High Kicks

[sirmattu]

Sounds familiar with karate.Every one believes the old crap about how katas were meant as a way to practice hidden techniques capable of defending oneself.The old belief of katas being useful is just that old and garbage.

well i guess that's what you get from someone who does muay thai

[Broadsword2004]

Hey, this is just my opinion on this high kicks thing, and no I have not read all 11 pages of this thread, so maybe someone already stated this, but anyways......from my understanding of it, quite a few old Korean martial arts masters or experts (whatever) and a few karate masters were known for their high kicking abilities. The thing is, though, I think they jsut practiced high kicks for the agility practice.

I mean, you know the sport of modern gymnastics was taken off of the strength training exercises that knights used to practice for building up speed and strength. It is literally recorded that knights practiced backflips, even. I would think that it was the same with martial arts of the East. High kicks were not necessary for combat, but agility is necessary for coombat, and very flashy, acrobat exercises oftentimes are great practice for building up agility. Even from what I have read of kung fu, they say that you learn to kick as high as possible so you are prepared to kick anyway possible is the thing.

The ONLY time I have ever read of kicking people off the horse, in a way that sounded believable, was when I read about the Flying Phoenix Kick. This kick is basically a side kick, but done pole-vaulting on a staff. Now, it wasn't meant to allow you to take down a charging horseman. The idea was if you were in like the mountains of China and some soldiers of horseback were traveling through some narrow, rocky path, in single file, then you could hide, and at the right moment, spring out from behind cover, pole-vault up, and knock the troop off their horse. That I think could work. Cuz the horse-riding soldiers wouldn't be able to maneuver or charge at all and would be taken by surprise.

I think the reason that martial artists oftentimes try to justify high kicks as application-worthy in terms of like knocking a soldier off a horse is because deep down, they know they are not practicing a "martial" art with those high kicks. But they want to practice them, and they like to think of them as fighting techniques, so they make up something like using them to kick a man off a horse while charging.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with practicing high kicks. Plenty of UFC fighters practice high kicks and can kick vertically even. And being able to kick high with power shows you have great leg strength and flexibility. Many so-called "martial artists" who denounce high kicks are way out of shape and can't kick high for beans or do a split.

To me, high kicks are just a training exercise moreso, but with martial application. If you have to train to kick, may as well train to kick high and with good power, because then you can definitely kick low with good power as well.

Medieval knights would practice doing somersaults/flips with full armor on, but without a helmet, and also vaulting onto the horse. That is where the pommel horse in gymnastics originated from, plus the vault exercise.

I don't know why people who denounce high kicks though don't practice them. You need strength, endurance, flexibiity in both the physical and mental sense, explosiveness, etc...high kicks are a great way to practice this. I guess though isnce Tae kwon Do is pretty much ALL high kicks, in the end, the Koreans knew it wasn't really a martial art applicable to fighting all by itself (not fighting mounted troops anyway), just a sport that utilized one of the training exercises of martial arts. ort of like how modern gymnastics is a sport using the training exercises of knights.

[Broadsword2004]

well i guess that's what you get from someone who does muay thai

Not necessarily; John Bluming, that big-ass dutch guy who is like a 9th dan in judo and a 10th dan in karate (I forget his exact rankings, so maybe those numbers are wrong, but he is up there in the rankings), and also like a 2nd or 3rd dan in Iaido, said, and I quote from a documentary, "The notion that you can learn to fight from practicing kata is nonsense, absolute nonsense. But why do they keep doing so much kata in the dojo? Because the money rolls in, that's all."

John Bluming is one of the great karate fighters of our time. He was beating most of the Japanese champions back in the day. He was also a champion Judo fighter. Bluming also trained under Don Draeger and was good friends with him.

So, I mean, there are obviously some prominent karate guys out there too who don't believe in kata, but are excellent karate fighters.