Martial artist, movie star, and guest MMA trainer, Steven Seagal, talked to Ariel Helwani about “teaching” Anderson Silva that front kick that he used to stop Vitor Belfort on their UFC 126 match up:
I’ve learned sort of a variation of that [Front Kick] in Japan, probably 30, 40 years ago, and I’ve been perfecting it all these years. It’s not exactly cut out there, it’s just something that I created that’s a little bit different. I thought Anderson could learn well because he’s sort-of a natural born athlete, has very quick hands and feet, and his kicks are good to begin with. So I started teaching him kicks that I thought he could really hurt people with.
In practice, he was knocking other people out with body shots, and at that point I knew he was going to start making these kicks work.
If you were amazed in seeing a front kick KO for the first time, Seagal says it’s because he hasn’t taught it to a lot of people yet:
…Nobody knows the kick. I’m teaching it to Machida, Anderson, and a few other Brazilians, but we haven’t really used it much yet. I haven’t shown it to many people yet.
At the press conference Silva credited Seagal with teaching him the kick. As translated by Silva’s manager Ed Soares:
“Steven Seagal helped me perfect that kick. That was a kick we were working on before I stepped in. This was a kick that I trained a lot.”
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