I was thinking about this thread recently, http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?t=27495&highlight=kicks, and specifically this post:
http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showpost.php?p=736864&postcount=79

So if the roundkick was only added relatively recently to Japanese/Okinowan Martial Arts, where did it come from?

Chuck, natch.

where did it come from?

From the dawn of mankind..

.... what, did you think the act of kicking someone in that motion is relatively new?

What TYPE of round kick are you talking about? Thai style, TKD/light contact karate style, kyokushin style?

From the Second link I posted.

Okinawan and Japanese systems added the roundhouse kick in the 50's and 60's, you will find no round house kicks in Okinawan and Japanese Kata's.

The roundhouse kick that's found in the post 50's karate?

Anyone?

from the leg? :tongue3:

From the Big Rock Candy Mountain?

--J. "He's Bonafide!" D.

Shotokan, mostly for regulated sparring and the cool-factor. There are techniques that look like roundkicks found in several traditional martial arts, but they usually had different applications before the roundkick era. Most martial artists at the time wore shoes and favored a swift kick to the nuts, the roundkick was thought too slow for safe and practical execution. They have been proven wrong through assbeatings. I could say the same about shoots to the legs; since the techniques deemed unpractical and unsafe weren't accounted for in martial training before they became popular, the old styles were incomplete and weak.

Now they know that they have to kick people in the nuts alot faster to stop a roundhouse, and train quite a bit of grappling regularly in order not to get raped.

Shotokan, mostly for regulated sparring and the cool-factor.

No, shotokan nicked it from CMA. As far as I understand it, Funakoshi never did roundhouse kicks. I think it was Yoshitaka, his son, that introduced them as he was more athletic than his dad. Could be wrong though, as I seem to recall that they may have been an even later addition than that (Nakayama, maybe).

There are no roundhouse kicks in the shotokan kata, which suggests that they're not native to the style.

One of the styles I practice does use the roundkick, but it only appears openly in one set. It is, however, one of the drills and the kick in the form is a bit more specialized than the standard roundkick.

Lots of techniques like this are not recorded in forms, but are part of drills. It's like ye olde horse stance punch*: It's not in any form, but it's hardly foreign to the art.

Lost Track has three roundkicks that I'm aware of:

1) One is hidden and come from shifting sides in a stance. In this kick, the foot hardly comes off the ground at all and plants in front when it's done. It usually hits the outer thigh.

2) One is drilled along with a leg grab; it usually hist the inside of the supporting leg.

3) One is a bit more truncated, kind of between a snappy kick and a full blown roundhouse. Instead of retracting the leg you pull it down and back, so it moves in a short oval.

In Lost Track and many CMAs, the sparring custom is to start with crossed hands, so it's not very common to move back and forth to pick the shot. You're already in punching distance, so any kick you're going to throw can't compromise the hands.

Now Karate comes from a bunch of Southern styles and they also think of fihting as something that's only "really" happening in punching range. A good roundkick usually takes at least one "beat" of its own in a sequence of movements, so I can see it being dropped completely in favour of techniques that let you engage the hands more freely.

That said, Chotoku Kyan was supposed to be a kicking specialist and was said to use a bunch of kicks that don't appear in kata either, so you never know. Funakoshi's practice was very centered in kata, though, so he might not have adopted these less "formal" methods.

* Well, it should be a bow to bow punch with shifting feet, but it got truncated in Okinawa at some point.

If I remember correctly Michael Casseaux´s book about savate in 1830´s contained roundkick. According Dan Duby, old savate roundkick was more whipping motion from side, than current BF style kick.

This may not be from the book, but it´s from 19th-century.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v433/drStraydog/11Fouette7115.jpg

they stole it from muay thai (badly)

Muay Thai has been doing it for a at least a few hundred years. It's quite a natural movement and you'll see even untrained fighters use it.

they stole it from muay thai (badly)

Yes, but the crime is old, so you can´t sue. So booyah.:new_uklia

If they did steal it, they sure didn't learn to generate the power in the same way. The Fouette (little whip) used to be referred to as a "hammer" instead... but even positing that there'd be similarity to (chausson-similar) martello, it's a significantly more sophisticated kick than the MT roundhouse that derives its power from a totally different body motion.

/no, I didn't put it in my style field. I just did my wine-glass test on Monday, so sue me... ;)