High Kicks: Cool Story Bro

It is an impressive act of skill for an individual martial artist to get a KO by landing a kick on his opponent's head - it takes flexibility, diligent training, some body strength and a certain amount of natural talent.

But it is NOT an accomplishment for a martial art to teach people to KO someone by kicking them in the head.

KOs happen by rattling someones brain - imaging the skull is the rattle and the brain is the thing inside the rattle that makes the noise when you shake the rattle. The way you shake the human skull like that is to deliver a strike with enough speed and weight to make the skull travel faster than the brain can follow, smacking the brain into the inside of the skull - that's your basic KO.

Look at where a punch goes from the time it begins until the time the punch connects. Typically it goes from the puncher's jaw to the arm being fully extended, in the time it takes to twist the hips into the punch. That distance is under 3 feet.

Now look at how far a foot, ankle or lower shin travels before it connects with the head, typically over 4 feet. It is delivered with a twist of the body that takes almost the same amount of time as a punch, so that it must be moving faster than a punch would be at the point of impact. Then there is the issue of the body weight, most methods of kicking high project the body behind the kick even more so than in a punch, but with the rare kicks that just use the weight of the leg, that's still a significant amount of human bone and meat behind that strike to the head.

In other words, almost any conceivable high kick can KO someone. The weakest kick is a front snap kick, and now there have been many documented KO's from front snap kicks to the face:

Now while most of those weren't exactly a lead leg teep, almost anything you do to get your foot up high and fast enough to connect with the head is going to get KO force going behind that kick. Almost any high kick from almost anyone is a potential KO threat.

There are more ways to kick the head from martial arts from all over the world than I care to mention. I am equally unimpressed by all of them. I am impressed by fighters who can pull them off, but I give the individual martial arts very little credit for their high kick techniques being in some way more special or effective than the others. A high kick is almost always a threat, no matter what spin you put on it.