Kickboxing is an easy sport to get into, but fairly difficult to learn once you get into the more advanced stages. Those who’re into it just for fitness need not worry much about this, but those who want to learn how to truly defend themselves or want to fight in the ring someday, it’s important to develop a better kickboxing technique.
This involves improving your fight stances, working on your breathing and most important of all, learning proper footwork.
Listed below are basic tips that will help you do just that.
- If you haven’t done it before, try practicing in front of a mirror. Doing so allows you to see how you move so that you can correct your errors. Remember, when practicing your fight stance, your power arm and leg should slightly be behind the foot and hand you lead with. You should also keep your knees bent a bit and your hands up to protect your chin from hits to both sides of your face. Also, your elbows should be close to your body at all times, for added protection.
- Do you know why many amateur fights end quickly? It’s not because they’re not as skilled or as technical. Rather, it’s because the two of them gas out much too early, which usually is a result of the lack of breathing control. In kick boxing, or any other martial art for that matter, you never want to tense up whenever you move. As you kick, punch, evade and defend, tensing up will restrict your movement and slow down your reaction time. So, instead of doing so, you should focus on relaxing and breathing deeply while you move so your muscles are well oxygenated throughout and you’re able to move freely. While this is much easier said than done, learning how to breathe properly will benefit you not only in fights, but also while you train.
- Your footwork dictates how well you move inside the ring and how well you move inside the ring dictates how often you get hit and in worse cases, get knocked out. This means to say that proper footwork is a pretty big deal when it comes to kickboxing. So, how do you practice it? Well, it’s simple, you start by making a more conscious effort to move around. While punching and kicking, make an effort to step forwards, backwards, and to the side. Given time, you’ll slowly turn this into a habit and this will translate into everything you do related to kickboxing, from pad work, to drills, to sparring, kick boxing and of course, in actual combat.
Improving your kickboxing technique won’t come quickly. It will take some time. Scratch that, it will take A LOT of time, not to mention the tremendous effort you have to put in during drills, shadow boxing sessions and sparring just for the results to show inside the ring.
Just stay motivated all throughout and your efforts will pay off in time.
