We recently delivered a three-session taekwondo and kickboxing cross-training programme for roughly sixteen elite competitive figure skaters at Connaught Skating Club.
The brief was not to teach them martial arts. Nobody there needed a new sport. It was to use martial arts mechanics to sharpen movement they already perform on ice — and to let them feel it off the ice, at a speed where they could actually correct it.
Two kicks did most of the work. Ap chagi, the front kick, shares its mechanics with a jump takeoff: the drive comes through the hip, and the timing of the knee snap is the same problem a skater is solving when they load and release a takeoff edge. Dollyo chagi, the turning kick, is a rotation problem — done properly, the turn is initiated from the standing leg and hip rather than thrown from the shoulders. That is very close to the correction a skating coach makes when an athlete opens up too early in a spin.
The useful part is not the kick itself. It is that drilling it slowly, on a stable floor, with no blade and no ice, makes an unconscious movement pattern conscious. An athlete who can feel where their rotation is coming from can change it. An athlete who cannot feel it is just repeating it.
We also spent time on stance work — the single-leg control that shows up later as a clean landing rather than a stepped-out one.
If you coach a squad in Richmond and this sounds useful for your athletes, we build each block around the sport in front of us. Get in touch and tell us what your season looks like.