OneKickWonder

I used to be skeptical of spinning kicks. I still am skeptical of the more showey and complicated ones. But spinning kicks do have their uses. Perhaps more in free sparring than point sparring though. Here's one of my favourite tricks. I come in with a front kick. Nothing fancy. As basic as it gets. Or a roundhouse will do. Again the simplest kind. If my opponent manages to block it, chances are they will try to knock me by my kicking leg into a spin so that they can get to my side to counter. I take advantage of any spin they put on me and just do a spinning kick with the other leg. Usually high, on the basis that as they've literally only just blocked my low kick, chances are their guard is still fairly low by the time my other foot comes round high. I liken this principle to a wonky floor board. You push one end down and the other end pops up, so you move to push that end down and the first end pops back up.

I do it the first way you described. That's how I learned when I was a kid. That's the only way I knew lol. I'll have to look out for the other way to see if anyone in our club does it.

His kick looks fine to me. There are many variants of the basic side kick. The one in the picture is just one variant. Note the arrow showing the direction of force. This should tell you which version he's doing. It is not the same as what I believe Funakoshi loosely termed the trample kick, which is a much slower but more powerful kick intended to break knees and lower ribs. That's more of a forward motion and with less lean. What we're seeing in the picture is a different variant with different applications. That's more like evade incoming punch and come up under the opponent's guard to strike his jaw or face. Less powerful, but much faster and suited to different targets in different circumstances to the trample kick variant. I don't know which variant is considered to be the 'basic' yup chaki in taekwondo. In tang soo do, which is related but less influenced by sporting goals and closer to karate, our 'basic' yup chaki is the trample kick variety. Both variants, and many others, are valid and correct. Just with different applications. You wouldn't try to destroy a knee with the faster but less powerful rising variant. Nor would you typically want to risk going for the much slower trample kick variant to head height because there'd be a very high probability that your opponent would just take your kind offering and rip your leg off and/or kick you in the gonads and/or throw you to the floor by your leg.

By all means correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the Gracies, or at least their disciples, that invented the ultimate defence against the multiple attacker question. 'No style prepares you for multiple attackers so we'll pretend nobody will kick us in the head while we're busy wrestling their friend on the ground'. Or words to that effect. As to the original question though, is this just some club or organisation doing a bit of name dropping to boost their popularity?

I totally agree. But with a slight caveat. If you Only train high kicks, then muscle memory makes it surprisingly difficult to do a low kick. To explain what I mean, in our tang soo do, we are told all kicks should be a minimum of belt height. The higher the better. Our instructor gives the same explanation as you, in essence that if you can kick high, you can kick low. I did a stint in another club for a whole that was more closer to MMA. The instructor held a kick shield to his knee and asked me to practice taking his leg out. The first few attempts, I aimed lower than I was used to, but still nearly took out his gonads. I found it night on impossible to fire a kick that low because my brain was saying I was aiming at the floor, because I was so used to kicking high.

I kick quite a bit in classes too, if we're lucky and have one those exception days..especially if the assistant instructor takes over. I am going to train harder now. Mostly to improve my transitioning and body control. I have found that just drilling techniques over and over does wonder to overall balance performing them.. For an example, the only kick I have consistently trained is tee side kick, and it's the only one I can do in slow motion, 20 in succession. The problem with training low kicks is that it doesn't challenge my flexibility. I don't see how that solves the problem with my hips. I was the same way when I started training age 15 Repetition does lead to improve BUT, only if every repetition is your best effort to achieve correct form. Kicking low in slow motion will help you develop good form. Way better than kicking fast and relying on momentum. Think about this. If someone says something to you verbally and the speak ridiculously fast, you may not get the full message. It was simply too fast for your brain to process. The exact same is true with our physical techniques. Firing a kick is not (or should not be) a one way communication. Your brain launches the kick, but it also receives feedback. Which muscles reported that they delivered without effort, which muscles reported strain etc. Practicing in slow motion allows your brain time to process that feedback, so that over time it can make better use of the muscles. This leads to better form. Better form leads to better flexibility. I see new starters and even those that have trained for a couple of years getting frustrated that they can't kick high because they are not flexible, when often they are just doing it wrong. There's a reason why martial arts masters have take something as primitive and innate as a kick and refined it to a fine art. They've found the best way to make best use of your body mechanics. Sometimes it's a seemingly trivial adjustment here or there that converts your limits from waist height to head height. Slow motion low kicking practice aids flexibility for another reason. Simply, it makes all the muscles involved stronger. Stronger muscles require better blood circulation, better blood circulation makes muscles more pliable, and stronger muscles can be stretched more without tearing. All this is not to say that there's no value in kicking fast and high. Of course there is. But it's just about tools in the box.

