Specifically, if said kick is delivered with my own arm and hand outstretched in front of me the foot would touch the bottom of the knuckles on the palm. I measured this distance and this is 30" (it would be 36" with hip projection which you say is not necessary). If you read the post you quoted more thoroughly you'd see I already said I could see that working with a walking attacker. That's not close range fighting and certainly not the 12" -18" range Kacey is claiming. That kick delivered at 18" requires a standing split and the attacker closing in at 15mph. Or if we're to use leaning so we can extend our 21" lever (knee to foot) even with knee to chest one would have to lean back 12" to 16" to bring the foot up from chamber. Read my last post and think about the numbers.
This tallies exactly with various experiments I've been trying with these kicks.
In dobok bottoms, I can get my knee, at maximum height (where my quads are up against my upper body) around 5"-6" inches from my chest. From what I've observed of my fellow TKDists, none of them, no matter how many years of training they've done, can get much closer than 4" or so at max height. My lower leg is a bit more than 22" long. That means that at some point, when my lower leg is perpendicular to the line of my body, my kicking leg will be extended 28". If the assailant is any closer than that, my foot will contact him—
at the highest!—at the point on his body corresponding to the height at which my leg is extended. Assuming he's my height, I'm going to be contacting him at a height a little below the shoulder. This is under perfect, even artifical conditions. To kick any height so that I would not be contacting him `on the way up', I would have to lean back at an angle that would leave me unacceptably off balance.
But when people talk about practicality for street defense, they're talking about not two feet and a few inches; they're talking about toe-to-toe or maybe a little more separation. I can't say I've had a lot of such confrontations—that, btw, is why I appeal to the experience of people who
routinely have them, people whose professions require their involvement in serious violence, collectively, several times a week over, say, a 10-year career—but in none of the ones I
have been involved in would anything over 12" have been anything but preemptive striking range. In every case, the fight was initiated from very close up, by a would-be sucker punch, a shoving action, or a grab.
Let me lay out my view on striking ranges.
Long Range: 30" to 44" Kicking to waist level or higher only.
Mid Range: 20" to 32" Most Hand techniques, Kicking from knee to waist level, and wrist grabs.
Close Range: 1" to 19" Collapsed hand techniques, elbows, forearms, knees, kicks to the knees or lower, and grappling.
_Don Flatt
I think Don's estimate of close range is definitely in the ballpark, possibly even a little bit generous; a foot or so is, from my own experience, much closer to the expected range, and people who, however unwillingly, actually engage in street combat with others for a living—
people who know something about streetfighting based on years of doing it on a regular basis for a living—typically give around a foot as the `close range' at which physical attacks start. Unless we're talking about preemptive striking, any kick which extends the leg much beyond a foot/foot and a half is going to contact the attacker's body at that range.
Now factor in relatively constricting street clothes, street shoes, uneven surfaces, undependable areal illumination and all the other factors people who actually do this stuff for a living caution us about, and the reasons they identify high kicks to the head as excessively risky might become apparent. They're not talking about your skill in throwing them into the air or in sparring situations in dojangs; they're talking about what they themselves have
repeatedly experienced as a result of their... career choices. When people talk about `training' these kicks, are they talking about training them, repeadedly in live combat practice which closely simulates an actual streetfight? In realistic scenarios not with opponents, but `designated attackers' whose moves you have no prior idea about and who can do virtually
anything to you, operate in any way, that a violent, untrained assailant will—i.e., stage 4 of Abernethy's `kata-based sparring', as kidswarrior summarized
here? How many people actually train
anything, any tech, this way on a regular basis? So when people say they `train high kicks for SD', how much realistic `SD' actually comes into that training—actually meets that standard of realism? Because, while it may seem obvious, it's probably as well to point out that that training standard is the
minimum standard of training which will actually allow you to ingrain your SD techs for actual use at the next stage of `training'... namely, the extremely nasty, dangerous real thing.
If a professional boxer tells me that punching with
both arms at once is a very bad idea, I'm not going to try to counter that advice by reporting the single occasion when I did that to an opponent and won with it. And if a half a dozen professional boxers tell me the same thing—and no seventh one in the conversation challenged their view—I think anyone who heard me reply that their problem was that they `didn't train for it' and so couldn't make it work(, but that if I, a complete non-boxer, train for it, I
can make it work) would just shake their head at me, and justifiably so. Because these guys box for a living, and I don't. And in the present discussion, the issue is not MA expertise, the issue is practical street combat expertise—whether you fight in real, typically chaotic situation frequently. There are plenty of highly competent MAists who do not engage in violence professionally. I would guess that most of MT's membership, or a good chunk of it, falls into that category. And there are other highly competent MAists who routinely use their MA skills in violent situations on a regular, sometimes daily basis; our LEO members, for example, or people who work as `gatekeepers' in rough surroundings. Some of these people have taken the trouble to lay out in detail exactly why, tactically, high kicks to the head are way more trouble than they're worth, no matter how hard you train them, when you're in what Geoff Thompson calls the pavement arena. These guys train beyond stage 4: they're at stage 5—actual regular, messy, brutal conflict with angry, drunk, drugged-up or just pathological attackers. Opposing what non-professionals report, or believe about the applicability of their art to what people who do this stuff for a living report is, therefore, hardly opposing `experience' to `theory', or even opposing two sets of equally representative experience. It's opposing the experience of people whose `going to work' will involve, on any given day, dangerous attacks by violent individuals with those of us who train, and perhaps teach, MAs as our avocation and `go to work' in offices, classrooms, factories, and all the other places where one
doesn't enounter that kind of violence. If people whose jobs of are the former variety caution you against something involving street defense, it seems to me worth paying very close attention to, just as it is when your doctor, looking at some innocent-seeming mole on your face, tells you you need it biopsied right away. Even if it looks innocent to you, even if you've ignored odd-looking moles in the past that indeed
did turn out to be innocent, just how good an idea is it to ignore what your MD is telling you?
Obviously, no one is saying you
must pay attention to that advice, or the advice of people who have a knowledge of real-time violence very few MAists, as good as they are, possess. If you don't want to believe what these people are saying, or even take the trouble to find out what it is, well, that's up to you.
2 of the arts I train in, Kenpo and Arnis, are both known for their low line kicks. As I said in my first post, during sparring sessions, I've pulled off many high kicks. Keep in mind again, as I said, this was during sparring and while wearing a loose fitting gi. If I get countered or make a mistake, I'm not in any danger, compared to defending myself on the street.
