Most kicking in traditional, pre-Funakoshi Okinawa, including kicking in the Okinawan versions of the kata, were low kicks.
That makes some sort of sense to me. For actual self defense, kicking high is just a bad idea, according to experts (and recall, dear reader, I am not; but I do read their books!).
As karate became “Japanized”, and turned into a discipline with more sporting applications, higher kicks became a more popular part of the syllabus.
One reason that high kicking is seldom the first choice in self defense is simply that it requires constant practice to stay capable of kicking fast, hard and high.
We humans use our hands everyday for a wide range of activities, but our feet tend to be used almost exclusively for locomotion, unless we are football players or Savate students, or, for that matter, karate students.
It is instructive to recall that the old, street-fighting oriented versions of Savate (French kick-boxing) involved very low kicks and a variety of hand strikes that were primarily slaps (but that may have been because French Law punished a strike with an open hand in a different way than a strike with a closed fist).
It has been suggested that the grandfather of modern Savate was a fighting system found by French sailors in the French colonies in Asia, where kicking was a common form of striking (very small men can reclaim their balance after a kick far more easily than big guys; and big guys can hit hard enough to reliably knock about an opponent with their fists. You heard it here first, from the King of Obvious).
So, do high kicks have any application in self defense?
As with everything in self defense, the answer is probably certainly “maybe”.
There’s a wonderful book written by a bouncer in which he points out that the combatant in his bars who was about to go down to the floor is predictably the guy attempting a martial arts type kick.
The same writer indicated that he was nearly kicked silly by a Korean stylist who had studied and practiced with fanatical seriousness.
Hence the “maybe”.
If you have the inclination and the time, every day of your life, to practice kicking for a while, and you have some amount of innate talent, you may well be able to generate very good speed and power with your kicks, and do so with no warmup.
Some killer-diller effective karate competitors I knew who studied with Sensei Robert Trias did very well indeed in karate tournaments, and used only two techniques with frequency: a back-fist to the opponent’s head to draw up his guard to expose his midsection, and a skipping-in side thrust kick off the forward leg to strike the midsection of the opponent. Follow ups, when needed, were a high roundhouse off the rear leg and finally a straight right.
The power of that somewhat eccentric front leg side thrust kick, because it had a locked hip and the weight of the body behind it, was impressive. I practiced it for an hour every day for one summer, and could move the three-hundred pound bag very well indeed when I weighed one-thirty-five.
That was then, by the way, not now. I suspect that if I devoted an hour a day to kicking training, my kicks would be much, much better than they are now, and much better in very short order indeed. The learning curve on kicks is much better than with hand techniques, at least it is for me.
That still leaves the question, if you are going to invest an hour a day in training, are kicks the best way to invest that time?
My limited personal experience with kicks is that they work well in a controlled sparring environment, and that most real confrontations are much too close to permit high kicks (that doesn’t include the ever-popular cowboy boot stomp on the instep, which ends fights pretty well, I hear; and I’ve also heard that a cowboy boot directed at a shin can break it with a high degree of predictability, when directed to the inner front of the shin, where there is zero padding).
But Chuck Norris, who appears to be a very nice man and a darn tough guy at that, with a lot of spirited interactions in his history, suggests that the reason he uses high kicks in movies is that they’re….movies! Not real fights.
Which, in every case, should be avoided. Okay, you don’t need to avoid movies. But the other.
One of my next posts, by the way, will direct my gentle readers to a wonderful website from Australia which discusses the history and development of Savate, its techniques and uses, and the historical activities of the criminal element in France, which used a series of nasty and effective hand to hand techniques to immobilize their opponents, the better to empty their pockets.
As best I can tell, out on the street, bad guys are not looking for opponents for a spirited test of one martial arts style against another.
They are looking for victims.
Hence, the wisdom of avoiding biker bars, bars with pool tables and girls who frequently say “Let’s you and him fight!”, and areas where, when you look around, only you have a nice watch on your wrist and a nice pen in your pocket.
Because you may have one idea of a good time, and the patrons in those bars may have another, which is antithetical to a good time for you!