Do you think your kicks will be as good as they could be, if you only practice them for 15 minutes per week?

Do you think martial artists that are at the top of their game, perhaps just before they enter a competition against other serious competitors, say to themselves, my tight hips won't be a problem, I'll just kick fast and hope momentum alone is enough to land it without any possibility of him catching my leg and exploiting my tightness to knock me off balance and do untold damage to my my muscles and connective tissue? If top martial artists think that, then your kick is absolutely fine. No need for any more work on it. All the advice you've received is irrelevant. If they don't think that, then I guess it comes down to, do you want to be a good martial artist or a mediocre one? I want to be a functional martial artist. Do you think you can achieve that and maintain that long term without addressing your known weaknesses?

Do you think martial artists that are at the top of their game, perhaps just before they enter a competition against other serious competitors, say to themselves, my tight hips won't be a problem, I'll just kick fast and hope momentum alone is enough to land it without any possibility of him catching my leg and exploiting my tightness to knock me off balance and do untold damage to my my muscles and connective tissue? If top martial artists think that, then your kick is absolutely fine. No need for any more work on it. All the advice you've received is irrelevant. If they don't think that, then I guess it comes down to, do you want to be a good martial artist or a mediocre one?

I know at first that seems like the world's daftest question, but bear with me:) Sometimes I feel like a decrepit old man. Getting up out of a chair or walking up a flight of stairs actually feels like effort. I often ask myself, when is my training going to pay off and make me feel youthful again. But recently a thought struck me. When I train at tang soo do, it is no longer a given that I'll be the first to duck out. In fact often it is people half my age that need to take a break first. And when I work in my garden, I can work for hours without a break doing fairly heavy graft, and not even think about aches and pains and effort. I can run as far as I'd like, but that's largely because I'm not used to running. Shin splints and lower back fatigue get me before anything else does. So then I got to thinking, sure, without doubt, fitness is largely physical. I'm not suggesting we can all take up smoking and drinking and lounging about and just imagine ourselves fit (although many people seem to think you can do that lol). But I do now wonder if you can imagine yourself UNfit.

I can still use them but it tends to be closed hips when I kick. Strangely enough, my hips are open when I do rising side kicks.. No problem at all.. But when I kick... They close. Why do you think that is? My guess would be a muscle imbalance. We have a tendency to focus on our big muscles. But there are lots of much smaller but vitally important muscles in the area of the lower back down into the legs. They tend to be responsible for finer control and stability. If they are weak, the big muscles just sort of explode in an uncontrolled way and put huge forces on the joints. If I were to be so bold as to offer a tip, it would be this. Take a leaf out of the book of the tai chi guys. Practice your technique in slow motion, while paying absolute attention to detail. Don't throw the kick, but lift slowly and steadily. You might find it surprisingly difficult. Especially at first. But it will highlight exactly where any weakness is or muscle tension etc. If you identify a weak spot or tight spot, then you could do specific exercises to rectify it. Even if you don't add in specific exercises, just performing the technique in slow motion trains the brain to recruit the right muscles in the right sequence without causing pain and injury. The brain and nervous system is a clever thing. If anything at all is wrong with your technique and it puts excess force on anything, your nerves tell your brain, even before it hurts, and your brain takes steps to protect the area, without you even being conscious of it happening. It manifests as a sense of tightness and/or weakness when doing the thing that puts the stress on. Practicing in slow motion not only helps you identify any area that needs works, but also helps convince your brain and nervous system that it's OK, so it doesn't automatically lock up to protect the muscles. I'm not flexible enough to even remotely execute slow roundhouse kicks beyond low kicks. I rely on forward momentum all the time, or else my leg won't go up even to mid section. Then start with low kicks. Work on your flexibility too with separate exercises. If you can't throw a kick slow motion and rely on momentum alone, then you are setting yourself up for a future of niggling pain and recurring injury.

