A lot of people think kicking is mainly about flexibility. Flexibility helps, of course, but it’s not the main issue when moving from one kick to another. The real challenge is this: can the body stay organised while one leg is in the air? For my client, we worked on transitioning from one kick to another without putting his foot down. In taekwondo, this sort of control matters. A student might need to chamber the leg, kick, bring it back, turn the hip, and kick again.

My 66 year-old client embarked on his sixth hour with me. This is a martial arts cross-training personal training course used to improve his movement in taekwondo and to improve his balance for the turning kick. Despite not being involved with Korean martial arts since the 1990s, I am working with a lot of taekwodoins who wish to use other martial arts, such as boxing to improve their overall game. This afternoon, being so close to his grading, I decided to totally work on

In previous sessions, we worked on balance, stance, chambering mechanics and the lead leg turning kick. His lead leg kick is improving, mainly because we have been stripping the movement down and removing unnecessary complications. In this fourth hour, the attention moved more fully to the rear leg turning kick, with the v-step used as a practical set-up.

Crowding changes everything for a taekwondo fighter. Range disappears, kicks get smothered, the opponent’s pressure feels constant, and the clean, linear exits that work well at long distance suddenly become harder to find. That was the central problem in a late afternoon martial arts cross training personal training session with a teenage taekwondo competitor preparing for the British Championships.

Martial artists often seek ways to improve their skills beyond their primary discipline. For a competitive taekwondo athlete, refining balance, agility, and injury prevention is crucial. Recently, a unique training opportunity arose when a mother approached me to help her daughter, an advanced taekwondo competitor, with conditioning and cross-training. The daughter boards at a school far from her main taekwondo dojang and found the local options insufficient for her level. Al