5 ways to improve your kicking techniques in Taekwondo

Taekwondo is a martial art known for its impressive kicking techniques. Fast and complicated kicks are a part of every Taekwondo demonstration, and kicking techniques usually score higher in sparring competitions.

Performing kicking techniques well requires excellent balance, flexibility, strength, and precision. These are not physical characteristics that most people have naturally, so it takes a long time and a lot of effort to learn how to perform kicking techniques well. It also requires good training methods, and so here are five ways that you can improve your kicking techniques.

1. Practise regularly and often

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The best way to improve your balance, flexibility, and strength for kicking techniques is to simply practise the techniques often. I have often found that a good time to practise kicking techniques is just before a regular training session. I often spend the 10 minutes before a class starts practising kicking techniques. If you do two or three training sessions a week, and practise kicking before each one, your flexibility and balance will steadily improve.

Similarly, I find that certain routines of kicking techniques work better than others. I find that the best routines gradually increase the difficulty of the kicks, and also don’t jump from one muscle group to another. The routine I often use is:

  • front rising kicks
  • front snapping kicks
  • inward crescent kicks
  • outward crescent kicks
  • side kicks
  • turning kicks
  • rising side kicks
  • reverse turning kicks

After that you can do any other kicks you like in any order. I tend to do about 20 of each kick before moving onto the next one. That might seem like quite a lot of kicks in total, but you don’t have to do the full list each time – I often just do down to turning kicks.

2. Stance holding

This is actually one of my favourite training activities, though I can imagine most people would find it boring. It’s quite simple: just choose a stance, perform it well, and then hold it for a certain amount of time – often 1 – 2 minutes.

That might sound easy – and for a walking stance it is – but for a low sitting stance (or the most difficult one – a low fixed stance) it’s harder. Doing this activity for certain stances helps improve your balance – in particular sitting stance, bending stance, and one-leg stance. This in turn helps to improve your kicking techniques.

When you start, you might only hold a stance for 1 or 1 ½ minutes, but over time, that will get easier, so increase the length of time you hold the stance for to 2 minutes, 2 ½ minutes, and so on.

3. Basic jumping

The most difficult kicks to perform in Taekwondo are jumping kicks. One of the brilliant things about Changheon-yu Taekwondo, and the patterns that Choi Hong-hi designed, is that the training for jumping kicks is partially built into the patterns. The first jumping kick in the Changheon-yu patterns appears in the black-stripe pattern Chungmu, and then the next ones appear in Gwanggae and Gyebaek. But also in Chungmu is a move consisting of a 360-degree jump and spin on the spot. This technique is just one of several fairly basic jumps that are good for improving your jumping kicks.

The basic jumps are:

  • ‘l’ stance, jumping on the spot and landing in the same stance
  • ‘l’ stance, jumping on the spot and changing from a left to a right stance (or a right to a left)
  • ‘l’ stance, jumping on the spot and turning to face the opposite direction, landing in the same stance (180-degree turn)
  • the same as the above, but spinning in the opposite direction
  • ‘l’ stance, jumping on the spot and spinning 360 degrees in the air, landing in the same stance in the same direction
  • the same as the above, but spinning in the opposite direction

If you’re just starting out at learning jumping kicks (or you are an instructor looking for some basic jumping technique exercises to give your students) these exercises are excellent for improving your balance through a jump. They get you used to landing correctly after having jumped and spun in the air.

4. Slow kicks

This is probably the most effective method for improving your kicks. Try performing kicking techniques much more slowly than usual, holding each of the important positions of the kick. For example, if you were doing a side kick, first bring the foot up next to the opposite knee, then hold for 5 seconds, then lift the foot up so that it is at the height of the kick, but the knee is still pulled in, then hold for 5 seconds. Over 5 seconds, extend the leg to the position of the side kick, then once the leg is fully extended, hold it in position for 5 seconds. Then over another 5 seconds, lower the foot again.

As you get better at the exercise, increase the amount of time you hold each position for.

This technique is excellent for improving your balance, strength, and the precision of your kicks. It’s probably the most effective method for doing so, but you have to do it often – probably at least twice a week – with a wide range of different kicking techniques.

