Notorious by Jack Slack

Author:Jack Slack [Jack Slack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

THE SWEET SCIENCE

AN ASIDE ON FRONT KICKS

Many onlookers were surprised by how quickly and easily Mendes seemed to tire. In the coming months, the notion that Chad had ‘come straight off the couch’ did the rounds. Certainly it is unreasonable to expect that a fighter with a few weeks of preparation would be in better shape than one at the peak of his training, but equally it is unusual for a fighter of Mendes’s level, training with any degree of regularity, to tire within five minutes of a fight. The key to Mendes’s fade-off was McGregor’s effective body work. The spinning back kick proved effective on occasion but the front snap kick was the difference maker.

The front snap kick is a day-one technique in traditional martial arts. Little boys and girls in white pyjamas practise them in dojos and dojangs across the world, but you scarcely saw them in professional combat sports until very recently. More common was the Muay Thai-style front kick: this is a pushing or thrusting motion. In the Thai-style front kick, the knee is raised high – then the kick is thrust in. It can be a damaging strike, but it has a tendency to be slow. More often in kickboxing and Muay Thai, you will see top-quality defensive fighters such as Saenchai and Giorgio Petrosyan bring their leg up quickly and not fully coiled, with the intention of simply prodding the opponent with the ball of their foot. It is a distance preserver and a means by which the fighter can knock his opponent off balance when they attempt a more powerful round kick.

In the traditional front snap kick, the heel is pulled tight to the buttocks and the leg is coiled well below the line of the target, then the knee is raised and the kick swings in behind it in one motion. This ‘chambering’ of the kick high or low is the main difference between a pushing or snapping kick.

The value of the snap kick is that it is a fast, damaging action, like the round kick, but it occupies the straight line between the fighter and his opponent. Just as the jab is to the looping right hand, the straight line strike is longer and has a clearer path to the target. If the attacking fighter uses distance correctly, he can often perform much of the initial motion of the kick in what in karate is called the ‘blind angle’. This is the area below an opponent’s vision when he is focusing on the eyes or upper chest of his opponent. A textbook example of this would be the first major front-kick knockout in the history of the UFC: Anderson Silva’s title defence against Vitor Belfort. Staring Belfort straight in the face, Silva snapped the kick up from underneath him, through the blind angle, and straight between Belfort’s high forearms – a hindrance to most high kicks. Belfort’s legs stiffened momentarily then collapsed in a controlled demolition as he fell in on himself.

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