Female student-athletes' biomechanics and anthropometric profile of unarmed combat kicks

In the Malaysian Armed Forces, Taekwondo-based unarmed combat is compulsory for every military personnel including female personnel. In this Taekwondo-based unarmed combat, kicking techniques are emphasized. This paper focused on this martial arts in a) investigating kinematical characteristics of turning kicks between the dominant and non-dominant leg; between the experienced and inexperienced female student-athletes and b) analyzing kinematics variables that could produce large impact force on kicking target. Six female student-athletes from the National Defence University of Malaysia (NDUM) were recruited as subjects in this study. The experiment was conducted using Vicon motion analysis system and DEWESoft hardware and software to obtain the kinematic variables and the impact force exerted on the kicking target respectively. The experiment revealed that the experienced subjects showed a better performance than the inexperienced subjects during kicking. The experienced subjects also produced larger kinematic variables such as the angle and angular velocity during impact. The highest angular velocity at an average of 1010.5deg/s was detected at the hip of the experienced subjects who used their dominant legs when they kicked the target at an average angle of 89.01. These values led to the highest average impact force exerted on the kicking target. The impact force on the kicking target was produced at an average force of 191.4N for the experienced and 77.88N for the inexperienced subjects using dominant legs (DL), but only 68.87N for the experienced and 47.21N for the inexperienced subjects using non-dominant legs (NDL). Nevertheless, the impact force produced by the experienced subjects was bigger than the inexperienced subjects for both dominant and non-dominant legs. Results from the motion camera suggested that the hip flexion angle should be as close as possible to 90°, the knee flexion angle should be from 19° to 20° and the ankle dorsiflexion should be about 50° in order to get the maximum impact force.