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Originally Posted by Tenchu
I am basically talking about the basic round kick. TKD literally flicks the foot from the hip and knee where as Muay Thai is more so bashing the shin as if it were a baseball bat.
A Happkido instructor once raised his knee having his leg hang limp below that and told me "Powerful kicks come from here". That is not true. Some do, but many dont. That is just the style of kicking. And it may well be slightly faster than MT, but definatly just that kick is less power.
As for most the other kicks they are as powerful as they can be when done the TKD way.
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Tenchu, remember that TKD as practiced today is a Sport Art, not a Combat Art (Muay Thai is somewhat, also, but it's still nicely rooted in the combative stuff--which is awesome). Most schools teach you to use speed and control your power so that you can score points. One of my favourite kicks, the hook kick, is very sneaky and very fast, but has very little power. It's application is in getting a quick point--or throwing the opponent's focus to somewhere where it shouldn't be ("How did I get hit?") in actual combat.
Don't fool yourself, though. A practitioner of TKD can have just as much power in a kick as you can as a MT professional. I think it was my third belt that I started getting curriculum that focused on power. The first "power" kick that they taught me, oddly enough, was a "Muay Thai Thigh Kick". The only real difference between it and any other kick was the preceding step-out and the target of the kick. This was incorporated into our TKD instruction, though. From learning that one kick and how it works, every kick I know, save a few, I can make really powerful.
I will agree, though, for reasons outlined in the first paragraph, that most kicks in modern TkD are designed to be more quick than powerful. I also agree that back kicks kick ass
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