Let’s start with an example.
Unless it’s kyokushin, most karate styles are point sparring. They don’t throw kicks below the belt.
Now if someone is scoring a point, what’s the harm in scoring with a low kick?
Jesse Enkamp suspects that it’s because Savate was practiced in a ruleset similar to old school point sparring, which meant stopping the fight and scoring a point when a blow hits hard enough to stagger, beyond a touch. But no strikes below the belt because of fencing.
But why would they model off of a French striking system? I think there is more to it.
Frankly I think it’s because Karate styles originally leaned the knee into the kick, whether it’s a round kick or an oblique kick. It’s safety for both competitors, though I believe safety for the kicker is the main reason why low kicks were not allowed in the kumite matches in Japan. If one studies the Kata(The library) of most karate styles, both those with long stances like shotokan, or narrower ones like in Okinawa all sink into the knees into the direction of the kick. I first learned to lean my knee in the direction of a kick in Kyokushin, but I realize now my Uechi-Ryu teacher was also teaching this to me, albeit indirectly. It’s not perfect, if kicks are mostly aimed at the thigh, even leaning the knee into it can’t stop accumulating damage. Yet as Robert Whittaker and Stephen Thompson have shown, it can certainly raise the threshold of what damage an upper leg can take before footwork starts to slow down. This is why karate based fighters in MMA never seem to check kicks, yet often seem like they arn’t really stopped by low kicks. It’s not because their opponents can’t generate power, it’s because this is the karate version of a check.
Yet if this is true, why were karateka and early 1980s style kickboxers so open to the low kick?
The weakness of Karate based striking and kickboxing to low kicks was revealed when Rick Rufus fought a Nak Muay. If you have been following this blog post, you probably can suspect how Rick Rufus lost.
Rick Rufus had better footwork. He put more pressure on. Landed more shots. Yet he lost, because he got kicked in the leg so much that he could not stand.
If karate dealt with low kicks by leaning into them, why didn’t it work?
The simple answer is this: If your constantly doing point sparring or hard kickboxing without low kicks, why would someone even learn about a defense to them? At least one that is effective, as there wasn’t any consistent use of a solid low kick in those circles. It wasn’t a priority.
Rick Rufus despite being so good, had never trained under a circumstance where this would be used against him, because it was assumed it wouldn’t work nearly as well because of the lean. So no one really preacticed sitting in stance and moving the knee into the round kick.
Now Rufus could have still easily lost if he knew how to do that. The Muay Thai round kicks that go from top down can lower the cost against the kicker, and thus still requires the karateka learning to check instead of leaning the knee. Yet I do believe Rufus at the very least would have fought longer if he knew this. As I said above, it increase the threshold of how many kicks a leg can take before it gives out.
There has been a rivival of this technique thanks to modern MMA. The use of calf kicks to counter the punishment of a kick check meant that fighters had to figure out other ways to defend the kick, which is for fighters never exposed to karate use a karate based defense against low kicks.
Justin Gaethje started off with wrestling, then some kickboxing. He himself delivers amazing leg kicks, both to the thigh and the calf. But he also talks about how he himself defends them. Look at what he does. And of course the same defense is shown by Machida, a karateka. Others do leg take aways or modified checks. But the integration of the knee lean is obvious by many coaches in this video.
https://youtu.be/A_dPBjnK6gk
Thanks to video evidence and the general free ruleset of MMA, I don’t think this tactic will ever disappear like it did for karate.
The karate world largely did not do it because they never had to. In MMA and modern Dutch kickboxing, they don’t have the luxury of forgetting.
Because that is what happened to Karate and early American kickboxing.
What's the deal with Adeel? 