Counter The Counter With Liam Harrison
In this video, Multiple time world kickboxing and Muay Thai champion, and current ONE Championship top fighter Liam Harrison shows you how to follow up after a missed kick. Head kicks are great, they can score knockouts, knockdowns, rock your opponent or at the very least make them scared believing that you have the potential to knock them out. However, all that good stuff is only possible if you land it, and that's where the trouble comes in.
Head Kicks are so hard to land for a few reasons, first of them being that they take the longest amount of time to land because the head is the furthest body part from the legs. That long distance means that there is going to be a long amount of travel time, enough time for your opponent to see the kick coming and defend against it. Add that to the other limitations that head kicks tend to have and it becomes easy to see why head kicks are so hard to land, and land effectively on top of that.
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This is where follow through strikes become really important as you are probably going to miss your head kick. The drill that Liam Harrison shows in this video is how to follow up on a missed kick and counter a common counter to a missed high kick.
To demonstrate this, Liam throws a high switch kick and his partner/opponent does a common defense to any high kick, the lean or sway back. This kind of defense is especially popular in Muay Thai and it is common to counter after swaying back with a lead hook. This counter can be devastating, as you are probably spinning into it, adding to its power.
Liam shows us a follow up technique from the high kick that acts as a counter to that counter, this being the spinning elbow. To start the drill off, Liam throws a switch high kick for his partner to dodge and then come back with a lead hook which Liam catches on his glove but it is meant to simulate the counter landing. The second time that Liam throws a high kick but as he lands with the kicking leg he immediately spins into a spinning elbow.
Liam says that this elbow can come straighty around or from a slight upward angle. Liam also talks about the importance of looking at your target before firing off the spinning elbow. THis is an important principle for all spinning attacks, but you need to spot your opponent before throwing the strike, or else it is guaranteed to miss. It’s even better if you spot the exact target that you are aiming for, like Liam says that you should spot your opponent's jaw when throwing the spinning elbow.
This technique has a ton of power, like most spinning attacks. Combine that with the fact that it’s a counter, meaning that the power it has will be increased because your opponent is coming in and not expecting, means that this is almost a guaranteed KO if it lands.
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