Kick
physical strike using the leg, foot or knee
A kick is a physical strike using the leg, in unison usually with an area of the knee or lower using the foot, heel, tibia (shin), ball of the foot, blade of the foot, toes or knee (the latter is also known as a knee strike). This type of attack is used frequently by hooved animals as well as humans in the context of stand-up fighting. Kicks play a significant role in many forms of martial arts, such as capoeira, hapkido, hwarangdo, jeet kune do, kalaripayattu, karate, kickboxing, krav maga, kung fu, wing chun, MMA, Muay Thai, pankration, pradal serey, savate, sikaran, silat, taekwondo, tang soo do, vovinam, wushu and Yaw-Yan. Kicks are a universal act of aggression among humans.
Kicking is also prominent from its use in many sports, especially those called football. The best known of these sports is association football, also known as soccer.
History
The English verb to kick appears in the late 14th century, meaning 'to strike out with the foot', possibly as a loan from the Old Norse kikna, meaning 'bend backwards, sink at the knees'.
Kicks as an act of human aggression have likely existed worldwide since prehistory. However, the earliest documentation of high kicks, aimed above the waist or to the head, comes from East-Asian martial arts. Such kicks were introduced to the west in the 19th century with early hybrid martial arts inspired by East-Asian styles such as Bartitsu and Savate.
The public source identifies “Kick” as physical strike using the leg, foot or knee. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kick, physical and strike.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.