Performance Games

Burton Richardson is an awesome instructor of JeetKune Do, Bruce Lee's personal martial art. The goal of JKD is to make the fighting art a part of your own personal expression, regardless of who founded the art or who your teacher is. With that goal in mind this is Burton's secret in cultivating JKD for his students.;

Do you want to be a person who can demonstrate an endless stream of techniques, but doesn’t spar well? To me, that is like settling for being a caddy in golf rather than being a player. You carry around the tools of the trade (the clubs), and you know what each one is for, but you can’t actually use them well. If you had good skills you would be playing the game instead of holding the bag. In martial arts we each need to be the one playing the game well.

In our classes, at least 80% of the time is spent on Performance Games. This is what we call training where your partner resists your efforts to apply your techniques. There are many Performance Games for each range, each transition, and each position. We have many Isolation Games where we just play with a few particular techniques or positions within the totality of combat so that we can hone those areas. It is important to play the entire game often, with very few restrictions, as this is the closest we can get to real combat in a controlled environment. Of course, we use Progressive Resistance so that each student is playing at the intensity that will best develop their skills.

Here is a big question that many martial artists struggle with: How long do you train a student in memorizing techniques before you allow them to play the Performance Games? In other words, how much experience should they have before they start sparring? What do you think? Three years? Three months? We start people playing the game the very first day of training, usually within the first three minutes of training. How can this be? Isn’t it dangerous? Not if you apply Progressive Resistance & Variable Intensity. A brand new student with no training background at all will be shown how to stand in a kickboxing stance with hands up. They will be taught proper mechanics for the jab, and how to cover up against a punch. How long does that take? A few minutes. Then, we pair them with an experienced student or instructor who can control the intensity and we let them play the open hand touch game (touching the top of the head with the hand) using the jab only. They are playing within the first five minutes,safely developing timing, distance, technique, and having a great time doing it.


I often see new students who are quite tentative and a little intimidated going into a new activity, especially realistic martial arts training. I see all that drop once they are playing. They smile and laugh as they try to touch their partner while trying to avoid being touched. As the class progresses, they learn the neck clinch with knees, and they learn the rocking chair on the ground. Other techniques are added in too, depending on the particular class. The very first day they get to play Performance Games in each range, so that they begin to develop fighting skills. There is no need to wait years for this. If you do, you will find that the student of three years has to re-learn all the techniques because there was no element of timing, reading, or distancing integrated into the techniques. Only through playing with a resisting partner will you learn to anticipate the moves before they come.