Kick

In combat sports and hand-to-hand combat, a kick is a physical strike using the foot, leg, or knee (the latter is also known as a knee strike). This type of attack is used frequently, especially in stand-up fighting. Kicks play a significant role in many forms of martial arts, such as Taekwondo, Karate, Pankration, Kung fu, Vovinam, Kickboxing, Muay Thai, Capoeira, Silat, and Kalarippayattu.

History
Further information: Asian martial arts (origins) The English verb to kick appears only in the late 14th century, apparently as a loan from Old Norse, originally in the sense of a hooved animal delivering strikes with his hind legs; the oldest use is Biblical, in the metaphor of an ox kicking against the pricks.

The act of kicking in general is a universal form of human aggression. The same movement is also used in non-offensive contexts, e.g. a kick to propel an object such as a ball, or a kicking movement without touching anything, e.g. as a dance move.

Kicks as a form of attack are more typically directed against helpless or downed targets, because using a kick in a combat situation bears the significant disadvantage of losing stability of one's stance, as delivering a kick obviously requires lifting at least one foot off the ground.

Thus, any combat system involving kicks needs to take this into account, either by adapting the rules of combat, such as limiting the contest to stand-up fighting, reducing the penalty resulting from a failed attempt at delivering a kick, or an emphasis on training very efficient and technically perfected forms of kicks. The more elaborate kicks used in martial arts, especially high kicks aiming above the waist or to the head have long been a distinguishing feature of Asian martial arts. This feature was introduced in the west in the 19th century with early hybrid martial arts inspired by Asian styles such as Bartitsu and Savate. Practice of high kicks became more universal in the second half of the 20th century with the more widespread development of hybrid styles such as kickboxing and eventually mixed martial arts.

The history of the high kick in Asian martial arts is difficult to trace. It appears to be prevalent in all traditional forms of Indochinese kickboxing, but these cannot be traced with any technical detail to pre-modern times. For example, Muay Boran or "ancient boxing" in Thailand was developed under Rama V (r. 1868-1910). While it is known that earlier forms of "boxing" existed during the Ayutthaya Kingdom, it is difficult if not impossible to recover any detail regarding the techniques these involved. Some stances that look like low kicks, but not high kicks, are visible in the Shaolin temple frescoes, dated to the 17th century.[citation needed] The Mahabharata (4.13), an Indian epic compiled at some point before the 5th century AD, describes an unarmed hand-to-hand battle, including the sentence "and they gave each other violent kicks" (without providing any further detail).