Tornado kick/360 roundhouse tutorial

Video by kyryllo

1. You kick with your LEAD LEG! and the turning motion is performed with the BACK FORWRAD! Very obvious but there are people who still confuse it.

2. Your kicking leg should be bent, Lead the swinging/suppporting leg as close as possible to the calf of the kicking leg. This initiates the turning motion.

3. Turn around on the ball of your kicking foot untill you clearly see the target again. The looking at the target serves as control if you turned around enough to launch the kick.

4. Jump up from the kicking foot on the supporting foot and perform a round house kick. The supporting foot must be planted at the time when the kick hits the target.

Important notes:
The kick is technicaly simple, though not very easy.

The major aspect of the kick is to transfer the motion force in to the kick, this requires a lot of repetition and adjustments.

Keep your kicking leg bent, it lowers your center of gravity which helps you with the stabilization of the rotating motion and you need a bent leg to actualy jump for launching the kick.

Although it seems that way this is NOT a jumping or flying kick. Try to reduce the time in the air to minimum if you want to bring force into the kick and be sure to stand on your supporting leg when you hit the target. At any split second that you spend in the air you lose force.

If you can't bring the hips into your kick, and hit the target with your knee showing up, you need to turn around much more before you launch the kick. Some people would jump highr to have more time to bring in the hips, it could work but as I said above it costs force.

The swinging leg controls the length of the kick. It should be lead very near to the kicking leg. Leaving it close to the kicking leg within the motion leads to a short kick, poining it towards the target makes the kick long.