High Side Kick Training: A Side Kick is common in many of the Martial Arts that you see around the world. What is a Side Kick? It is a kick executed by bending the body laterally with the hip turned slightly over.

The kick is then thrown diagonally across the body towards the target.

When you throw a Side Kick, if you bring the body down and the leg comes up, that is not the issue we are going to address here.

We are going to talk about the condition when you drop your trunk and leg doesn’t come up higher. In this case, most likely, the problem is strength and flexibility of the supporting leg.

What’s the issue? Flexibility or Strength?

You have to decide whether it’s strength or flexibility that is the problem in supporting leg or both. So we are going to use the wall.

Take the leg, bring it up, if you feel like you can bring the leg higher, flexibility is not the problem.

If you can’t bring the leg that high and you feel stress at the shown position, flexibility is the problem.

Now, the strength is another thing. Once you bring the leg up, try to lift it. If you can lift the leg for a few seconds and comfortable enough on the back of the supporting leg, strength is okay.

Preparatory Exercises High Side Kick Training:

Couple of exercises needs to be done before you get into the main exercises.

1.- With one leg straight and straight back, you have to lean forward as far as you can (doesn’t have to be all the way down) and come up. If you can go a little bit lower, that’s great. Do the same with the other leg.

2.- Secondly, what you have to do is stand on one leg and then bend forward with the other leg in line with the body like shown. This is very important exercise for balancing on one leg during Side Kicking and at the same time it works on the strength and flexibility of the back.

High Side Kick Training: Main Exercises:

Now, after mastering the above mentioned techniques, we are going to go into techniques that actually help during Side Kick in terms of supporting leg.

1.- In the first exercise, we work on the balance position like this. This also works on the hip and midsection on that side. Do the same on the other side and maintain it. It is a kind of Single Leg Dead Lift.

2.- After you have figured either the issue is flexibility or strength, the other exercise looks like this. Put your foot on the wall in Side Kick position at the hip level (If you can’t being it to your hip level on the wall, use a small stool at whatever height you can hold it up to.) From here we are going to lower ourselves down stretching the Hamstrings and coming up working on the Hamstrings for full stretch. So, when we come down, we are stretching the Hamstrings and when we are coming up we are strengthening them.

(To get a little bit stronger and a little bit more flexible, obviously the foot needs to travel higher.)

After you do this a few times, if flexibility is the issue, then you can just hold the stretch and come back up.

People that can swing the leg high:

Last thing I am going to demonstrate is for the people that have no problem with dynamic stretch meaning that they can swing the leg high but when they have to kick high, they face problem.

So, what you have to do is place the hand on the floor, bring the leg as high as possible on possible, let go of the floor and try to maintain this position. You can come up a little bit if you like. The point is you have to feel the stretch in the back of the leg.

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