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…]