Taekwondo Kicks: The Names, the Korean Terms and What Each One Is For

Taekwondo is known for its kicking above everything else. If you have just started, or your child has just come home talking about an "ap chagi", here is the map.

One thing to settle first, because it confuses everyone: the Korean names are romanised inconsistently. The same kick appears as yop chagi and yeop chagi. The same spin appears as dwi chagi and dwit chagi. Nobody is wrong. Korean does not map neatly onto the Latin alphabet, and different organisations made different choices decades ago.

The word chagi simply means kick. Everything before it describes the direction or the shape.

The foundation kicks

These three are taught first, in almost every school, and they never stop being drilled.

• Ap chagi — front kick. Driven straight forward off the ball of the foot, knee lifting first. The first kick almost every beginner learns, and the one that teaches you to use your hips instead of just your leg.
• Dollyo chagi — roundhouse, or turning kick. The leg travels in a circular path and lands with the instep or the ball of the foot. This is the workhorse of sparring, and the single most-used scoring kick in competition.
• Yeop chagi — side kick. Delivered sideways with the heel or the outer edge of the foot, body turned away from the target. The most structurally powerful of the basic kicks, and the hardest of the three to make look good.

If you learn nothing else in your first year, you will have spent a great deal of time on these. That is deliberate. Every advanced kick is one of these three with a turn, a jump, or a change of height added.

The kicks that come next

• Naeryeo chagi — axe kick. The leg lifts high and drops down onto the target, heel first. Requires real hamstring flexibility, which is why it arrives later.
• Dwi chagi — back kick. You turn away from your opponent and drive the heel straight backwards. Blind, committed, and genuinely powerful.
• Huryeo chagi — hook kick. The leg extends past the target then whips back to strike with the heel. Sometimes called a reverse roundhouse, and sometimes named dwit dollyo chagi instead, depending on the school.
• Bandal chagi — crescent kick. An arcing kick, inward or outward, often used to clear a guard rather than to score.
• Bituro chagi — twisting kick. Travels across the body on an unexpected line, which is the whole point of it.

The spectacular ones

These are what people film. They are also, mostly, combinations of the basics with rotation added.

• Dolgae chagi — tornado kick. A spinning jump into a roundhouse.
• Narae chagi — double roundhouse. Two roundhouse kicks off the same jump, a staple of competitive sparring.
• Multiple-rotation kicks — 360, 540 and beyond, which belong to demonstration teams and to students with years behind them.

A word of honesty about these: they are taught after the foundations are solid, not instead of them. A spinning kick thrown from a poor stance is just a fall with extra steps.

Why the names matter

Learning the Korean is not ceremony for its own sake. It does two practical things.

It makes a class instantly portable. A student who knows dollyo chagi can walk into a dojang in Seoul or Santa Clara and follow the instruction.

It also forces precision. "That kick, the roundy one" describes four different techniques. Dollyo chagi describes exactly one. Once a student has the vocabulary, corrections get much faster, because the instructor and the student are talking about the same thing.

If the terminology side interests you, here is the wider Taekwondo vocabulary beginners meet first. For how the kicks are actually developed in class rather than just named, see our guide to kicking training.

Come and throw a few

Reading kick names gets you nowhere. Twenty minutes on the mat with someone correcting your hip position gets you somewhere.

Your first class is free, with no contract, and new students receive a free uniform and white belt. Call (408) 243-1001 and we will put you in a class at the right level.

Learn them from someone who competed with them

Kicking at KIMOO is taught by an 8th Dan Grand Master who won gold at the 10th Wushu World Cup in Milan and has trained national competitors for decades. The corrections you get here are the ones that matter at speed.

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