The low kicks

The kicks were the first thing I tried to capture, and the first attempt failed. On 22 October my kicks were filmed on one phone, from the front, and their depth guessed by hand-tuned rules; one view can’t even tell which foot is in front. After four review rounds my verdict was “worse than before”, and I had the code deleted. We agreed to film again with two phones and triangulate.

That was Muay Thai 03, take_01, filmed in the gym on 25 October. The right low kick (4.40–6.10 s) is the rear-leg roundhouse to the thigh, the ankle 0.67 m up at the impact. The left one (9.80–11.65 s) is a switch: the hop, the kick, the switch back. In the switch hop the foot’s inverse kinematics flicked the knee in by about 40° over four frames. I saw it, and the kicking hip now keeps my own angles with a smoothed correction. Each kick is aimed a little up, down, left and right, ±10 cm, but not nearer or farther.

Four kick teachers, both low and both mid, trained in parallel on rented GPUs on 26 October, cloned from distill4 (work log). The right low kick, lowkickR1-223.2M, is the weakest of the four: 6 of 30 in the air, slow, and 0 of 30 at the bag. It reaches but doesn’t snap. The left, lowkickL1-224.6M, hits 30 of 30 in the air at 6.8–7.6 m/s but brakes into the bag: 0 of 30. Neither falls.

On the videos I saw two things wrong. The green dot sat outside the bag, so of course the kick missed the bag. And after the kick the fighter bent its body left and right, where my reference stayed balanced. The second round, lowkickR2 and lowkickL2, hangs the bag with its centre on the target (the dot 17 cm inside the face) and pays for not bending sideways. lowkickL2-227.4M hits 30 of 30 in the air and 30 of 30 at the bag (the first round 0), bending sideways 4–6° after the kick, with no falls. lowkickR2-286.1M is still the weak one: 12 of 30 at the bag, but 0 of 30 in the air, because it stops at the target instead of kicking through it. It no longer bends the wrong way (4–8°, where the first round bent 14–35°). I kept both on the videos on 28 October: “Looks good, please mark it keep”. Neither is in the student yet.

What I think, as a coach

On the aim: “it doesn’t need a huge range”.

On the first teachers’ videos: “the green dot is completely outside the bag so of course it’ll miss the bag … let’s put the green dot completely inside the bag at the appropriate height depending on the kick”. And: “after the kick the fighter loses balance, it bends its body left and right, that should not happen, in the reference it balanced well”.

My notes on the move, from the first attempt: the shin goes forward through the target, the low kick at the opponent’s thigh; the leg rebounds out to the side, folds knee-out with the foot tucked under, and lands at stance width.