Yuki Yoza: Attacking the Check

Yuki Yoza is the K-1 Lightweight Champion and for K-1 old heads he has been a breath of fresh air. As someone who is always banging on about how we will probably never see another Andy Hug, Yoza is going some way to fill the gaping void left by Hug’s death. Similar to Hug, Yoza has competed at the highest levels of Kyokushin karate and it was there that he developed a peculiar, dexterous kicking game. There may never be another kicker quite like Andy Hug, but right now there isn’t another kicker in the game who can do the things Yuki Yoza does either.

Yoza’s tune-up against Aaron Clarke gave us a chance to examine some of his outside fighting; how he rhythm steps and rebounds into powerful left kicks, and his signature “Yoza kick” to the opponent’s rear leg. With his knockout win over the #2 ranked Kongnapa a few weeks back, we get the chance to talk about some of the subtle techniques he uses when the opponent attempts to check his kicks.

Return of the Shove

The year that Yuki Yoza won his Kyokushin world championship, the IKO introduced a new set of rules that explicitly allowed one handed pushing. This might surprise you if you had seen a Kyokushin match before 2017 because the competitors were constantly “pushing” each other with closed fists to the chest and shoulders. The 2017 rule change seemed more a matter of housekeeping and getting everyone on the same page, because forcing the opponent’s weight onto a leg and kicking that same leg has long been a part of Kyokushin tactics.

From Andy Hug’s kickboxing debut in 1993, to Yuki Yoza’s in 2019, the shove-and-low-kick has proven a terrific method. Hug fought southpaw and drove in behind his forearms and the top of his head to shove the opponent back and kick their rear leg.

Yoza is an orthodox fighter, but once he comes close enough to lean on his opponent and begin that Kyokushin style infighting-with-kicks, he can either step through to southpaw or simply keep his hips square and unleash the kick. The purpose of the shove is to prevent the check. You cannot effectively raise and check with the leg that is catching you and stopping you from falling on your rump.

Of course, nothing works one hundred percent of the time. Opponents figure out what Yoza is doing and either stand firm against the shove, or time a hop backwards on one leg to try to check.

In the above example you will notice that when Aikpikart picks up his right leg to check, he is locked in place on one foot. Furthermore, his left leg is occupied in holding him up so he cannot effectively close the space between his left elbow and left knee. Not only is there a target for Yoza’s southpaw back kick, but even if he hits Aikpikart on the forearm, there’s a good chance the Thai will fall over .

The rear leg check or same side check is the standard answer to Yoza hacking in left kicks to his opponent’s back leg, but Yoza’s game out in the open is a different animal altogether. Here is a clip from his fight with Aaron Clarke where you get to see all the classic Yoza weapons. A left high kick, a left body kick (with head whip to suggest it is going high), a left front kick, and a left knee.

None of these is a point scorer and all are used to hurt, but because each is targeted above the waist, they can all be stifled by a cross check. While I’m sure everyone is familiar with the idea of the cross check, here is Jon Haggerty using it against Taiki Naito.

The simplest means of Yoza punishing the cross check—and the method that has become his go-to gap closer—is to raise the lead knee and glide in with a left hook. By landing the left hook on the head or on the guard, Yoza ensures that when he comes back down into his stance, he is close enough to start pushing his opponent and manipulating their weight—making it hard for them to check follow up kicks.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is his flashier, and much less effective, gyaku-mawashigeri—the inside-out kick. Yoza throws this in a rather odd way. Rather than pick his knee up, rotate it outward at the hip joint and then snap the kick from the knee, Yoza thrusts his left forward as if he is trying to barge the opponent’s out of the way with the outside of his ankle.

As we have already mentioned, a key reason that Yoza encounters the cross check so frequently is that kickboxers are more practiced checking with their lead leg anyway. Everything in kickboxing is about the right low kick to the lead leg. This is one reason that Yoza kicks the back leg, after all—the back leg is less conditioned and that kick is less commonly seen. But Yoza makes great use of the right low kick to the lead leg as well and is a proponent of the calf kick. This means that his opponents are constantly weighing up whether the right low kick or a left kick above the waist is coming. Many of them settle on picking up the lead leg and trying to read and adjust to the specific strike while the leg is in the air.

This is where Yoza can show his creativity and nastiness. While Yuki Yoza is famed for the Yoza kick—a front kick to the opponent’s rear leg—that signature technique is really just an application of the cut kick. Cut kicking is the act of kicking under one of the opponent’s legs to get to the other, or more simply: taking out the standing leg. Here is Yoza showing the most basic application of that: he flashes a punching combination, the opponent lifts their lead leg expecting the low kick, and Yoza kicks underneath to hack at their weighted standing leg.

