Tai Chi: Straight Leg Kick

Series Summary

Tai Chi is a Chinese martial art that has been practiced and adapted throughout the years to encompass many different styles. Though not as "hard" a martial art as say, Taekwondo in that it does not overtly foster sparring and contact fighting, Tai Chi is nevertheless made up of forms which mimic blocks and strikes of "harder" martial arts. It is now primarily used as a form of spiritual and mystic exercise that incorporates body and mind through meditation and movement. In this free video series a professional Tai Chi instructor, Rich Marantz, will show you several useful stretches for loosening up the body and hip joints. Rich will begin by showing you a few maneuvers to help loosen up the body and get the chi flowing. He'll then begin teaching you several stretches to help increase your hip and joint flexibility. You'll learn stretches, such as: the snake creeps down, scoop the moon, waist turns, knee ups, rabbit hops and the lotus sweep kick. Rich will also teach you a few joint rolling exercises to help increase your chi flow and improve your strength. These stretches are designed to help you loosen your muscles in order to improve your flexibility and Tai Chi practice. Watch these few short videos and start improving your body today.

Video Transcript

"In this next segment I'm going to teach you about a conditioning exercise called straight leg kick to the front. This helps us to get our hip flexors open as well as maintain a lot of control in our body to be able to move the body parts individually to loosen the body. The way that we do this is that we have one foot forward, both arms out to the side. From this position we want to just bring the back leg straight up and straight down with out bending the leg. Now when you do this, as always, you do it to your flexibility levels. You just bring up and down. Straight up. Straight down. And if you notice I'm not throwing my body so it's not like this right? You wont get any benefit doing your exercise like that. It's much better to just let it come up a little bit. Keep your body still and relaxed. So all the movement is coming from here and in this hip. So you stand here, straight up. Very relaxed, very simple. You do one leg, turn around, do the other leg. One leg, do the other leg. Many people say it looks silly, look like the Rockettes but it's the idea of somebody standing right in front of you. You can bring your heel right up into their face or as in a lot of martial arts, called an ax kick. Up and then straight down."