How to Increase the Height of a Taekwondo Side Kick

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody I'm John Graden from the Martial Arts Teacher's Association and johngraden.com. How do you throw a sky high side kick in Tai Kwon Do? Well it's one of my favorite techniques and one of the beauties for me in traditional martial arts doing kata and traditional techniques is the athletic coordination challenge and when you are doing forms competition and I still compete in forms throwing a high kick with good form has a higher degree of difficulty so typically it is looked upon better and you get more favor for it, I'm not going to say more points because it is not quite that standardized but it does increase the level of difficulty which works to your favor in competition. It is not necessarily the most practical technique in the world but it is a traditional art that we try and do as accurately as possible. This is what it looks like. In my form kabeck which I will be doing this weekend there is a technique where I go from here, punch, and then a back leg side kick. The back leg side kick is going to come from this leg and the key is that you want to commit to the kick, commit to the kick. It is really important. In other words I'm not just going to throw it with surface execution, see that is surface execution, like dance I'm just kind of showing it to you. And that is not a good side kick because with a good side kick you commit to the kick, you blast it out there hard and that helps you to get height on the kick and second to that the supporting foot really has to pivot hard. If I don't pivot this foot the hip doesn't get around and I'm going to have a hard time getting it high enough and I want to pivot really hard and drive that kick, explode it out into the target. For flexibility we want to work on the inner groin, the hips, and the lower back. Why the lower back? A good form side kick has the kicker maintaining somewhat of an upright position. We want to avoid leaning on those kicks which looks bad when it is performed so here is a stretch you may not have seen before that helps with side kick and here we go. We'll go down from here into your horse stance and knees bent, put the forearms between your knees and when you do a stretch like this it is a little uncomfortable so your body naturally guards, it naturally tenses up a little bit so you have to mentally override that so just breath and override it and open up your legs. From here I'm going to drop into a mini split so from here my knees go right across my hips. I'm not sitting back, I'm not sitting forward, I'm right in the middle and I'm continuing to push my legs apart and sometimes you are going to have somebody push your hips down from the back, rock back and forth just a little bit, push it out and next roll on one leg, extend your side kick and roll towards it. Notice that here my knees across my hips, out to the leg are in a straight line I'm not stepping back or sitting back or sitting forward too much and I'm really prying those legs apart and then I do the other side, same thing stretch it out, get it out there and then I'll come back to the center, stretch here some more and then I'll go into my full split and come back up again. Two elements to high side kick, one, commit to it, two, work your flexibility. I'm John Graden. I hope that helps. Thanks."