I can still use them but it tends to be closed hips when I kick. Strangely enough, my hips are open when I do rising side kicks.. No problem at all.. But when I kick... They close. Why do you think that is? My guess would be a muscle imbalance. We have a tendency to focus on our big muscles. But there are lots of much smaller but vitally important muscles in the area of the lower back down into the legs. They tend to be responsible for finer control and stability. If they are weak, the big muscles just sort of explode in an uncontrolled way and put huge forces on the joints. If I were to be so bold as to offer a tip, it would be this. Take a leaf out of the book of the tai chi guys. Practice your technique in slow motion, while paying absolute attention to detail. Don't throw the kick, but lift slowly and steadily. You might find it surprisingly difficult. Especially at first. But it will highlight exactly where any weakness is or muscle tension etc. If you identify a weak spot or tight spot, then you could do specific exercises to rectify it. Even if you don't add in specific exercises, just performing the technique in slow motion trains the brain to recruit the right muscles in the right sequence without causing pain and injury. The brain and nervous system is a clever thing. If anything at all is wrong with your technique and it puts excess force on anything, your nerves tell your brain, even before it hurts, and your brain takes steps to protect the area, without you even being conscious of it happening. It manifests as a sense of tightness and/or weakness when doing the thing that puts the stress on. Practicing in slow motion not only helps you identify any area that needs works, but also helps convince your brain and nervous system that it's OK, so it doesn't automatically lock up to protect the muscles.

It's hard to be sure from still pics and a short description, but it looks about right to me. But you really need to work on loosening and strengthening your hips if they are, as you say, stiff as a board. Everything centres around the hips.

Exactly. And I think a lot of martial arts teachers are doing their students a great injustice by giving them false confidence that a technique will work for them. As an example, take something like the wrist lock and arm bar takedown that seems to pop up in many styles as a defence from a lapel grab. It works. And it can work against a fully resisting stronger opponent. But only if you add in all the subtle tweaks that are not required when there's no resistance. And even if it does start to work, it won't always go as far as the takedown. If the 'attacker' is fast enough to react early enough, subtle changes in arm position negate the lock. In this example, I'd be worried that in a real situation, and student might spend too long trying in vain to make it work, and get their head kicked in as a result, when an equivalent victim but with no training might just panic, and react instinctively, with much more primitive moves, but that might be enough. I and a few others in our club like to play with the techniques a bit, trying out the what ifs, trying to flow straight from a failing technique into something else. But unfortunately we don't get that much opportunity to do so, and even when we do have that opportunity, sadly many don't take it, choosing instead to go by the book to help them achieve their next grade.

Some good insights here. Thanks all. Just to pick up on a few points. I never undermine any of our instructors. In that I'll never say in front of another student that I'm skeptical about a technique for example. If I don't believe something would work under pressure, I'll ask my instructor quietly if I'm missing something because I can't seem to make it work well. With regard to playing with different angles of incoming, I dint mean radically different. For example, if a preset routine calls for a high block against a punch to the face, I wouldn't ask how it would work against a foot sweep for example. But I would ask what if the straight punch was a hook or a haymaker. Or what if the right straight punch was immediately followed by a left.

