Front Back Side Kick

Last week during blackbelt class we were throwing some front-back-side kicks and I was really excited to see how I’ve been progressing with them. I really like this combination of kicks for its level of difficulty and how the challenge gives me a ton of insight into each of these kicks on their own, or in combination. Because I find this kick so valuable (but for some reason it slips my mind more often than not) I knew I wanted to put it in my Chimaera form (my hand form a created this year), and I have been trying to develop it. It’s starting to feel more stable but I still really struggle with getting power into the back kick. 

Cut to last week’s class and Sifu prompts us to try to make the back kick the strongest out of the three. With my focus on it I was able to put a but more power but I knew I still had a massive gap in my knowledge because even with my focus on it, it still felt pretty weak. After some questions and discussions I figured out two things I could try to implement. 

1) Thinking about rotating the hip joint during the kick: this one I still need to practice to see if I can feel what Sifu was describing (this is one of my biggest issues with this kick is I don’t know how to engage my hip in a way that supports the power generation/transfer. The way I’m aligning my skeleton feels like the hip can’t engage the same way as any of my other kicks would). I’m not quite sure yet what this means, but it’s something I’m hoping to investigate moving forward while I progress with this kick

2) Thinking about these kicks as three parts of a whole rather than three kicks that happen in succession: This was the big lightbulb moment for me because I used to think that doing these kicks back to back made them more challenging because it forces you to focus on recovery; delivering power to a target that’s not there, then reversing that energy to recover, then generating it again from scratch for the next kick, and then doing that whole sequence again for the side heel at the end. But by thinking about them as three separate kicks I was making it harder on myself! If I focus on the transitions and use them in a way that makes the recovery and power generation into one single step, it becomes easier and more effective! (I need to remind myself to be careful and not blend them too much, but being able to use the withdrawal from the first kick as the chamber for the next one has already made my back kick feel a lot better! -> now I just need to see if I can utilize the transition from back kick to side kick in the same way!)

Current Total

Push-ups

24493

Sit-Ups

24665

AOK

387

Km

1692

Blogs

23

Sparring

40

Hand Form

143

Weapon Form

215

Repair Relationship

0

Online Engagement

13

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