Punish Their Punches With Karim Ghajji
A good way to get your opponent to stop punching you is by chopping out their legs whenever they punch. This does a few things to stop your opponent from getting their punches in. First, it will likely cause your opponent to take a longer distance from you, as kicks are longer weapons than punches. This means that your opponent will have a harder time getting in range to land their punches due to all that extra distance that they have to cover.
They will also be more hesitant to punch as to effectively land punches, you need to step into range and that step can be a trigger for someone to the leg. Stepping in and punching will also make the lead leg of the person punching very heavy, thus making it harder to dodge or block any incoming leg kicks.
Landing leg kicks consistently will also really damage the leg of an opponent, shutting down their movement and making it hard to put weight on the lead leg, thus making it hard to move forward with punches and make them hard. This means that your opponent won’t have the footwork to get into range to land punches, or it will be dramatically diminished and slowed to the point where you will be able to easily see it coming. Even if your opponent’s punches managed to reach you, they won’t have the same pop on them that they would have if their leg wasn’t dead and they could put more weight on it without some excruciating pain.
These reasons and the ability to just score some points on your opponent is why it’s important to learn how to throw kicks as a counter to damage your opponent’s leg, get some points on the board and to have a pretty reasonable guarantee that the kick will land without getting blocked or caught.
In this video, former Glory Kickboxer Karim Ghajji shows a low kick counter to a standard boxing combination. This combination is done with Ghajji in southpaw, making this an open stance scenario where both fighters have their chests facing in the same direction.
From his southpaw stance, Ghajji waits for his opponent to throw a standard one-two combination. Ghajji blocks his opponent’s jab with what is now his lead right hand and then slips to the outside of their straight right. From this position Ghajji is loaded up to fire a rear low kick to his opponents rear leg.
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This will damage your opponent a lot, as while your opponent might be used to getting kicked on the outside of their lead leg, they are almost certainly not as conditioned on their back leg.
This technique can also be used if you are an orthdox fighter fighting a southpaw fighter but if you don’t want to switch and you are fighting another fighter in the same stance ,you can still make this technique work.
Instead of blocking the initial jab that your opponent throws, you can instead slip to the outside of that and throw the leg kick immediately after. This is likely to cut off their follow up right hand and make them lose balance, but still be careful after throwing the kick as they might still be coming with the right. If you still want to slip the rear cross, you can do that in a closed stance situation and then chop at your opponent's rear leg with your lead leg using some clever footwork. Keep in mind that if you do that version of the technique that you will need to exit immediately after landing the kick as it puts you in very close proximity to your opponent.
If you want to learn more striking tips and drills like this check out our other video tutorials by Karim Ghajji available now!