How To Improve Your Kicking Speed For Karate & Taekwondo

Improving your kicking speed is one of the most desired attributes for karate, taekwondo, and striking arts in general. This is because you are able to hit your opponent faster and they are much less likely to be able to block or catch your kicks.

In all honestly, some of kicking fast is down to genetics. I am not a scientist, but it’s quite clear that some people can naturally kick faster than others. This can often be seen when a group of friends joins a gym and does martial arts for the first time. Often there will be one member of the group who is clearly better than the others, even though they all have no experience.

It should be noted that speed isn’t everything. Ideally, you would like form, power, and speed, but not everyone can have all 3. Some people will have different muscle types than others, whereas one person might have been born with the ideal body for taekwondo. If we think of Mike Tyson as an example in boxing. Tyson was quite a bit shorter than almost everybody in his weight division, but he was blessed with natural power and natural speed. He obviously had put a lot of work into his technique, but already had power and speed.

When training to get faster kicks, you must always remember never to give up your technique, just so something becomes quicker. You will reach your goal faster, but if you lose power and technique as a result. It simply is not worth it in the long run.

Drill Properly & Often

One of the main things you can do to increase your kicking speed is by drilling the techniques properly. The human brain cannot just do any task as fast as it wants, it can however learn a task and increase the speed over time. This can be viewed in a non-martial arts arena such as typing. Maybe the first time you sat down at a keyboard you didn’t know where the keys were and had to look for everything. Over time your brain began to remember where the keys were until you could type without looking. At this point, you can try and speed up to go as fast as you possibly can.

Kicking is fairly similar to this. You wouldn’t want to just start throwing roundhouse kicks randomly with no flexibility or knowledge of how to start and finish the technique. Not only could this get you injured, but it may also slow you down in the long run since you will have to completely relearn the entire technique from scratch.

Lastly, you want to drill things as often as you can. Practice really makes permanence. If you really want to kick faster, you’re going to have to put in a lot of work. This may mean you have to train 2 or 3 times as much as you already were if you were only putting in one or two sessions per week. Success will come to those who desire and earn it. You won’t get faster kicks by sitting around the house!

Conditioning Drills For Explosiveness

Box Jumps

Box jumping is pretty much made for explosive power in the legs, so it is fantastic for making your kicks faster. It is important that you practice on a small box, to begin with and maintain proper form. Whilst you may think that jumping up and down seems like quite an easy task (which it is). Your knee is a very fragile joint, so you don’t want to make any mistakes that will impact your ligaments either now, or later in life.

Your fast-twitch fibers in your leg muscles will be prioritized when performing an exercise like this. It may be that the gains are only seen in your kick speed months after you have trained box jumps. However, they will be there.

Hip Switches

Hip switching is a fundamental part of karate and especially taekwondo. You simply can’t train either martial art without this technique. By practicing hip switch drills, you are readying your mind and body to perform an explosive kick from either side.

Once you’re very comfortable with switching stances from left to right, it may be an idea to put something a few inches off the floor – this is for your front foot to land on. The idea behind this is that it can be good practice to keep your front leg slightly off the floor. This narrows the distance between your leg and your target. So even if your kick was the same speed as it had always been, it would still seem faster since it would reach the target in a shorter amount of time.

It is important to practice a variety of kicks from switching since you want to be ready to fire as soon as you have planted your back leg on the ground.

Various Kick Drills

There are many different drills you can do to make your kicks faster. However, these are probably best discussed with your coach. Stephen “wonderboy” Thompson is known for his lightning fast kicks. In the video below Stephen and his father share the knowledge of how to make your kicks faster.

They tell us about how not to punch or kick “through” a target and instead look to snap it straight back. This will not only make your kicks faster but will reset your defensive stance so you are ready to either block or kick again.

Remember To Always Add In Lateral Movement

The entire point of getting faster kicks (for most people) is so that they can become more effective in sparring or competition matches. It is very rare that someone just wants to simply hit a bag quickly.

Whilst kicking a bag repeatedly can and will help you improve your speed (when trained correctly), it does not simply translate directly to sparring.

Sparring is very dynamic and unpredictable in comparison with hitting a heavy bag. Your opponent is moving around a lot and also trying to punch or kick you. This really changes many things since you’re not standing still trying to kick as fast as you possibly can. Therefore it’s not sensible to train 100% of the time standing still whilst kicking fast.

To add reality to the situation, you must practice kicking whilst moving around, especially laterally. Your opponent is going to be making a lot of movements, so this mimics the situation you will find yourself in. Your body will naturally adjust to the movements and you will be able to kick a lot faster than you would before training like this.

It may feel and look weird to begin with, but this is much more suited to what a real sparring match looks like.

Weighted Legs

At the very least, wearing ankle weights will strengthen and condition your legs. When wearing the weights your legs will feel slow and lethargic. However, when taking them off you will feel like you are walking in space!

There is a lot of debate about whether you should practice kicks with ankle weights since it can put a lot of unnecessary pressure on your knees. If you are young, you certainly shouldn’t consider wearing ankle weights for anything other than walking around or doing some simple leg lifts. The knee is the most complicated joint in the body, so you certainly don’t want to blow it out in your teenage years or early 20’s.

Weights will help you, but should certainly only be used under professional instruction for your own safety.

Record A Timed Video Of Yourself

Thankfully in modern-day we have a lot of access to technology that previous generations never had. We are able to take advantage of these benefits by recording our own techniques.

It may sound strange, but by recording yourself, you can actually improve your kicking speed. By putting a video in slow-motion you are able to analyze your own technique, or at least upload it to the internet for others to critique.

There are quite a few ways to change certain kicks to make them faster which involve lifting the knee before twisting, not bringing your foot quite as high, and a few other things.

So if for example, you think you have a good roundhouse kick. You may want to consider adding another fast version of this kick. If you are to subtly change the technique of the kick, you may have a fast version and a powerful version. Both will be a roundhouse kick, but they will be minor differences in the execution which can make one a lot faster than the other. In full speed, you probably won’t be able to notice, but when slowed down the differences will become obvious.

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