Knees

The straight knee drives the point of the knee upward into the body, most often the solar plexus, floating ribs or the inside of the thigh. It is the shortest-range power technique legal in kickboxing, and its availability is one of the cleanest dividing lines between the codes: legal under K-1, GLORY, ONE, Dutch and WAKO K-1 rules, illegal under every American full-contact and low-kick variant, illegal in savate, and restricted to the body under Sanda and Kyokushin.

The flying knee launches both feet off the floor and drives the knee into the head or upper body. It is a genuinely high-risk technique with a genuinely high reward: it carries the fighter's entire bodyweight into a small, hard striking surface, and it arrives at head height from an opponent who was watching the hands.