is and/or can be followed up by more punches. It can and is followed by whip-like groin and knee kicks. That’s the trick! JKD is a sweeter-science (with all due respect to boxing) of precision firepower. The straight hitting scheme provides for several advantages. 

First, the straighter the hit the smaller we are as a target. 

Second, we have far greater capacity for combination striking. We’re fully automatic, so to say. 

Third, our balance is less disturbed with such strikes, which allows for easier transport. That is to say, footwork! This provides a high-level of mobile firepower. 

Fourth, straight hits allow greater access to the enemy’s weakest targets which are right on or next to the center-line. 

Fifth, the JKD systematic, in providing for these things, is a nightmare to defend. Rapid shots to the face, then the groin, then the knee, back to the face…twice…then the knee again…it’s nearly impossible to stop. There’s just too many strikes over too much real estate. Oh, and again, all of that can be done on the move! Don’t forget that. 

In all, don’t think of the stop hit as a one-and-done thing. That might happen, yes, but we always factor in reality in order for a systematic to be logically valid. Contradictions can get us killed. The Jeet Kune Do concept of interception also means hunting. Don’t forget that. To Jeet isn’t passivity but highly cultivated and non-contradictory aggression. In Jeet Kune Do we learn to attack the attack; if we can’t, we merely move out of harm’s way and then repeat. You see? Simple, but not easy.