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andyscriven
andyscriven's picture
A Kicking Drill to teach students control in sparring

In the new age of social media, I have been at a complete loss on how to promote my club. After lots of research on facebook, instagram and youtube the advice is to put videos up so people can see what you do. Also help your students with training methods which they can do in their own time. This is what I have been doing. I would be interested to see what other Instructors are doing as well.

I recently put this drill up to show potential students, looking to start martial arts, that sparring can be taught safely and gain great control when they kick. I call this drill the Baseball Mitt drill.

I would love to share ideas with other Instructors!

Ian H
Ian H's picture

andyscriven wrote:
I recently put this drill up to show potential students, looking to start martial arts, that sparring can be taught safely and gain great control when they kick.

Nice drill.  I like how you added the foot movement and the unpredictable hand movement.  

I know most of the conversations here are headed in the other "how can I kick harder?" direction but ... since you are talking specifically about sparring and teaching safety/control in kicks ... one drill I like is "air kicks", usually using a roundhouse kicking with the back foot, where the student holds the kick out at full extension for a moment or two (or longer!) and then retracts.  Superfast extension ... hold ... hold ... superfast retraction.  

The "hold" time allows the student to focus on controlling the stop of the kick ... you can reduce or take this out later as they advance ... and it allows you more time to check that they have the proper "kick delivery" posture (support foot turned, hips rotated, leg straight, &c) to see if there are other things that need fixing in their kicks too.  

I like doing this with the kick coming from the back foot, rather than the front, as that kick (a) tends to score more in tournaments when done well and (b) that kick tends to be more uncontrolled (ie head contact penalty) if the control is not worked on.  

... and then you can get them to work on a nice heavy body-kick as well, that can double for practical applications as well as kumite tournements ;-)