As a white belt, you will be regularly practicing four kicks.
  1. Front Kick (Mae Geri)
  2. Round Kick (Mawashi Geri)
  3. Side Kick (Yoko Geri)
  4. Back Kick (Ushiro Geri)
White Belt students predominantly practises their kicks from both short fighting stance (Han Zenkutsu Dachi) and Ready stance (Heiko dachi). All kicks are developed and practised by breaking them down into parts, then practising them slowly before moving up in speed.

Fitness

From a fitness perspective, kicking is an excellent way to gain strength, lose weight, increase endurance and flexibility etc. Using the larger muscles in the legs, and lifting them up to waist height (or higher) means that not only the leg muscles are working, but the bodies core muscles are fully activated.

With modern society’s sedentary lifestyle of sitting behind a desk or on a lounge, modern human’s experience postural problems and have created alarming statistics on back pain.  Working the core muscles, as kicking does, serves to improve posture, speed up weight loss, decrease the chances of back pain and minimise back pain for current sufferers.

 

Self-Defence

A person’s legs are longer, and can deliver much more power, than their arms. This makes kicking highly effective in self-defence. Kicks become even more effective in self-defence when a person is wearing shoes. What’s more, kicking enables a person to maintain distance from their attacker – a distance outside their attackers potential striking or grabbing range.

Its also worth noting that kicks serve to protect a person from attacks on any angle.