Footbag Kicking - Hacky Sack ^®
Is on the Rise Around the World!

I have talked about five footbag kicks, and up to now I have referred to these as kicks. We shall change our thoughts now and refer to these kicks as blocks. The term block is the meeting of the footbag without a defined kick. This is the act of putting your foot in the on-coming path of the footbag. Just as a baseball player meets the ball with his bat for a base hit, your foot is a setting block. There is no defined kick on the block, although there is definition in your movement to the footbag. As you master control of the footbag you will always find yourself moving with it. Your effectiveness in this movement is, in essence, maximum movement with the minimum effort.

This is where Footbag Dance has a parallelism with the martial art. Hung Gar, a Chinese form of martial arts, uses this efficiency of movement to move quickly over a great distance. This movement is done by bending at the knees, thus lowering one's center of gravity, and then moving laterally by stepping behind one's leading foot, and so on. (Illustration U). This movement in Hung Gar is called "the cat". Eventually, this cat-like movement will just be your natural way of moving and will become a conditioned response.

As your legs strengthen you will be able to move more and more efficiently. You may be asking, "Why is this cat-like motion so efficient?" To see why, set up this experiment:

After you get good at the Cat, get someone to run straight ahead while you use the Cat to run laterally (facing his profile) and parallel with him. As the runner strides, he takes one long step after another. (If you were to stop this runner in the middle of the stride, you could look graphically at the distance he covered on each step.) Running laterally, using the Cat, in parallet with the runner you can see that your lateral stepping would cover a good part of the distance the runner is covering in each full stride.

Over a distance of five, 10, or 15 feet this is a very, very effective and quick lateral movement. Such speed is necessary to get quickly to the place of the meeting of you and the footbag so you will be positioned to make an effective kick or block. (Illustration V)

I have created my own discipline to keep this an active part of my consciousness (or conditioning). Whenever I am practicing I always move to the footbag with this cat-like motion. I do this not only when the footbag is in the air but also after it has been missed and is rolling away. I call this "constant pursuit," always moving with the footbag. Therefore, my discipline of motion or dance is constantly improving. Eventually, you will be doing this without thought. Letting your mind and body flow as one: a meditation within.

As you continue your study you will be working toward a totally centered consciousness or total conditioned thought. Whenever the footbag approaches, your response will be whatever is needed at the time. You want to work your side and back kicks into circular motion. There is a tendency to want to stay in front of the footbag. Our culture and the sports we have played have conditioned us to do this. Footbag Dance is about the only study in which you allow the object to pass your body and then respond after the passing.>

This is a difficult thing to deal with (letting the footbag pass before kicking it), but obviously it is within our reach. Speaking of cultural traits, you will be prone to reach out to grasp at the footbag with your hand as it passes over you. Just remember, "If you can catch it you can kick it!"

While learning Footbag Dance, the teenagers of Willits would most commonly try to catch the footbag by hand. They got the point, quite quickly evidenced by the fact they themselves imposed a penalty for catching the footbag: 10 pushups!! That was impressing determination. The fact now is that the footbag is rarely if ever hand caught by those same students of Footbag Dance.