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How to do a leg kick, aka shin kick. Part 4

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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:

The Leg Kick for MMA
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…]

How to do a leg kick, aka shin kick. Part 3

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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:

The Leg Kick for MMA

Just a quick recap for this “How to do a leg kick” guide: Read parts One and Two first, otherwise it won’t make all that much sense. In this part, we look at the use of the rear arm in the leg kick.

There is some level of debate on how to use the rear arm so I’ll just give you the two main options:

Extend towards the opponent:

  • Extend your rear arm towards the face of your opponent to take away his sight. You can even make it a full or semi-straight punch if you have enough hip control.
  • Your fist in front of his face makes it harder for him to counter. He ‘ll have trouble seeing you for just an instant, giving you a window of opportunity to fire the kick.
  • The punch-like movement can hide your intention to fire the leg kick. Both the punch and the kick use a hip rotation so they look similar in that regard. He sees your hips turning and the first thing that follows is your rear arm. Only a fraction of a second later does your leg start moving. With some luck, you can make him react to the arm as if it were a real punch and score with the leg kick. [Read more…]

How to do a leg kick, aka shin kick. Part 2

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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:

The Leg Kick for MMA

Here’s Part Two of “How to do a leg kick.” It’s a bit more than I first planned on doing so I’m only covering the use of the lead arm. Otherwise this post would get way too big to read comfortably. I’ll talk about the rear arm in Part Three. Here we go:

The lead arm
There are a bunch of factors involved here and, in my opinion, things aren’t black or white. You can move the lead arm in a number of ways with each one having specific strengths and weaknesses. If you learned a certain way or have to do it because it’s “traditional”, that’s fine. As I stated in the first part, pick what you like from this guide and ignore the rest.

Keep the lead arm high and to the side.

  • As you kick, pull the arm in and try to keep the elbow close to your ribs. Keep your hand close to the lead side of your face as well, for obvious reasons.
  • This arm position has the advantage of protecting the lead side of the face and body. If your opponent counters with a hook or round kick to he body on that side, you have at least some protection there.
  • It’s also the easiest way to hold your lead arm. You’ll notice it doesn’t take much effort and comes naturally. [Read more…]

How to do a leg kick, aka shin kick. Part 1

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Call it what you want, the muay Thai shin kick, a leg kick, cut kick, low roundhouse kick. The name you call it by isn’t really that important, the results you can get form this kick are what counts. I fell in love with this kick when I bought my first muay Thai tape (in the days of VHS, a loooong time ago). It was an event headlining Rob Kaman vs. Ernesto Hoost. In that fight, Kaman leg kicked so hard that he knocked both of Hoost’s legs back, sending Ernesto stomach-first to the floor. To put it mildly, I was impressed. Check it out at 5.16 min:

Since that day, I started working on my leg kick and haven’t stopped. It’s one of my favorite techniques now, both for competition and self defense (yes, you read that right). In this “How To” guide, we’ll look at many different aspects; technique, tactics, combinations, etc. The idea is to offer a buffet, placing different pieces of information on the table so there’s something for all to enjoy. But just as with a real buffet, if you don’t like the food, don’t eat it. I’m just giving you my personal observations and preferences, the things that seem to work for me and my students.

If you do the kick differently or your teacher insists on another way, that’s perfectly fine. There are many variations, nuances and reasons to this technique. I just want to cover some information that would have helped me out when I saw Kaman’s leg kick and wanted to learn how to do that. Hopefully you’ll be able to use it too.

This how to guide has numerous parts; I’ll write them as time allows and update everything when it’s done. So check back every now and then to get the latest. Or you can subscribe via email to get the updates. Just enter your address in the upper right box her on my blog. Don’t forget to confirm your subscription once you receive the welcome mail.

Enough intro, here’s the first part.

[Read more…]

Gokhan Saki’s leg kick

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I’m a big muay Thai and kick boxing fan so I follow the K1 tournaments whenever I get a chance. One of the up and coming fighters is Gokhan Saki, a Dutch fighter with Turkish roots. What impressed me the most were his leg techniques. Mind you, his punching is pretty good as well; especially his left hook has a tendency to land with laser-like accuracy. But he excels at kicking techniques. Here’s a short clip of one of his fights.

He takes on Rick Cheek, a relatively unknown fighter. Gokhan uses the typical Dutch style of fighting: short combinations and lots of leg kicks. He reminds me the most of Rob Kaman in that regard; He has a similar style of fighting even though Rob was a bit “stiffer” in his movements. But what is most striking with Saki is how he so often leads with the rear leg kick. No set up with the hands, no feinting, no countering. Just flat out using the leg kick like you would a jab.

This is generally something you don’t do that much in the ring. The rear leg low kick is easily blocked, the opponent just has to raise his knee a little (I’m oversimplifying, I know) and it feels like you just kicked a wall. That’s why you usually prepare the rear leg kick with punches or feints. Or you do it as a counter when the opponent is not in an ideal position to block. Either way, Saki seems to violate those principles with impunity.

[Read more…]

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