We often train stances fairly statically and rigidly, almost as if they are a thing in and of themselves. But clearly they are not. Go to a tai chi class and this becomes obvious at lesson 1. In our tang soo do club, that tends to be kept fairly quiet until higher grades. So what are stances if not a thing in their own right? Stances are positions we move through while moving. They train us to develop good legs and balance and to get used to being in positions that naturally offer free movement, stability, a good launch platform for our techniques, and a naturally good defense. Stances develop principles, not techniques. Think about a long rigid front stance. Seems utterly pointless. Too rigid to move from easily. So why drill it til it becomes natural? What if your assailant begins the assault by pushing you backwards when you're not even expecting it, you are totally caught by surprise. The shock might make some people tense up, and adrenaline drives us to push ourselves up to make ourselves look bigger (built in primal response). Basically we go off balance and if we don't fall, we at least take a few uncoordinated backwards steps to regain our balance, before immediately making ourselves big and rigid and clumsy again. The person who has drilled front stance on the other hand is more likely to sink at the hips, allow the legs to absorb the shock with one leg back to regain balance, and is much better prepared for whatever happens next. In our style, our fighting stance is like a cat stance. The front foot barely touches the ground. All weight on the back foot. Again useless. But it teaches us to be relaxed and fluid as we move. Horse riding stance, again pointless. Except and very close range you might pass through horse stance while grappling or throwing. I could go on. But my point is simply that if we train good stances, then we'll develop the muscles and the reflexes to move fluidly and with good balance, speed and stability.

I have no experience of BJJ at all. So I'll put it out there that I'm not a grappler. I had to Google 'pulling guard'. It kind of makes sense to me, to some extent. Coming from a stand up mostly striking style, I'm aware that the most dangerous place to be is at optimum striking range. Pulling guard seems to me to be similar in principle to moving inside the opponent's comfortable range in order to take their balance while being too close for them to strike effectively. Interestingly, I have always preferred to move in rather than trying to stay just out of range, despite many teachers teaching the latter over the former. And in play fighting I will often use both arms and legs to grip an opponent while trying to 'mock grapple' them (mostly with my sons these days). I used to wonder where this habit came from, giving that I've never trained BJJ. But the more I learn of my current style, with close quarters grappling being an increasing aspect at higher grades, I find myself recognising stuff I thought I'd invented myself. Then I remembered that when I was very young, I trained in judo for a while. I can't really remember much about it, but maybe it was just enough, at just the right stage in my life, to stick. At least at core principle level if not specific technique. I'd still get my butt kicked by a real grappler though lol.

I know. In fact most of the styles we have around today are actually fairly modern. My point there was that the modern styles have become so successful that I think it would be difficult to find an older style. Not least because until modern times, there was no real way to record and preserve the styles other than through forms, but they are always open to interpretation and external influence. So unless someone invents a time machine, I think it would be difficult to find an accurate representation of an older style. I'd love to be wrong on this point. I think that while it's absolutely right that styles should move on, I also think it's a bit sad to lose the originals.

With respect, that's not true. People may do as they've trained, if they've trained to the extent that it's now natural. In our style, we have a very awesomely powerful kick, which I believe our taekwondo brethren call a tornado kick. It's a great show kick. I'm told it even sometimes works in the sanitised environment of competition. But if someone tries to shake me down for my money in a violent encounter, there's no way I'm going to chance spinning and jumping to throw a kick knowing that if any tiny thing goes wrong I'm getting my head kicked in. Fighting in self defence happens in a primitive part of the brain. Higher consciousness barely gets a look in. So to fight as you've trained means your training has to be repetitive enough and simple enough to get right down and embed itself in the monkey part of the brain. Or stressful enough that the mental and physical environment of a real violent encounter is one in which you can think a bit more clearly than most. This is the route we take in Judo and BJJ. A lot of what we do is comparatively complex, but once you have experience doing it against real resistance and in competition, it provides a sort of physical and mental analgesic to the environment that is physical violence. LLEARNER's quote is true in context. If the training is of sufficient quality and quantity to provide what is known as operant conditioning, then yes, people will revert to it. They will, under maximum stress, see a stimulus and react to it before the thinking, reasoning part of the brain has a chance to process further details. The issue is, the vast majority of martial arts training in the US at least, does not contain the elements needed for operant conditioning. I kind of hear what you're saying. In our style, we only spar at about 50% force, and with fairly strict rules. So it's not like a real fight at all. But a trained martial artist trying to punch and kick you repeatedly for 3 minutes is certainly enough to get the adrenaline going, even when you know you won't get really hurt (unless you have a rare accident). And when you know you can hold your own against someone that knows what they're doing, and having been punched and kicked many times (nobody can block or dodge every incoming) you learn that you can still maintain your composure after being walloped. In that respect I agree that certainly training will come into play. That and the physical endurance and balance and all the other myriad benefits of training. But my point was that you won't necessarily do what you've trained to do, if for example you've only ever practiced softly softly against a cooperative training partner that allows you to put on a highly convoluted technique.

