Muay Thai Kickboxing - How to Throw a Front Kick

Matt Hostetler: This is Matt Hostetler with Capital Jiu-Jitsu. For this clip, we are going to demonstrate the front kick. This is a very important kick in striking arts. Its basically equivalent to a jab, but delivered with the leg. The way that you deliver, the proper way to deliver a front kick is to hit with the ball of the foot.

First and foremost, you dont want to hit anybody with your toes, you will end up breaking them or hurting them. So, the first thing I wanted to point out is to getting the habit of curling your toes back when you deliver the strike. Now, what Stuart does first is lift up his leg to chamber. He is chambering the kick right now. Now, from this point, he literally, delivers straight out, directly at the kick pad that Jeremy is holding and you notice with the kick pad he has got the threads facing him. You dont want to hold it the wrong way and it could potentially have the guy cut his foot. You dont want that.

So, again stressing the proper way when you are drilling, the proper way for the partner to hold the equipment, so, again deliver the front kick a couple of times. Now, as you noticed, Stuart was never off balanced when he delivered this kick. Again, you want to always remain in balance. This front kick can come in into play a lot of different ways. You can use it if the guy is walking towards you and you just want to back him if he is, if your opponent is walking towards you, you just want to back him up, kind of same thing you would do with the striking jab or you can use it on offense. It is a very widely used kick and if thrown properly, at the bare minimum, you will disrupt your opponents timing. If you are lucky, you will give him something to think about if you hit him in the right spot in the solar plexus, maybe knockout as win. But again, the whole concept is to curl the toes back, land the kick with the ball of the foot and lastly, hip movement.

Again, you want to transfer as much power as possible into the strike. So its harder to demonstrate this at slow motion, but Stuart, if you want to give the bag a kick at full speed and with good hip movement, more hip, more hip action, this again, the core of his body, you want to transfer that out. So, you really want to get the hip movement into the strike and thats the discussion.