During my last self-directed karate practice, I had an insight regarding the il dan the speed drills. For quite a while I’ve been aware of how the rear left leg swing kick, the one that follows from starting in the right front stance, feels more awkward than the rear right leg swing kick that follows from starting in the left front stance. The former feels more like a “heaving” of the left leg to launch the kick whereas the latter feels more like a “lifting” to deliver a “slap”. Like so many times before, I stopped to spend some time trying to figure out why. Maybe this time I’d get somewhere.
A month or so ago I spent some time trying to figure out why my front-leg swing kick using the left leg felt so different from my right leg. There, too, I was conscious of a “heaving” motion. After some study I realized that when executing a front swing kick with my right leg, the leg was far “lighter”; I was centering more weight on my left leg. The rear-leg swing kick using the left leg during the speed drill didn’t seem to suffer from that same root cause. After spending several minutes examining the differences between the left and right sides I realized that, when starting from the left front stance (the stance leading to the better execution) at the end of the “rear, dodge, rear (inward punch)”, my forward leg was already be pre-pivoted, the toes pointing significantly to the left and even backwards a bit. This has the effect of rotating the leg, which in turn rotates the pelvis. The lower half of the body is already “wound up” like a spring, or the rubber band driving the propeller on a toy balsa airplane. It’s also understood that most of my weight is on this pre-pivoted leg. At that point, the right leg can simply be lifted up and launched as a swing kick, allowing the body to unwind.
Focusing on doing this when starting in a left-front stance dramatically reduced the sensation of heaving the kicking leg. Even so, I noticed that my next limiter might not be so easily removed. There is something different about my left hip joint that causes it to move a little differently, and less smoothly, than the right. There’s even a clicking sound that most often accompanies the motion. It seems unlikely that I can make that go away.