5. Foot shape exercises

A lot of students find it difficult to get the right foot shape for different kicks. A side kick is usually performed with the foot-sword, thus the foot-sword must be pushed forward (so that you don’t hit your opponent with the sole of your foot). A front snapping kick is usually performed with the ball of the foot, thus the toes must be pulled back.

Practise moving your feet into these different shapes – practise pulling the toes back or pushing the foot-sword forwards. This is an excellent exercise because you can do it even just while lying down watching television.

Five general principles for teaching a good Taekwondo class

I’ve been training in Taekwondo for more than 13 years now. In that time I’ve attended classes as a student, and I’ve also taught as an assistant instructor and instructor. As a student I’ve seen which classes are enjoyable and interesting, and I’ve tried to distill what it is that makes a good Taekwondo class. And as an instructor I’ve tried to use these ideas to teach interesting and effective Taekwondo classes, and through trial and error, have found what works and what doesn’t work. Here are five general principles that I try to follow when teaching a Taekwondo class.

1. Students shouldn’t be standing still for more than 30 seconds.

I’ve been to too many Taekwondo classes where students have been left standing around with nothing to do for several minutes. You can see them getting bored – it doesn’t take long. While I don’t think that the primary purpose of a Taekwondo class is to keep students physically fit, it is something that should just happen incidentally – students should be doing enough exercises to become and remain physically fit. Many people do attend Taekwondo classes for that reason.

2. Never do the same class twice.

I’ve also been to too many classes that have just been exact copies of previous classes. This is a sure way to make your students bored. Variety is essential for maintaining your students’ interest and enthusiasm.

This doesn’t mean that no two lessons can be alike in any way – if you were to try to make every single lesson completely different from every other one, you’d quickly run out of teaching material. It just means that no two lessons are exactly alike. There should always be something different about any two lessons, even if it’s just doing a different warm-up exercise.

3. In every class, teach your students one thing they haven’t heard before.

This relates to the point about variety, and that no two classes should be alike. An easy way to make sure that no two classes are exactly alike is to try to teach your students one completely new thing in each class. This could be almost anything to do with Taekwondo: it could be a new sparring technique, it could be how to score points when refereeing sparring match, or it could be something about the history of Korea. There is a lot to know in Taekwondo, and most students only ever see a fraction of it. Teaching your students one new thing in every class not only adds variety and keeps your students from becoming bored, but it might introduce them to some aspect of Taekwondo that they find particularly interesting.

4. Always give higher grades something harder to do than the lower grades.

Again, I have been to too many classes where the class consists of a wide range of grades – from white belt all the way up to third degree black belt – and because there are white belts in the group, the entire class does white belt (or often yellow belt) line work. While black belts do need to practise basic techniques like punches and knife-hand strikes, they don’t need to do this all the time, and they DO need to practise the more advanced techniques that they’re learning for their grade. If you always give black belts white belt exercises to do, they will get bored.

If there are a large spread of grades in a Taekwondo class, the class needs to be split into groups. If there are black belts (and if there are enough of them), they almost always need to be split off into a separate group, and given very hard, physically demanding exercises to do – they are black belts after all. If the group of colour belts is large enough, they should be split too – normally around green or blue belt. If you only have one or two black belts in the class, one of them can instruct one of the colour belt groups.

And even if the class is not large enough to be split, if you’re doing something like line work, you should still give the higher grades some harder line work to do.

5. Get the senior grades to teach the junior grades.

This is something that we did a lot in the Taekwondo classes I go to 10 years ago (and which we still do now, though not to the same extent). If two green belt students need to learn the pattern Wonhyo, and there is a blue belt in your class who knows their own pattern quite well, get them to teach the green belts Wonhyo. It gives the blue belt something interesting to do; it helps the blue belt ‘revise’ Wonhyo, and think about it in a different way as they have to describe the moves to someone else; and it frees you up to monitor the class at a higher level – to make sure everyone is active, rather than just concentrating on teaching two students in your class one pattern.

How to count from 10 to 100 in Sino-Korean numerals – Taekwondo Terminology Tutorials

In this fourth video in the series on counting in Korean, we look at how to count from 10 to 100 using Sino-Korean numerals.