The Fastest, Hardest Kick In All Of Karate
I learned this type of kick some forty years ago in Kwon Bup Korean Martial Arts. This was the forerunner of modern day Tae KwonDo, and the unfortunate truth is that these kicks aren’t practiced anymore. Why, I don’t know, because this type of kick is the hardest kick, the fastest kick you will ever see.
I call this move, doesn’t what martial art you do, the pop kick. Whether you do a snap, a side, or a wheel, the basic principle doesn’t change. You replace the left foot with the right foot, and kick with the left foot…this all has to occur at the same instant.
By same time I mean that the left foot and the right foot start together, and the right foot hits the ground at the same time the left foot impacts. By doing it in this fashion the whole body gets smaller at the same time, then the whole body explodes. This causes a very pure energy pop in the energy center, which is a point a couple of inches below the navel, which is also called the tan tien.
In addition to the purity of explosion you will feel in the energy center, which will tend to concentrate energy in the kick, you will experience a sudden weight on your standing leg at the same moment you experience weight in the leg you are kicking with. This sudden weight tends to make the explosion of energy very precise, even as it increases the violence. This will really increase the energy of your technique.
If you are executing this move with a snap kick, make sure you get the knee high up so that the foot doesn’t slide up the front of the target, but rather comes in straight. If you are doing a side kick, make sure that the weight of the hips really goes into the target. If you are doing a wheel kick, make sure you get the hips and kick up to a true horizontal plane.
The fourth technique would be a spin pop to the rear, and uses the side kick. You would practice all four kicks against a wall, learning how to lift legs simultaneously, and place the feet on the wall and the ground at the same time. You don’t have to hit the wall with power, save that for a bag, control will actually give you more power in the end.
We used to have all kinds of entry moves to make these kicks work. We would angle our stance as we slapped the attacker’s hands, and the we would do it subtle, and then be in the kick before the target knew what we were doing. As we invested time and sweat the explosion would get more pure and more full of energy.
Make sure you use this technique in a variety of stances, and you will have a much larger arsenal of martial arts weapons. This is a great technique to practice, and it is born of the successful merger of karate power and TKD kicks. Japanese martial arts or Korean martial arts, this is the hardest kick, and the fastest kick, and perhaps the most effective leg technique I know.
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