There's a question I have always been curious if anyone could answer. The movie 'Dragon-The Bruce Lee Story' made it appear that Bruce substained a back injury from a fight. While I always heard the injury was self-inflicted as the result of poor lifting technique. Does anyone know if Bruce really suffered a life-long back injury and how it occured to begin with? If this belongs in the JKD forum the Mod's will probably move it there.
On Aug 13, 1970 Lee was performing Good Mornings with 60kg / 135lb - his bodyweight at the time - and was completing his first set of 8 (he usually did 2 sets) without sufficiently warming up when he heard a loud popping sound, and dropped the weighted bar. For several days he tried heat treatments and massage, until the steadily increasing pain forced him to seek medical advice. He had severely damaged a 4th sacral nerve (diagram of spinal nerve locations), and it was unlikely that he would ever be able to kick again; in fact walking unaided was in doubt. He was forced to rest, and for the next six months he spent most of his time either lying or sitting up reading from his extensive library. During this time he also designed a bed which would afford him greater comfort in his injured state. Eventually he resumed teaching and training, not because he was fully healed, but simply as he felt he had given himself enough time and was unable to refrain from his active life any longer. He would suffer chronic back pain for the remainder of his life, and began taking marijuana as this helped numb the pain *lol i can see his new film now 'Enter the Stoned Dragon'*. In his films from this point on he used a stunt double for somersaults (seen in both Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon *i always thought he did his own lol*).
Does anyone know if the problem was related to only his failure to warm-up properly or maybe not using good form? Because I heard that Bruce did'nt recieve much training from experienced lifters?
i believe he later said that weighted good mornings were unneccessary and could lead to injury. So its probably a combination of both.
Bruce received instruction on weights from James Lee and Joe Allen who was a training partner of the late Steve Reeves. He injured his lower back by doing as everyone else has said very heavy good mornings with his bodyweight on the bar, he realised after that you dont need to go heavy on that movement just using a few pounds will do, get the book expressing the human body that will tell you what Bruce did for training
Saying 135 is very heavy for good mornings is a joke. It sounds like he just had an insanely weak lower back to me. There are lifters that do up to 800 pounds on good mornings, I've done 180 for reps and I don't even do that lift.
many adults throw their back out bending over to pick up items that weigh as little as a newspaper... some just have a spine teeter-totting on a disc ready to be slipped
