The mid kicks

The mid kicks come from the same two-phone take as the low kicks, Muay Thai 03, take_01, filmed in the gym on 25 October after the one-phone attempt failed. The right mid kick is 20.60–22.30 s. The left one is a switch kick, and I threw two of them at different heights (24.80–26.85 s and 26.80–28.87 s, the second about 10 cm higher). My call was to keep every kick a technique of its own, with no blending between them, except here: the left mid’s reference mixes my two by the height it is aimed at.

Both trained on 26 October alongside the low kicks, four teachers in parallel on rented GPUs, each cloned from distill4 (work log). midkickR1-223.5M hits 30 of 30 in the air at 5.9–7.5 m/s, but 0 of 30 at the bag, 6.5–12 cm off at 3.3–4.6 m/s. midkickL1-228.9M hits 29 of 30 in the air, and at the bag it stops 26–35 cm short: it kicks the air, not the bag. Its training miss was about 27 cm too. Both turn their hips 42–65° into the kick and come back square, with no falls and no extra steps after it.

On the videos I saw the same two problems as in the low kicks: the green dot outside the bag, and the body bending left and right after the kick. The second round, midkickR2 and midkickL2, hangs the bag with its centre on the target and pays for not bending sideways. midkickR2-221.9M hits 27 of 30 at the bag, where the first round hit none, and bends sideways 8–11° after the kick, about half as much; but in the air it hits 23 of 30, turning its hips 115–127°, twice the first round’s turn. midkickL2-275.4M reaches the bag now, but lands there only at the high aim, 5 of 30, and hits 18 of 30 in the air. I kept both on the videos on 28 October: “Looks good, please mark it keep”. Neither is in the student yet. The first two mid-kick teachers are also where the high kicks started from.

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”.