Guided Chaos kicking, like everything else, is based on balance.If you do not have a good one-legged root, you cannot kick effectively. Your balance cannot be committed to or depend on the kick or its result. Whether you miss completely or connect perfectly with a charging aggressor, you cannot lose balance. Recoil from the impact of the kick is channeled into the ground via the root leg, such that it actually INCREASES your stability and the depth of your root. You drop into your root as you kick to maximize your balance and connection from the ground through your target.
Kicking is analogous to striking with your arms. Just as you do not "throw" your balance at the target when striking with your arm, you do not "throw" your balance into the kick as many martial artists do. You keep control of your root and the kick merely emanates from it.
There should be practically no muscular exertion in your arm as you strike. The power of a movement that contacts the target via your arm comes from the cumulative motion and alignment of your entire skeleton and its pressure against the ground, enhanced by dropping. The arm itself is loose. All the same applies to the leg.
Once you get a feel for Guided Chaos kicking, you're not whipping or throwing your leg at the target via muscular exertion. Rather, feeling your body to be in the right place relative to your target, you're placing your foot or leg on the target in a relaxed and nonchalant way, knowing that your balance, body unity and dropping will be there to supply the penetration and explosion once you connect. This does a lot to "hide" your kick and prevent the telegraphing that most martial artists do when they prepare to kick. Accuracy is key, as is feeling where the enemy's center of gravity is such that you can penetrate him in an unavoidable way, which makes you unavailable to him. It's much easier to be accurate when you're loose and on balance and merely "placing" your foot on the target, rather than effortfully swinging your leg in the general direction of the bad guy, hoping to hit something that will help support your compromised balance! Your retained balance and looseness also allows you continue to use your arms (or anything else) effectively even as you kick. Most people can't do this due to lack of balance and/or imagination.
As you develop in Guided Chaos, you get the feeling that anywhere you can touch with your hand, you can apply destruction if need be, because you're always on balance and moving loosely with body unity, guided by your sensitivity.Hence the practice of "counting koo" or merely touching the available targets while remaining unavailable yourself, as part of the training (not ALL of the training). A Guided Chaos master can do the same, and more, with his or her legs. For an obvious example, note how Master Michael Watson frequently uses his leg like a third arm in contact flow, moving it just as precisely, slowly and unavoidably. The other masters and grand masters can do this too, it's just very visible when Michael does it slowly with his long legs.
Also remember that in his experience and forensic research, Grand Master John Perkins identified many cases of effective kicking in the confined space that many attacks go down in, both from the ground and while standing and bracing against solid objects like walls. This is an integral part of the training, and indeed is one way to introduce kicking to students without much or any experience using their legs as weapons. Free-standing kicking may at first produce tension (physical and mental) and loss of balance. Starting out kicking while bracing against something with the hands or body can help the student's body and mind get comfortable with the idea. I once saw John take a complete beginner in martial arts (albeit a decent athlete) from zero to seriously combat effective kicking in one lesson, and he used a progression that started with leaning against a wall and culminated in the student's effectively stopping charging attackers with kicks from a free standing position, not realizing anything special was going on! Note that some martial artists who have been kicking "experts" for DECADES cannot do this, as they never understood the connection between balance and effective kicking. (Witness the "auto-retreat" feature some sparring competitors have when they kick--which may actually HELP THEM in their particular sports while preventing them from achieving serious stopping power with their kicks.)
Kicking from the ground, as in groundfighting, seems very different but can actually teach good lessons about and enhance your standing kicking. See the blog post from a couple weeks ago about groundfighting.
As different as Guided Chaos is in general from most martial arts, the kicking methods are especially different from those of the most popular martial arts. Learn them the right way and you'll see how useful effective kicking can be in a variety of situations.
Happy Kicking!!!