When my friend Ed, a Muay Thai instructor, was making an instructional video, he demonstrated the various kicks on his student Ben.
When demo-ing the dte to the inner knee - the vastus medialus, also known as the "teardrop" due to it's shape - the kick went in harder than intended and Ben stumbled off camera in agony.
When the vid was cut, Ben, being a good sport, agreed that the scene could remain intact.
This was a great example of a move that has so much effective power at the short, sharp range, that a slightly too hard application against a conditioned Thai fighter had a devastating effect. How much more effective would it be against an untrained and unconditioned attacker, applied by you with real power, wearing hard shoes - or even steel caps?
A few weeks later on the Door, I had an escalating situation that needed a violent solution.
Normally I use the trusty right cross KO once I've lined them up from the fence during the verbal stage. But from time to time I like to field test new moves. I've done this with the dte, powerslap, shuto, and toho amongst others.
It's how we know these moves work in real situations - they have been field tested.
On is occassion I opted to use Ed's inner thigh kick, planting my steel cap right on his vastus.
My opponent stumbled backwards and sat down on the pavement, all thoughts of how he was going to "knock out the bouncer" gone from his mind.
When reviewing the CCTV footage of the incident (as I always do) it was pretty much a carbon copy of the Ed-Ben kick in the dojo tape, with a slightly different angle.
I took the club tape to the dojo Monday to show Ed, Ben and the rest of our group this great example of a Traditional MA technique, in this case from Muay Thai, effective in the ring, and effective on the street.
This move is still done at STMA and is now known as The Ben Kick.
