Hi! I am Jonathan; we are here again at Somafit, going over and looking at Olympic Taekwondo. The next two kicks we are going to be learning is the Cut Kick, which I am showing now and in addition to that the Fast Kick, later. We will start and go back to my fighting stance. My weight is distributed a little more on my front leg. I am on the balls of my feet. I am going to start here in a pendulum or in a pendulum like swing.
So, my back leg which in this case is my left leg is again to swing to meet my right leg. As that happens, the minute they touch, almost like the trigger to a gun, I am going to then raise my knee up quickly; thrust my foot out, so that my heel is really leading the rest of my body and again hips really have to do so much with executing a proper kick or making sure that you are going to get that power there. My hips are almost turned in such a way that I am almost turning my back to my opponent, but not quite; but I am really want to think about pushing my hip towards my opponent.
So again slowly, my left leg swings like a pendulum to its right leg. My right knee is raised from my right leg. If they imagine I am already in forward motion here, I am going to extend my leg out so that my heel hits; as that heel hits, my foot comes down and step back and so, I am essentially stepping back into my sparring stance just as I went forward with leg to leg. So, here I go leg to leg and here I go leg to leg. Let us go ahead and have the target in front. You see that this kick for the most part is the kick that goes predominantly to the hips and to torso and it is not a kick that would be throwing to the head, biomechanically, it would be a easy kick to move away from or duck and we do not want that. Our goal is to hit our opponent and strike him with as much power and force as we can, displacing their body and making it so that they can not continue.
So, speaking of that, we have Sumir (Ph) here in a chest protector which is a piece of safety equipment that is used in sparring as well as training as well and is basically condensed foam that surrounds your torso. As you can see there are three blue circles across the center of this chest protector which marks the target areas of this chest protector or 'hogu' as it is referred to in Korean. This is where essentially I am going to point my feet and the noise that is made when this happens is a popping sound like a smack or in this case a hard smack from my foot or instep. This again prevents from bones being broken, but again does not absorb any of the trauma past that. In addition to that, a foam target, which is a practically six inches thicker foam and allows me to really execute whatever technique I am practicing on with my full amount of power without injuring my opponent too much.
Again, this is solely used for training and we would not use this in a bout scenario. So again, this kick really displaces my opponent or knocks him away from me or down. As I am doing that, I am already thinking of a second technique to score on him with. So, I am not going to execute this second technique, which you are going to see its intent in this example. That is the second kick, could have come from my left foot, could have come from my right foot; but again, I am pushing him off of his center and thinking of his head as the target area. So that is the Cut Kick. Next kick coming up is the Back Kick.
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