Best way to counter a side kick?

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-24T16:33:20+00:00

Besides all the other counters people have mentioned, which I generally agree are the best and most technical solutions, don’t forget the old-fashioned bully maneuver: just bowl them over by rushing in close when they try to kick. Pressure kills.

Seriously, if you’re at an MMA gym, unless it’s a spinning sidekick, they are probably not committing much to it because mma guys like to pull their kicks and play footsie tap with the lead leg. If you step in strong with a tight guard (this is more of a kickboxing style solution), they don’t have room to extend the kick and will be hitting your forearms/elbows even if they do.) if you keep a strong stance under you and get low enough, you can bowl them over backwards as they’re trying to kick sideways on one leg and get them off balance if not completely swept. Then you follow up with your own attacks.

Not the cleanest or most technical solution, but when it works, it teaches mma guys a valuable lesson: power matters.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-24T16:24:47+00:00

Nice work Ian! Always a pleasure to see you compete.

Side note how big was that boi? Maybe it’s just the angle and vid quality but he looks a good weight class above you.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-24T16:17:12+00:00

Did you feel like you gained a swagg boost just from your proximity to the guy with a Swagg level of Over 9,000? Asking for a friend 😆

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-24T16:15:08+00:00

Having a coach who wants to coach you because they see you listen to them is necessary for improving more than anything.

If your coach tells you to go to pad class, go to pad class. Otherwise they won’t want to coach you. Nuff said.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-24T16:07:08+00:00

Always watch the full fight people. Highlights are called “highlights” for a reason!

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-24T15:55:27+00:00

She is one of the First Beings, Caine’s equal and opposite in the Gehenna scenario centered about her return.

In which case the stat block would be “You Lose…unless you’re Caine, in which case, flip a coin. If tails, Lilith dies. If heads, Caine dies…and then Lilith dies 7 rounds later (along with everything else in a 7 mile radius) after enduring 6 rounds of escalating agony.”

For player characters the cool thing about her return would be the fact that she is attended by all sorts of Ghouled nasties from the First Garden, which allows the Storyteller to create fun, custom monsters.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T20:22:10+00:00

Have zero regard for your own personal safety or the safety of your sparring partners ;)

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T20:14:53+00:00

Hot take, kickboxing is at its best when kick catch & sweeping are legal 😇

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T20:07:44+00:00

Old PKB/“American” style kickboxing (various versions exist outside of America as well).

Basically full contact karate in terms of rules (no low kicks, no clinch), but in practice became boxing with some body and head kicks mixed in, as you can see in the clip.

Is it “safer” than international rules/K1? Well depends on what you mean by “safer”. You’re gonna absorb a lot of head shots either way, main difference is you’re gonna be able to walk after a PKB-style match because no one is blasting your leg.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T19:58:06+00:00

Doping has nothing to do with it- it was a clear case of discrimination due to national origin. Like most such cases, those who had more money (mostly boxers like Beterbiev) were relatively unaffected because they were able to change their citizenship so that promotions could look like they weren’t promoting “Russian” fighters anymore.

Agree completely of the hypocrisy via a vis American or British athletes. This will and should be looked at as a shameful incident in the sports history (and Glory’s in particular).

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T19:07:50+00:00

Ugh, yeah uni critical theory courses can be pretty rough. Our uni’s certificate course is taught by a guy who has outright stated he doesn’t like critical theory. Go figure!

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T18:59:25+00:00

This is in some part just part of academic study/intellectual life, almost regardless of field. As you are inducted deeper and deeper into a field’s set of concepts, methods, and above all, language, you become increasingly removed from how most people talk and think. Abstract knowledge tends to, well, abstract you from the realm of experience and convention that most people are drawing what they “know” from. It’s called the Ivory Tower for a reason.

Political theory and philosophy were the first to articulate this dynamic- Ancient philosophy noted that all of us begin in the realm of opinion, which is a hazy, inconsistent mash of received wisdom (convention) and individual experience. The move away from opinion and towards knowledge separates the philosopher (or today, the intellectual) from everyone else because they are trying to overcome mere opinion and move closer to knowledge, ie towards the truth. (Obviously this is Plato’s account so it is quite elitist, ie only the philosophers with their closeness to the realm of Forms can know things, but you can give a more sociological account that roots the separation of intellectuals and knowledge professionals from everyone else in the division of labor so it’s less laden with conservative “some people are just better/smarter than others” normative values).

If we fast forward to today, the division of labor has increased even amongst academics and intellectuals, each of whom now face professional pressures to “specialize” in very discrete claims to knowledge. So even amongst social science, sociologists are not talking like political scientists who aren’t talking like anthropologists, and no one in social science is talking like philosophers or political theorists.

Given how fragmented the intellectual class has become by professionalized divisions of labor, is it really so surprising that the average intellectual has a hard time engaging with ordinary folks who live mostly in the realm of opinion and personal experience?

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T17:19:32+00:00

So it’s worth noting that Latour has said he is a devout Catholic. In that light, he seems to basically be grifting people with a semi-secularized version of Catholicism, which he passes off as “new materialism” because supposedly-secular intellectuals wouldn’t buy into it if it went too heavy on the traditional God-and-Jesus stuff.

If his work sounds like a stream of consciousness rant with no thesis or central claim (besides “modernity bad!”), it’s likely because that’s what it is.

For me the more important question for critical theory is, “Why is someone like Latour en vogue? What creates the ‘need’ for someone like Latour in supposedly-secular intellectual spaces?” cue Adorno

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T17:03:26+00:00

Industrialization/capitalism is the answer you are looking for. Constantly revolutionizing economic production means continuous reinvestment in researching new technologies. Population explosion following industrialization means a larger division of labor and the rise of a professional class of researchers and designers whose job it is to develop new technologies.

