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 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…]

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…]