Front: Hold onto a wall or chair back and swing your straight leg up in front of you
1 set, 10 reps – both legs
Side: Face the wall or chair and swing your straight leg up to the side. Hold your foot in a side kick position
1 set, 10 reps – both legs
Rear curl: Face the wall or chair back and swing your leg back. When it’s at its highest point, curl your lower leg as if trying to kick your rear.
1 set, 10 reps – each leg
7. Chamber: Face the wall or chair back and swing your chambered leg up as if preparing to side kick or roundhouse. If the chambers for these two kicks are completely different in your style, do one method of chambering this workout and do the other method the next time you train alone.
1 set, 10 reps – each leg.
That is all there is to it. You can add reps as needed, but I wouldn’t advise doing any less than what is noted here. It’s still a good idea after completing this warm up to go easy the first few minutes of your training.
COOL-DOWN
Cooling down at the conclusion of your workout is just as important as the warm up, though it’s most often neglected. When you have survived a 60 minute grueling solo workout, you just want to hit the shower and crash on the sofa. Spending another five or ten minutes doing cool down exercises is the last thing you feel like doing. But it’s most important that you do because cooling down releases lactic acid that gathers in the muscles during a hard training session, which reduces that post workout stiffness and soreness.
Cool-down Exercises
Lightly stretch your legs, shoulders and arms for five to ten minutes at the completion of your workout. Use the same stretches you did to warm up your muscles and the same set and rep count, but do them with less intensity. Remember that you are cooling down.
Warm up properly, train safely and cool down properly and you will have many healthy, injury-free years in the martial arts.
In this section we are going to explore ways to improve your kicking that are fun and innovative. We will look at how you can train alone to strengthen a weak kick, quickly improve a new one and explore ways to even increase the speed, power and flexibility in kicks you have been doing for a long time. We will also look at a few unusual kicks to see how you can use them in the street and in competition. As always, let’s begin with the basics.
VARIATIONS OF THE BASIC KICKS
Let’s begin with the basic four: front, round, side and back. These are the foundation of all leg techniques, which you must master before you can expect to perfect other ways of kicking. In addition, it’s the front, round, side and back kicks that trained fighters commonly rely on in a self-defense situation. Hopefully, no one thinks they are going to use a leaping, spinning, cartwheel kick against a 245-pound ex-con who has spent the last ten years pumping iron in the joint and fighting other cons. Most martial artists who have fought in the street say that it was their fast and powerful basics that saved their bacon, not those fancy ones seen in silly movies.
A good way to thoroughly understand your basic kicks is to analyze the many ways they can be executed. Contrary to what you may have been told, the way that your school teaches the roundhouse, side kick, front kick and back kick is not the only way the basic kicks can be done. I mention this because there are narrow-minded styles and systems that teach that their way is the only way. This is nonsense. While there are certainly many ways to execute these kicks incorrectly, such as with poor balance, improper body mechanics, wrong angles and so on, there are many varied ways to execute them correctly. Not only are there variations among styles and systems, there are often variations found within the same fighting art.
I don’t see a problem with this. What I do have a problem with are teachers who insist that their students kick exactly as they do. How can they expect this? How can a short-legged, broad-hipped student kick the same way as one who is long-legged and narrow-hipped? He cannot, nor should he be pushed to do so.
I first show my students the track of a kick. For example, I show them how a side kick is chambered, launched, extended, hits the target, retracted and returned to the floor. Once I see that they have the basic track, I let them discover how best to deliver it based on their physical structure. My job as the teacher is to ensure that they are employing the proper body mechanics, as they relate to their physique, to optimize their speed and power.
I also think it’s important to examine other ways to execute the same kick. We are blessed with a melting pot of styles and systems in this country, so we should take advantage and borrow and steal from each other. If you are a kung fu fighter but you really like taekwondo’s roundhouse kick, why shouldn’t you add it to your repertoire?
If you belong to a strict system that doesn’t allow for variations, I leave that to you to work it out with your teacher. I’m not suggesting that you be disrespectful or a traitor to your school, but if your teacher is unbendable, you have to decide if a rule is more important than a technique that may save your life. I’ve used my fighting art on the streets in Vietnam and as a cop in Portland, Oregon, so that decision has never been a tough one for me.
In this section, let’s take a look at a few variations of the front, round, back and side kicks. We will examine different parts of your foot and leg to kick with, as well as different ways to launch the kick. These kicking methods may be different from the way you regularly do them, so training alone is the perfect time to experiment, especially if your school has a strict policy as to how kicks are to be performed. Practice them away from your school and then use them on your classmates. When your kick smacks into them and they are left standing there scratching their heads, saying, “What the heck was that?” it will be interesting to hear their arguments against the technique.
The front kick, with the front or rear leg, is often the first kick taught to beginning students, though that doesn’t make it the easiest one to learn. Even an untrained person can do a kick that looks like a front kick, but to do it properly takes a lot of work. It’s important that you know how the body mechanics of the front thrust kick are different from those that make up the front snap kick. I’m not going to take the space here to describe them because every other book on the market does a good job of it. Just make sure you have a good understanding of the differences before you proceed to the variations that follow.
Angle Front Kick
This is one of my favorite front kicks because it’s so deceptive. It launches forward at an angle, half way between a straight front kick and a circular roundhouse kick. To do it, simply angle your lower leg out slightly—use your fast front leg or your more powerful rear leg, depending on which element you need at the time—and kick forward into the target. Kick with the ball of your foot, the top of your foot or your lower shin, just above your ankle. The difference depends on the target. For instance, if you are kicking an assailant’s thigh, hit with the ball of your foot. Kick him with the top of your foot, however, if you are firing at his groin or at his face as he is bent over looking downward.
A nice feature of the angle front kick is that an assailant can be turned