16/03/2026
Martial arts and yoga share many similarities. Both seek to connect, the mind, body, and spirit. Both arts improve flexibility and strength through movement and breathing. Through such disciplines greater mobility is obtained by balancing strength training with flexibility. Both will improve your range of motion benefitting both soft tissues and joints aiding a reduction in stiffness.
Developing a good practice in both arts requires discipline. An exemplary figure in Martial arts is Bruce Lee. He developed Jeet Kune Do by combining elements of Wing Chun, fencing, boxing.
Jeet Kune Do is often considered a "philosophy of combat" rather than just a set of techniques. It promotes absorbing what is useful and discarding what is not, making him a founder of MMA.
What we can take from Bruce Lee's training from a stretching perspective is his unwavering discipline. He didn't wait for motivation he stretched every single day.
His routine wasn't complicated, we can identity most of his routine as basic classical yoga poses. Like yoga the focus is on correct form, and fluidity of body movement.
Bruce Lee’s "be like water" philosophy means cultivating extreme adaptability, flexibility, and fluidity in life to overcome obstacles, rather than resisting them rigidly. It urges emptying the mind of preconceptions to adapt to circumstances, like water taking the shape of its container, being both soft yet powerful.
Each stretch class, I think about my students wants and needs. Tonight's stretch class is for Steve our student who has taken up Karate.
See attached article for his daily stretches.
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