Monday, January 19, 2009

Wim Demeere: Some Interesting Kicks



Wim Demeere and I have traded some ideas on shin kicks and other unorthodox kicking. This was mainly inspired by the fight scene where Billy Bob Thornton uses kicks to the shins and knees, along with some heavy palm slaps. It's a great movie fight scene if you haven't seen it.
Wim had also posted "Gokhen Saki's leg kick", where he points out that an opponent can use a "short wall" block by lifting the knee. If you are throwing a back leg round kick to his leg, he puts up his "short wall" and you can break your leg literally in half, as painfully shown in the video in his post.
But more to the point; there are lots of kicks that can be inserted from interesting angles. In the video above, Wim demonstrates a "skip kick" to the shin at about 27 seconds. He also uses what I would describe as "Hackey Sack" kicks (to the opponent's lowered head), just like the ones played in the bean-bag kicking game.
These are clearly unconventional but none-the-less effective.
-Mike Martello, at our last Yin Bagua seminar also demonstrated a "Mud Step" kick on my training partner. Mike shuffled his feet as he stepped, pretending he was shaking mud off his shoes. As he walked around my friend, each little shake of the "mud shoe" kicked my friends shins. This was from a safe position as far as balence and there wasn't much you could do to stop it. These kicks are certainly not finishing techniques, but provide your opponent a lot of frustration, distraction and a chance to open up a knock-out blow.

4 comments:

Littlefair said...

An interesting and amusing addition to your serious article might be the old English sport of shin kicking.

Think I'm making it up? Well it might not be *really* old, but certainly back in the 17th Century it was practised and still is to this day.

Check out: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2iKcDNfIy7w

The winner is not the one who kicks hardest but who ends up pinning his opponent on the ground.

Article here about it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/gloucestershire/4605157.stm

Compare with Cumberland wrestling which on wikipedia says has Celtic roots but to me looks more like Greco-Roman wrestling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumberland_and_Westmorland_wrestling

Dojo Rat said...

Thanks!
I'll follow up on that!
D.R.

Webmaster said...

The "Hackey sack kicks" were called "Ghost kicks" in the style I did. The idea was that you never saw them, only felt the pain.

Personally, I view them as transitions, as a way to insert yet another impact or to surprise the other guy. They look like weak when you're used to the power generation of say muay Thai. But they can land with a surprising amount of power and give some fun results... :-)

Wim

Dojo Rat said...

Yes, I would say that a "ghost" or "hackey sack" kick to the guys nose as you are holding his head down would hurt like hell!