Bruce Lee and the One-Inch Punch

Bruce Lee was neither tall nor heavy, but he could beat up larger opponents. What he lacked in brawn, he made up in speed, smarts, and heart.

He also knew how to put on a show. The son of an opera singer and film actor, young Bruce Lee grew up in show business. He happened to be born in San Francisco while his parents were touring with the Hong Kong Cantonese Opera. He performed as a child actor and competitive dancer. In 1958, he won the Hong Kong cha-cha championship. Later, he served as dance partner and bodyguard to actress Diana Chang during her publicity tour of America, showcasing his cha-cha moves with her on stage every night.

At the inaugural Long Beach International Karate Tournament in 1964, showman Bruce Lee captivated the crowd by demonstrating two-finger push-ups and a spectacle called the one-inch punch. The one-inch punch is a martial-arts strike that travels just a tiny distance before reaching its target.

Lee’s demonstration surprised the audience of martial artists and combat fans not so much for the speed of his punch, which was blinding, but for the explosive power that it delivered. It sent tournament attendee Bob Baker flying backward into a chair. The punch began with Lee standing with his fist outstretched to Baker’s chest, tensed and ready for the punch. Then, a moment later, Baker was flying backward. Lee had hardly moved a muscle.

Lee’s punch looked like an impossible stunt. It looked like a hoax. It looked unnatural, like Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. The punch didn’t look real. But it was real.

Decades later, the TV show Mythbusters set out to investigate the one-inch punch. They conducted tests with a martial artist who allegedly studied under one of Bruce Lee’s students to deliver the performance, and they concluded that the one-inch punch was a plausible attack technique.

In truth, the recreated punch didn’t look nearly as crisp or focused as Bruce Lee’s punch. The Mythbuster martial artist stood with his left foot forward, while Lee stood with his right foot forward. Lee showed much more extension from his rear left foot through his hips and shoulders to his fist.

Most power punches that you see in the boxing ring travel a long distance. The puncher pushes off the rear foot and pivots the hips and shoulders to deliver power to the fist. It’s the pivot that delivers the power, like the swing of a baseball bat or a golf club. By contrast, the one-inch punch employs no pivot. Rather, it requires a chaining of muscles from the rear foot, up through the leg, hips, spine, shoulder, arm, and wrist. The power comes from an instantaneous flexing of all muscles involved so as to deliver the force from the rear foot to the front fist.

Lee’s body acted like a series of signal repeater/amplifiers used to carry an electrical voice signal thousands of miles.

Lee’s study of the Wing Chun style of martial arts focused on close-quarter combat mainly through hand techniques, as opposed to Northern Chinese martial arts techniques that emphasize kicking from farther away. When standing face to face with an opponent, you could see why the traditional power punch would not be optimal, considering the time it takes to draw back the fist and throw it forward. In close-quarters combat, where the difference between knocking out your opponent and being knocked out by your opponent can be measured in milliseconds, the traditional haymaker that you see in western boxing could put the attacker at a disadvantage.

While the one-inch punch travels a short distance, it is like the tip of a whip that carries astonishing force. In a whip, the impulse is accelerated to supersonic speed by the time it reaches its tip. The crack of the whip is the sound of a wave traveling at supersonic speed. It is a miniature version of what happens when a jet airplane travels faster than the speed of sound. It creates a shock wave as it displaces air. It’s the sound of air molecules crashing into each other.

As Lee said in his book Tao of Jeet Kune Do, “Good form is the most efficient manner to accomplish the purpose of a performance with a minimum of lost motion and wasted energy.”

Like many singular links, the point of the one-inch punch is to transform the impossible into something possible.