Raising Your Kick

 

"It's not just self defence, it's about self control, body discipline, and mind discipline and breath techniques. It involves yoga. It involves mediatation. It's an art, not a sport."

-Elvis Presley (I did a double-take when I first read this also.)

"You may train for a long time, but if you merely move your hands and feet and jump up and down like a puppet, learning Karate is not very diffferent from learning a dance. You will never have reached the heart of the matter; you will have failed to grasp the quintessence of karate

-Gichin Funakoshi

When I first switched from Moo Duk Kwan Tae Kwon Do to Chung Do Kwan Tae Kwon Do I had an unfortunate problem of when kicking, because of their stance, inadvertently hitting them either on the waist or around it when doing any kick.

This was partly because of sloppy technique, but also because I had been taught to 'swing' my kick, instead of hinging it. While I did have strong kicks because of this, I also had technically poor form when doing so. And all the power in the world means nothing if you are not doing it with proper technique. Perhaps it does make a difference when fighting, but in terms of practicing an art one does it a certain way, and then develops speed and power.

So there were two methods I learned to improve the kick. One was instead of swinging the kick from its placing on the ground upward, to instead hinging it at the knee. This removed the tendency to swing the leg like a pendulum, which while very damaging, was also much slower than utilizing it as an angle instead of a motion like an arc.

Secondly, I learned the importance of raising my knee. It seems something obvious, but for some reason I never realized that the higher I raised my knee when doing a kick, the higher the kick would land. Because of this I developed kicks which could be done above my head, but there are other ways to increase the height of your kick after you have developed proper technique.

For my side-kicks it was a harder problem; I never developed full splits, something I still am working toward today, and because of that may never have a vertical side kick. Then again, there is a good chance I will never need such a flexibility with my kicks to survive a fight on the street, but in terms of practicing the art and developing the flexibility it will be nice.

That being said, a stretch that is surprisingly beneficial to developing a vertical front kick (which I do have) is that of the butterfly stretch.

Stretching does more than just increase one's flexibility, it also restructures the muscles and tendons to become more resilient. I can recall on one occasion a person with very developed kicks kicked my shin, and swore he had broken his toe. Instead what had happened was his tendon was so strong that when his kick landed it tore off a piece of the bone rather than detach. He found this out after X-rays. What I learned from this is that the tendons and muscles can become strong enough to resist tearing, and thus more resilient.

I came from a school where it was prone for the HCL and ACL tendon to tear, and for a very long time wondered why it was only this school where I witnessed this occurring. After having gone to nearly a dozen or more martial art schools, it is the only school where the incident took place.

I don't know why, but my theory is that practicing on the cement floors, combined with a stretch called , where you tuck your leg behind your back as you reach for your toes, caused that particular tendon to be strained in a way that was detrimental to the tendon, as opposed to the opposite intended effect. I may never know, but this taught me to be cautious in how I stretch. Some stretches may actually be bad for us, so do research about how you stretch.

That being said, I fully support the side-split, for-ward split, and butterfly stretch. The latter, which I can do fully, seems to correlate with my ability to do a vertical front kick.

Another technique you may consider tweaking to increase height of your side-kick would be to raise your shoulder towards your knee as extending the kick. Many have a tendency to dip their head toward the ground as they kick. A teacher I had pushed my shoulder and thus head toward me knee and the effect was an immediate ability to raise the kick six inches higher.

One dynamic stretch I have found useful is 'swing-kicking'. This is where you deliberately swing the foot back and forth, from as high as possible in the front (not unlike an axe-kick) to as high as is comfortable to the back. This will stretch your buttocks muscles, as well as your hamstring and gastrocnemius muscles. I had difficulty finding an example of this stretch online, so I made my own.

"Success is the sum of small efforts everyday."

-R.Colier