Against an opponent who is concerned with checking his kicks, Yoza can make like the villain in an old timey Western—shooting kicks to each leg to make the opponent hop from foot to foot and “dance.” When Yoza fought Yuto Shinohara back in August 2022, he alternated kicking Shinohara’s rear and lead legs until a relatively unspectacular calf kick incapacitated Shinohara just by catching him a little out of position coming down off an attempted check.

Just last month, Yoza defended his K-1 lightweight title against a very solid challenger in Kongnapa. Kongnapa got to work checking kicks early and Yoza began working around the check and finding the soft spots. One knockdown came off a beautiful step through Yoza kick with the lead leg.

Kicking under the check, Yoza hammered Kongnapa’s standing leg. Yoza immediately stepped in and kicked the leg that had just come down. Yoza’s great left calf kick was trailed a split second later by a left overhand that put Kongnapa down on his face. Playing from one leg to the other, attacking the standing leg, then attacking the checking leg the moment it becomes weighted again.

The cut kick is a great attack against a checking opponent, but there is a second application of the cut kick that is less commonly seen: counter-kicking. A famous example would be Fedor timing his right low kick underneath a tired Cro Cop’s left high kick.

That kind of cut kick—low vs high—is already unusual, but Yoza’s Kyokushin experience has left him with some of the trickiest cut kicks you will see in any combat sport. While we are discussing overcoming or working around the check, checking kicks is not all that common in knockdown karate. Many karateka will choose to eat the kick to land a counter, and one particular counter is to absorb the low kick on one leg to land a low kick with the other. This is something that Hajime Kazumi and Judd Reid were extremely slick with in Kyokushin competition.

In Yoza’s first meeting with Taio Asahisa he was able to use cut kicks in two contexts you will almost never see outside of knockdown karate. The first was taking Asahisa’s low kick—on one leg—and kicking out the standing leg over Asahisa’s kick. The second was cut kicking underneath a front kick. The front kick is supposed to be the longer technique and Asahisa has a good one, but by turning his body Yoza could let Asahisa’s foot graze off him and attack the standing leg. As the fight progressed Asahisa began turning his foot sideways, with his toes out to the side, to make sure his foot stuck to Yoza when he made contact.

Cut kicks are part attack, part posturing. Throwing and tripping are not scored in kickboxing, but leaning on the back of an opponent’s head until he has to put his hands on the mat is not scored in boxing and fighters still relish the chance to do so. Falling to the mat and having to pick yourself up again is tiring no matter how you do it.

A technique that is almost all posturing is Yuki Yoza’s cheeky ankle hook. This is for when his opponent is checking his outside low kicks. You will notice Yoza changing his kick to protect his leg. He will start turning the knee to point up to the ceiling as he finishes the kick instead of turning over to track with his hips. This results in a kick where he lands with the inside of the shin and loses a lot of the power.

But if he can hook his opponent’s achilles with the top of his foot, he can pull their raised leg across their body and send them tumbling to the mat. It looks effortless, the opponent feels silly, and no one scores a point or gets warned for cheating. The important thing is that it is tiring and—whether the technique is legal or not—the opponent thinks about it when they try to raise their leg and check in the future.

If the ankle sweep is all style and no substance, Yoza’s last trick against the check is the opposite. For this we return to the cross check: where the opponent’s left shin comes across to stuff Yoza’s powerful left round kick at the shin.

This technique is where we get into inches and degrees making the difference between finding the opponent’s soft, squishy underbelly, or continuing the fight with a hematoma on your ankle. Yoza throws a kick on a slanting upward angle—sometimes called sankaku-geri or the triangle kick. He lands with the ball of the foot or even the toes.

When confronted by the cross check, the sankaku-geri obviously gives you a bit more reach on the kick. If your shin is stuffed and your foot can still connect a few inches further across than the bottom of your shin would, you can catch the opponent completely by surprise. The downside is that triangle kicks are extremely susceptible to hitting elbows—the opponent does not even need to try to spike your foot, it can just happen. And then it is the small bones of the top of the foot against the point of the elbow. But this is why the triangle kick must be combined with the constant threat of the high kick—to keep the elbows in a predictable, high guard position.

Just as the Yoza Kick links with the idea of Attacking the Check, these two ideas also play into the deeper art of Kyokushin style infighting. Yoza has adopted a peculiar cross guard on the inside that allows him to hit parries and side steps into his preferred low kicks and his first fight with Taio Asahisa essentially devolved into a chest-to-chest kick-off. But that is something for another day, perhaps with some more detail on Asahisa, himself a beautiful and completely different type of kicker.