With respect, that's not true. People may do as they've trained, if they've trained to the extent that it's now natural. In our style, we have a very awesomely powerful kick, which I believe our taekwondo brethren call a tornado kick. It's a great show kick. I'm told it even sometimes works in the sanitised environment of competition. But if someone tries to shake me down for my money in a violent encounter, there's no way I'm going to chance spinning and jumping to throw a kick knowing that if any tiny thing goes wrong I'm getting my head kicked in. Fighting in self defence happens in a primitive part of the brain. Higher consciousness barely gets a look in. So to fight as you've trained means your training has to be repetitive enough and simple enough to get right down and embed itself in the monkey part of the brain.

Years ago when I used to practice kung fu, I used to also practice meditation to boost awareness. When I stopped training, I gradually lost the ability to empty my mind so yes, I think you can get spiritually or mentally unfit.

One kick wonder, a lot of what you wrote seems to be contrary to history i as know it. Funakoshi did not coin the term kara te. http://irkrs.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-1936-meeting-of-okinawan-karate.html in a 1936 meeting of karate masters , Master Chomo states that he wrote a book in 1905 called "karate Kumite". the meeting had a discussion on the naming of Okinawan Te. Funakoshi was not at this meeting. however the suffix DO may have been what you were referring to but i would suggest that Do was a common martial art word in main land Japan and thus it would have been the Butokukai that added the word Do. Karate in the educational system was a goal of Itosu for Okinawa. there is a letter i could referrance of Itosu's thoughts on this. however i think it was more the Japanese National movement using the Physical education system as a method of indoctrination of political policy prior to WWII. they kinda hijacked karate for a push of propaganda. history is never so clean and idyllic. names where changed for political reasons and often for the sake of self preservation. you couldnt go around talking about Chinese stuff without being a national traitor. Perhaps Funakoshi plagiarised the whole thing then. I don't know. I wasn't there. Lol, more likely you just got your history wrong. Funakoshi was sent to Japan to further Itosu's plans for karate. He first called his art Ryu kyu kempo Karate Jutsu, changing to do and emphasising character development later, possibly after ww2. And the 5 Pinan weren't split from any protokata, itosu created them as a self-defence short course, a way to get kids into the basics of karate training. Possibly. It's based on what I read in Gichin Funakoshi's book, karate do kyohan. There's a section where he describes why he chose to use the term 'kara' instead of 'tang' which is written the same. He clearly suggests he did it. But then there are contradictions even within the same book. For example he writes of the history and the Chinese influence but in a layer chapter describes it as uniquely Japanese. I don't know. I give up. My earlier point in contributing on this thread was that politics very much get in the way of truth. Perhaps this is just another example.

