This is the final part of this “How To Do a Leg Kick” Guide. Lets look at what your legs should be doing.
The support leg:

• Keep your weight on the support leg. Many beginners make the mistake of leaning too far back when using the leg kick. This takes the weight off the support leg and destabilizes you. It also bleeds away the potential for power in your kick.
• Don’t lock out the knee. The knee of your support leg should be bent and not locked out.  A straight leg makes it hard to generate power and stay in balance
• Bend the knee in function of the distance. Try this, stand at your regular leg kicking distance in front of your partner. Now ask him to  step an inch or two towards you. If you now kick from that distance, it can be difficult to land your shin properly. However, by straightening out your support leg a bit, you increase the distance from your hip to the target and can land the kick again.
• The opposite is also true. From the same starting point, ask your partner to step back the same distance. Using a regular leg kick, you’ll end up connecting with your foot or toes. Try again, but this time you bend the knee of your support leg a bit more than usual. It’ll make the path your kicking leg travels on more horizontal but you’ll be able to strike with the shin again.
• This is a skill, not a given. Adjusting the supporting leg’s knee like this takes practice. Don’t think you can do it once and then use it in a fight. It’ll take a lot of practice but it makes for another layer of versatility to this technique. [Read more…]

UPDATE: The Leg Kick: Your Ultimate Guide to Using The Leg Kick for Mixed Martial Arts is now available! Click the link to get the book or click this picture:

Here’s the next part of “How to do a leg kick”. If you haven’t already, check out part One, Two and Three. In this part, I’m gonna talk about using the hips for this shin kick.

The main difference between the leg kick and the roundhouse kick is the use of the hips. I’ll use a generalization here and say that in many karate styles, the power comes to a large extent from snapping the knee (I’m just making a point to illustrate something, don’t get upset). In the leg kick, as seen in muay Thai and MMA, that’s not the case: the hips do the work. If you don’t turn them correctly, the kick loses power. I’ll cover a couple of ways to use the hips for the shin kick below but first, here are a few things general guidelines:

• Don’t chamber the knee as you launch the kick. This forces you to snap the lower leg and takes away the sledgehammer effect a proper shin kick has.
• The hips move first. Start turning your hips and let your striking leg follow. If you do the opposite, it becomes very hard to get power in the kick.
• Use the hips to retract the leg. Right after your kick lands, turn the hips in the opposite direction to retract your striking leg. If you don’t use the hips, you can still retract the leg but it will move a lot slower and leave you open to counters. [Read more…]