Why There Are So Many Fighters Who Broke Their Own Shin while Kicking Their Opponent’s Leg?

*Warning!! Photos in this article are horrifying for sensitive readers!!*

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Why there are so many broken shin injuries while doing Round Kick / Diagonal Kick in many fighting sport tournaments?

Why there are so many fighters who broke their own shin while kicking their opponent’s leg with Round Kick?

The kickers are often breaking their own shin while kicking their opponent’s leg and ironically their opponents are just fine – no any hurt.

The reason is: Those kickers (who broke their own shin) are smashing their own weak bone wrongly to opponent’s strong body part.

Some instructors are often teaching their students to kicking the opponent’s leg using Round Kick like these:

The fact is: Kicking the opponent’s leg using Round Kick is high risk technique, because our shin bone relative thin and have no muscle to protect it, too fragile if used to hit opponent’s strong leg area.

Those low round kickers (who broke their own shin) are often hitting their opponent’s strong front knee and strong front upper shin instead while their kick got blocked with Leg Block / Shin Check technique (see the photo below, their shin broke while their leg kick got blocked by their opponent).

Even our forearm is far stronger than shin, we can use it to blocking the opponent’s kick because it has strong muscle which cover the forearm bone. Thats why we can block opponent kick with our arm without worry.

Round Kick is only safer for kicking weaker opponent’s areas like ribs or side chin. Lot of fighting sport tournament organizers like Karate, Taekwondo or Kickboxing are also often ban any Round Kick to the leg area. Of course, to avoid broken shin accident case.

One interesting question is: If aiming round kick to opponent’s leg have high risk broke your own shin if it blocked, then why in Karate and Taekwondo tournaments their shin never broken while their round kick got blocked with same Leg Block technique?

In Karate and Taekwondo tournaments, Round Kick is only aimed to body and head. When the shin crashed with the opponent’s Leg Block / Shin Check, the impact on the kicker’s shin is not too hard (sometimes there is no impact, based on my personal experience) because when the opponent lifts their leg / knee highly to blocking high Round Kick, their balance in this position is more unstable and relative shaking while standing on one leg like this (sometimes you will fall if you blocking a high Round Kick using leg block too high like this):

But if the opponent doing Leg Block lowly, their balance is more stable and their body mass is harder. Thats why you will break your shin if you doing Round Kick too low, because the opponent entire body mass is stronger while raise their leg lowly like this:

So, if you wanna kick your opponent’s leg without worry, just use safer - stronger techniques like Sweep, Side Kick or Leg Stomp / Oblique Kick like these: