How To Use Body Kicks To Counter The Jab With Thiago Alves
One of the first signs we look for in a talented fighter is his ability to counter opponents. When we see a fighter performing a counter, we know that he has an excellent technical understanding of Muay Thai.
The beauty of counter-attacks is that they are offensive and defensive at the same time. To develop good counters, we must learn to anticipate, stay composed, and choose the correct counter for the situation at hand.
Many practitioners find it hard to use the counters they have learned in training when they spar or fight, and why is that? Shouldn’t they be able to apply what they learned and trained for? The problem mostly lies inside their training program. A practitioner is training to counter his partner in a static and obvious situation he is not used to performing in a more live situation.
When we are only working our counters with drills that don’t involve anything other than the anticipated strike, we lose the most critical aspect of the counter; we lose the skill of drawing our opponent. Without programming our opponent to act in a certain way, we will not react fast enough to be consistent with our counters. To become a successful counter puncher, a practitioner must always lay traps for his opponent to fall into, which requires good technical abilities.
In this video, Thiago Alves will teach us how to use a simultaneous counter for the jab with a middle kick.
Who Is Thiago Alves?
Thiago Alves is a former UFC fighter and a striking coach at American Top Team. Thiago was a veteran of the UFC, and he had shared the cage with some of the legends we heard about, like GSP, when he met him in a fight for the welterweight title. Thiago is a bare-knuckle boxer these days, and he continues to live as a martial artist day by day.
Add More Pop To Your Strikes With Thiago Alves! Click Learn More!
Countering The Jab With A Body Kick
Thiago starts the video by explaining that we will learn to counter the jab with the body kick. There are two main ways we can do it:
- Parry the opponent jab and kick his body from the outside where he is now open
- Parry the opponent but this time, as we kick, we push him aside so he cannot grab my leg or try and take me down.
Thiago reminds us that the way we want to kick in Muay Thai and MMA is slightly different; in Muay Thai, we can strike with all of our shin, putting all the power behind it because of the risk of him grabbing my leg taking me down is not there.
But in MMA, Thiago likes to land his kick with the foot or the beginning of his shin because he is not the tallest guy in his division, and he doesn’t want to give his opponent something to grab onto and a chance to take him down.
Remember, we can still land our kick with the shin in MMA, but it is not ideal, and to be effective with the kick and land it consistently, landing with the end of my leg might be a better choice that will also give me more range with my kicks.
So let’s recap how we should counter the jab with the body kick:
- Anticipate the jab coming
- Parry the jab
- Throw my body kick from the outside so he can’t defend it
- *If you are in MMA, you can push with the kick reducing the risk of a grab
Learn More From Thiago Alves
Suppose you liked the technique shown here by Thiago Alves. You would love his complete instructional going over all the different types of effective strikes - “Explosive Striking - The Science Of Landing Strikes With Pop By Thiago Alves” available exclusively on Dynamic Striking.