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Contrary to what many people believe Bruce Lee wasn't born with the fantastic physique with which he would be identified in later years. In fact Bruce was born quite a sickly child and had a number of physical deficiencies.
Bruce worked hard to gain physique but it wasn't merely for the purpose of vanity. He built his muscles purely for power and protection. He spent as much as four hours a day in his garage, hardly taking a break, as he worked on the equipment, built by his students to his specifications. He designed his weight-
training workout to avoid bulky muscles that might interfere with his performance. For instance, he did not want muscles that restricted the movement of his elbows. "You must tuck your elbows in quickly when a blow is directed to your midsection," he explained. "Some bodybuilders are so bulky that they have no way to defend the solar plexus area with efficiency. They can't cover the area with their elbows, so when they use another method to protect it, they leave other parts of their body open. Weight training is supposed to help you, not screw you."
Bruce would often ask people to feel how hard his muscles were not as a way of boasting but just because he was proud of his physique. Whilst on the set of 'Enter the Dragon' Bruce asked director Fred Weintraub's wife to feel his muscles, she commented that "they felt like marble, hard and smooth except they were warm. " Fred himself gave this description of Bruce, "His body never had an inch of fat; it was pure muscle, like steel." Bruce was especially proud of his abdominal muscles and would often allow people to punch him in the stomach just to show how hard they were. When Bruce wore lose clothing it was very difficult to see just how well developed his body was, but when he took off his shirt, he was the envy of many a body builder. "I've seen many muscular bodybuilders," one of his fans said, "but never like Bruce. He is built perfectly, not bulky. He has muscles on top of muscles, yet he moves with the finesse of a ballet dancer. Those men with bulky muscles can't move like that; they are too tight and clumsy." Bruce had to work hard to develop his abdominal muscles, "l used to have a big, soft belly," he explained. "My stomach protruded and I looked terrible for a young guy. I decided to streamline my waist." From that day on, Bruce took up weight training. He had so much energy that he had to channel it somewhere, so he practised his martial arts everyday for hours and complemented this with his weight training.
To Bruce, training was a full-time job, even whilst watching television, he would be in exercising in one way or another. He would do sit-ups very slowly, "You'll get more benefit by doing them slowly," he said. "It's not the number of repetitions, but the way it's done." When he wasn't doing sit-ups, he would be squeezing a rubber ball, lifting weights, performing isometric exercises or punching at a piece of paper. Once while scouting for a location for the 'Silent Flute' with James Coburn, he kept punching the back of the chair in the jeep in which they were travelling or rapping the note book he was carrying with his fist. In the end Coburn could take no more and told Bruce to give it a rest. Bruce didn't know what to do with his self and became restless, he had to be doing something, anything to keep his body and mind working.
As for diets and supplements, Bruce wasn't really that particular about what he ate. He used to drink protein drinks everyday, which would be made in a blender with eggs, steak and milk and lots other ingredients, but apart from that he would pretty much eat anything. He was training that much that he could afford to. His favourite dishes were Chinese and Japanese and he was especially fond of beef in oyster sauce and a cup of hot tea. Although Bruce wasn't very big, standing at 5-foot-7 and weighing just under 10 stone, he had a huge appetite. In a restaurant, he always ordered an additional plate of food for himself; one serving was not enough. He also drank litres of water a day, probably because he perspired so much. He would also supplement his food intake with vitamins and minerals, which was an influence he got from a body building magazine.
A couple of months prior to Bruce's death in 1973, he had a medical examination. The doctor who examined Bruce told him that he had the body of an eighteen-year-old man. Quite a feat considering he was thirty two at the time.