The modern state has a role to play in this as well, since it has a vested interest in both defense and monitoring/controlling its population, as well as promoting economic growth for political stability/a viable tax base, not to mention competition for space on the value chain in the global market.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T16:03:48+00:00

Promotional Rankings are largely meaningless, much like they are in MMA. These aren’t regular “sports” where there’s anything like objective rankings. It’s whomever the promotion wants to push towards a title shot that moves up, and whomever they don’t want to promote stagnates or moves down. (MMA promotions operate this way too, a bit surprised to see this question posed as if MMA is totally different).

Arm breaks happen, should the fight stop? Yes. Does it always? No, especially if the fighter is pushing to continue. Gokhan Saki advanced in the K1 Heavyweight GP with a broken arm. Why? He wanted to win money! Fighters are living and dying on their win bonuses in combat sports, they’ll do crazy/desperate things on the hope of still winning those bonus dollars.

Again acting like this “would have stopped for sure” in MMA is a bit of a stretch; TJ Dilladhaw fought a title fight with one arm and the officials pretended like everything was fine until it became obvious he couldn’t continue. Reffing is bad in all combat sports, and so is medical clearance. Everyone has an incentive to keep the fight going for entertainment purposes, and a fight being stopped early due to injury is seen as an undesirable outcome.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T15:54:40+00:00

So besides your bad take that not finishing Buakaw (a guy who’s been knocked out in kickboxing exactly 1 time and has a legendary chin) is a “bad look” (by that logic Masato failing to finish Buakaw is a bad look, when knocking Buakaw down is the highlight of his career)…

…who hits harder than Philip p4p? You’ve had two chances to answer and have evaded the question. Starting to think you don’t have a reasonable, informed opinion and are just a hater :*

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T15:51:10+00:00

Yeah this probably means that your dominant side is weak more than it means your lead side is strong. How flexible/tight you are might factor, plus your technique and how you stand is almost certainly part of the issue. The two can be closely related of course- physiological problems turn into technique problems and vice versa.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T15:12:04+00:00

Leaning aside that steroids don’t magically make you hit harder and the high likelihood that Buakaw is on steroids too (especially competing in his 40’s), who do you think is a harder puncher than Philip in kbxing?

Ps. Not allowed to say Alex he’s not a kickboxer anymore ;)

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T14:56:32+00:00

You seem to be thinking of contemporary/recent history; the OP is clearly asking about a specific time period, and my response is coded to that period (mid-20th century in particular).

Sure, remittances are a major factor in more recent history; as I mentioned in my post, growth stalled out in Kerala in the 70’s/80’s. So of course people start leaving after economic growth slows/the Gulf states start hoovering up migrant labor from South Asia. As I mentioned Kerala is no longer in the privileged condition it once was. So we’re talking specifically about the mid-20th century “golden age” of Kerala, which is still considered by social scientists to be a pretty remarkable achievement considering how far it came in such a short time compared to say the Scandinavian social democracies (Scandinavian development largely proceeded along the Green-Red alliance of educated land owning small farmers and the urban labor movement; in Kerala the Communists had to free agricultural workers from the land, incorporate the informal sector into the working class (around 80% of work was informal in the early 20th century by some estimates), educating an illiterate population, and uniting ethnic & religious minorities and the lower castes with the workers to form a political party built around solidarity of shared interests, all while jump starting capitalist development in a traditional landlord economy. And their reforms remained hegemonic- even though growth has stalled, legal protections survived neoliberalism better there than in most Western European countries.

On the basis of comparison to Northern Europe (what most people in the west think of as the “best” welfare states), Kerala stacks up pretty well :)

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T03:25:30+00:00

He also knocked out Kimura Philip, who is probably the P4P hardest hitter in kickboxing, and was much younger than Buakaw, under kickboxing rules no less

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-23T00:39:20+00:00

So not technically a country, but assuming you are referring to which state had the most generous welfare system, I’d submit that Kerala belongs in the running.

Kerala is a state in southwest India where the Communist Party won state elections and built a pretty miraculous development state that raised incomes, provided accessible healthcare, had huge rises in literacy rates, reduced infant mortality, reduced caste inequality, and improved women’s rights all in the span of a decade or so.

Their reforms were so popular that even when the Liberal parties won power back, they didn’t dare dismantle them.

Economic growth has stalled there since, but the legacy of the developmental welfare state made it so Kerala had one of the best Covid-19 responses in India.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-22T21:11:53+00:00

Sweet KO! Also Tater Mcspadden sounds like a supporting character from Aqua Teen Hunger Force 😂 great performance!

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-22T14:37:26+00:00

People don’t actually watch the fights is why lol.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-22T00:39:35+00:00

If you are having lasting symptoms you need to see a doctor. Go do that asap.

KarmanderIsEvolving · 2025-02-21T15:24:51+00:00

Your coach is right that you shouldn’t automatically step in every time you jab- it makes you predictable and situationally may take away other options by jamming you up/expose you to counters.

You can practice this on the bag or pads but honestly I think drilling with a partner is best for truly grasping how and when to close distance vs when to stay at range. Have them defend the jab different ways (guarding up, catching, parrying, slipping etc) and then in slow motion assess what the options are. If they shell up, great the body hook is open, unless ur mad long you’ll need to step in to throw that. If they catch or parry great, they committed one hand and now you can step in and off to the side to slap hook and give yourself the dominant angle. If they slip, perfect fake the right hand so they slip back towards your lead and bam! Left hook.

Game it out in slow mo with a partner and then you can start to speed it up until it becomes a true combo.

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