One kick wonder, a lot of what you wrote seems to be contrary to history i as know it. Funakoshi did not coin the term kara te. http://irkrs.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-1936-meeting-of-okinawan-karate.html in a 1936 meeting of karate masters , Master Chomo states that he wrote a book in 1905 called "karate Kumite". the meeting had a discussion on the naming of Okinawan Te. Funakoshi was not at this meeting. however the suffix DO may have been what you were referring to but i would suggest that Do was a common martial art word in main land Japan and thus it would have been the Butokukai that added the word Do. Karate in the educational system was a goal of Itosu for Okinawa. there is a letter i could referrance of Itosu's thoughts on this. however i think it was more the Japanese National movement using the Physical education system as a method of indoctrination of political policy prior to WWII. they kinda hijacked karate for a push of propaganda. history is never so clean and idyllic. names where changed for political reasons and often for the sake of self preservation. you couldnt go around talking about Chinese stuff without being a national traitor. Perhaps Funakoshi plagiarised the whole thing then. I don't know. I wasn't there.

in your middle paragraph you mention that there is a Chinese influence on Okinawan karate but only acknowledged to a lessor extent?? i am not sure what you mean. did i understand you correctly? there is a direct link to the Chinese and it is very obvious one. its not a hidden fact today. it was down played during WWII but its never been a secret. i find it very unlikely that there is a Thailand influence to Okinawan karate. as far as where did Chinese kung-fu come from..well there is a theory that it traveled over the silk road from India. that the Budhidharma legend was probably many people traveling over many years. the Chinese leaned from the Indian fighting styles which had Yoga like forms. In turn it is believed that the Indian culture picked up combative fighting from the Greeks. Alexander the Great and his men who practiced Pankration when not in battle made it all the way to the edge of India. it is well known that many of his men stayed and the Greeks had a practice of assimilation into the other cultures rather than dictate its own culture upon those that it conquered. while many laugh and mock at this idea it is the most probable lineage. The Indians defeated Alexander the Great's armies, they clearly had their own martial culture and a civilisation that predates Ancient Greece. I think the attempt to trace MA back to the Greeks is dubious at best and a bit sinister at the worst. I think it is unlikely that Muay Boran influenced karate through anything more than a passing glance. I just don't see it in anything that has survived to the present. That being said I would love a look at Ti. I am curious as to whether Karate was meant to be an advancement from a base of Ti, or just an alternative for the upper classes. [/b] Karate was absolutely certainly not meant to be the reserve of the upper classes. It was Gichin Funakoshi that coined the term Kara Te Do that we've since abridged to simply karate. His goal was very openly to take his style to the masses. He tried to get it included in schools as part of the physical education programme. He tried to get it into the military, most notably the navy, as a fitness training programme. He wrote letters and to and tried to organise demos for many institutions. Even the name kara te do was carefully chosen to make it more palatable to ordinary Japanese citizens, and he pushed it as physical training requiring no equipment, self defence, and spiritual betterment. Funakoshi's karate is not a replacement of early systems of to de, or te, shuri te, naha te etc, and tang te and whatever other local names applied to local style variants. It was simply the consolidation of organisation of what Funakoshi had learnt of such styles. He knew that the only way to get karate to be widely accepted was to ditch the culture of relative secrecy, and local cliques, and introduce a formal structure. Even the kata he selected to be in his style were carefully selected from several styles so as to include what Funakoshi considered to be the most useful core of all the styles he'd practiced. He even renamed a load of them to make them more palatable and less obscure, and broke up and rearranged some to make them easier to learn. Most notably with pinnan / pyung ahn being split into 5 and renamed heian. I'm not sure you'd find the older styles these days. Good luck in your search though. I suspect they'll have been lost, effectively swallowed up by the styles we know today. What you might find interesting though is if you look at styles like aikido and some of the Chinese styles, while superficially they look quite different, after a little while I think you'll see that they share a great deal in common, but just have slightly different teaching methods.

in your middle paragraph you mention that there is a Chinese influence on Okinawan karate but only acknowledged to a lessor extent?? i am not sure what you mean. did i understand you correctly? there is a direct link to the Chinese and it is very obvious one. its not a hidden fact today. it was down played during WWII but its never been a secret. Yep. I said that.