How To Develop a Powerful Roundhouse Kick

A powerful rear leg roundhouse kick is an extremely useful weapon to have in your arsenal. If it hits a target it can finish a fight, and even if it hits a guard, enough of them can become debilitating to your opponent. 

But how is it that some people are able to generate such amazing force with this technique? Let’s go through some of the fundamental mechanics, and give you a few things to work on to see real development in your kick. 

Mobility and Flexibility 

I want to start with mobility and flexibility. Often considered to be basically the same thing, the way to think about it is. Mobility in our joints is what we want and having flexible muscles will help us get that. The reason this is so important is as follows. 

Think of your body like a car engine. A big part of what makes a car engine able to perform is that all the parts move freely through their required range of motion. You will have issues if parts start to touch that shouldn’t and if any friction is introduced to the system. It’s why oils and lubricants are such an essential part of maintaining your engine. 

Now unfortunately we can’t simply squeeze some WD40 on our joints and call it a day. But what we can do, is put regular and intentional focus into our stretching. Getting back to the kick, if you want to be able to generate as much power as possible, you need to be able to move that leg freely through the desired range of motion.

That is, raising the knee, rotating the hip and extending the leg. If you have tightness in any of these areas, it is going to hinder your ability to generate speed and power through the kick. 

Think like a Samurai

No, don’t worry, I’m not going to get all ‘grand master’ on you. But I do want you to think of your leg as a weapon, in this instance, like a katana (samurai sword). With a sword, you do not want to cut ‘into’ your opponent, you want to cut ‘through’ your opponent. 

Relating this back to the roundhouse kick. You don’t want that kick to stop upon reaching the target, you want to power through it. Of course, we still need to snap that kick back, but not until every ounce of force from our body has been sent through it. 

This is mostly a state of mind thing, which will in turn effect your physical mechanics when approaching the kick. Effectively what I’m telling you is to truly put your weight behind it by fully rotating your hips, but samurai swords make everything easier to understand. 

Speed Kills

Finally understand that when it comes to generating power there are only a few variables. One is the mass of the object (your body) this can be changed by gaining weight of course, but with weight gain we also lose speed. The speed that we accelerate our leg with up to the target is the second variable. 

So you can either gain some mass, or you can work on delivering your kick with more speed. Generally a fighters focus isn’t on gaining mass or changing weight class. So I think the most useful thing a fighter can do when trying to produce more power, is train with speed in mind.

When practising the kick. Focus on the shrinking the time between your foot leaving the floor, to it returning to the floor after the kick. 

Repetition is the mother of all skill

Whilst everything I’ve said in this is true to the best of my knowledge. The real secret to developing power in your kick is going to be repetition. 1000’s upon 1000’s of kicks into a heavy bag or strike shield is truly what’s going to turn your leg into a lethal weapon, so go practice!