Surprisingly Simple Set Up For The Head Kick With Marlon Moraes
The ability to Throw kicks is an essential skill to develop as a striker, the reason being, most of the power the human body can generate comes from the legs.
What makes a fighter dangerous is that he can finish the fight at any moment, and using kicks is a great way to throw powerful strikes at our opponent that can even break through the most rigid defenses.
The most common problem trainees face early on is landing their kicks; when we throw kicks, we might produce more power, but it is still slower than punches and easier to anticipate and react to with a counter or any other defensive maneuver.
Another common problem we face is using the hands and legs together; usually, fighters use kicks and punches separately, but we will have a hard time setting up our kicks without punches.
The primary solution for using our kicks effectively is the setups we use; without the setup, a kick is just there to draw reactions; we cannot land a finishing blow when our opponent is in his neutral position.
To create a setup, we must learn how to use our hands and legs together complementing each other; for example, I can throw punches to raise the opponent guard and then land a middle kick or front kick at the opening created on his body.
Who Is Marlon Moraes
Marlon Moraes is a Brazilian MMA fighter competing for the Ufc at the bantamweight division; Marlon fought for the bantamweight title and earned wins against legends of the sport like Jose Aldo. Marlon grew in his native Brazil, where he started learning Muay Thai at the age of 7 and won 2 national championships before transitioning to MMA.
In this video, Marlon Moraes shows us how to land a clean head kick, drawing defensive reactions from our opponent.
Head Kick Set Up Against Parrying Opponent
Marlon starts the video by sharing with us how much he loves knockouts and that a good way to score ko’s are the head kicks, where we can generate a lot of force directly to the skull, rattling the brain and sending our opponent to sleep.
The first thing we look to do when we throw the head kicks is to get the opponent’s hands out of the way; this way, we can get a direct path to our target without anything blocking us.
An excellent way to draw the hands away from the face is by throwing straight punches to draw a parry reaction. When we face boxers and kickboxers, this is almost their immediate reaction which we can use to land our kicks.
A classic example shown in the video is the 1-2-head kick, where we throw a jab-cross drawing a parry reaction from our opponent to follow up with the head kick behind his guard.
It is essential to understand that we cannot separate the movements if we want to land our kick; we must throw our kick at the same time our cross is parried; this creates a window where we can penetrate our opponent’s defenses without him being able to react.
Remember that once our opponent has parried the punch, his hand is far from his face, and now there is nothing there to block our kick, he has only one hand to defend each side of his face, and once it’s sent away from the guard there is no coming back.
To finish, let’s simplify the steps we have:
- throw a 1-2 (jab-cross)
- draw opponent parry reaction
- throw the head kick simultaneously behind our cross
Learn More From Marlon Moraes
Suppose you like this simple way to land the head kick effectively, you can find much more techniques showing how to land your kicks successfully at - “The Savage Switch Kick By Marlon Moraes” available exclusively on Dynamic Striking.