2024-08-03

Subbing for ISKF Tempe at the Tempe Family YMCA.

I only had two students for the second hour of training this morning, so I asked for requests - I asked them what they wanted, or needed, to work on. One student wanted more practice on Heian Nidan, so we did that for a while. Then the other student (a brown belt) said he wanted to work on back kick, so we did a deep dive consisting of the following points:

• Contact surface: The contact surface for ushi-geri should be the heel, not the entirity of the bottom of the foot. You want to eliminate any kind of “shock-absorbtion” in your ankle when transferring energy to the target, so you want to hit with the part of your foot that can’t possibly flex on impact. That means pulling the toes back towards yourself while thrusting your heel out as far as possible.
• Keeping the hips square: It’s very easy to turn an otherwise good back-kick into a bad “3/4 side kick” by overrotating the hip. This is understandable: When you turn your head to see where you’re going, your hips come along for the ride and turn too. If the hips turn, then the leg turns, and the foot goes from veritcal to horizontal very quickly. Indeed this is such a problem that some people execute back kick without looking … which brings us to …
• Aiming: Just as the lifted knee is the aiming point for mae-geri, the supporting heel serves this purpose with ushiro-geri. If the rest of your mechanics are good, your back kick will lie in the vertical plane formed by the inside edge of your supporting foot. In other words, all you have to do is make sure your supporting heel points to the target. This may seem really obvious, but it’s important to remember this when you start practicing spinning back. Just spin your front foot around to point the heel at the target and you should be good to go.
• Distance: Because back kick is mechanically similar to side-thrust kick, people tend to overestimate its range. Remember, your hips are turned when you’re throwing a side kick, so you get to add the distance between your hips. Likewise, your foot is plantarflected when throwing a front kick, so you get to add the distance between the ankle and the ball of the foot. But back kick adds neither of these, so it’s one of the shortest kicks in our toolbox.