Before Rayna Vallandingham joined the cast of Netflix’s Cobra Kai last year—making her debut as villain Zara Malik in season six part two—the athlete turned actor had never actually seen the show.
That’s because the teen action dramedy, which is a follow-up to The Karate Kid franchise and centers on martial arts battles, hit a little too close to home. “It felt like my own life,” Vallandingham tells SELF. So the 13-time tae kwon do world champion, who holds a fourth degree black belt (that’s a super high karate rank), avoided watching it…until she booked the role of Zara. Then? “I just fell in love with it,” she says.
In turn, viewers fell in love with Vallandingham, who garnered praise for her “standout” performance and “fierce intensity.”
With 3.7 million followers on Instagram and another 3.1 million on TikTok, Vallandingham is a strong advocate for participation in martial arts, regularly posting videos that showcase the power, finesse, and grit the practice demands. “I don’t know who I would be without it,” she says. “It teaches you discipline and perseverance and respect, and not only to respect others, but to respect yourself and value yourself.”
With Cobra Kai season six, part three premiering February 13—marking the end of the show’s nearly seven-year run—we chatted with Vallandingham about how she trained for the role, what it takes to master those high-flying kicks, and all the ways martial arts has bettered her as an athlete (and a human!).
She channels the confidence of her eight-year-old self to crush those scenes in Cobra Kai.
Vallandingham, who just turned 22, has been practicing martial arts for 20 years—her parents put her in tae kwon do lessons as a toddler. So booking Cobra Kai was a homecoming of sorts. “It really just felt like, okay, I get to just go on this set and just be myself,” Los Angeles–based Vallandingham explains.
That said, despite Vallandingham’s decades-long experience in competitive martial arts, nothing could have prepared her for the demanding choreography of Cobra Kai. “You’re doing it over and over and over again, different camera angles, different lenses, different intensity,” she says. “It’s really so much fun, but definitely very intense.”
To get through these demanding moments on set, she would take a deep breath, sip an energy drink, and channel her inner eight-year-old, the version of Rayna that loved competition. When filming all sorts of flips, kicks, aerials, choreography, and weapon work, “that competitive mindset really took over again, and I got back to who Rayna really is at the core,” she explains.
This approach helped her get in the right headspace. “I was really immersed in this world, and I truly became this character,” she says. “I feel like we all kind of felt like we were truly in this world. It was definitely a cool energy in the air.”
Weight lifting plays a clutch role to complement her martial arts.
Vallandingham learned all her advanced material arts moves—like back flips and the 540, a jump spinning kick where you land on the same leg—at a young age. And that honed the muscle memory that helps her still do them today, she explains. But consistent strength training also plays a key role, especially since she has a history of tendonitis, a condition which inflames your tendons and can cause pain and swelling.
“It‘s really important for me to make sure that I have the strength needed around my knees to support” doing martial arts, she explains, since landing many of her tricks has an intense impact on her joints. That’s why she slots in weight lifting sessions three to four times a week. As SELF has reported previously, strength training the muscles that surround your knees (like the quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves, and inner thighs), can boost knee stability and alignment, ultimately bolstering the health of that joint.
And everything she does on that front she learned from her dad, Jeff, a former bodybuilder who still hits the gym every day for about two hours.
“He’s like my superhero, and he taught me everything that I know about fitness and listening to my body and strength,” Vallandingham says. He gave her a strength training routine years ago that she still adheres to: It focuses on the lower body, using moves like Bulgarian split squats, barbells squats, Romanian deadlifts, leg extensions, and leg presses to bolster her glutes, quads, hamstrings, and calves. Focusing on single-leg strength—through exercises like the Bulgarian split squats—is a great way to bolster balance, stability, and core strength, as SELF previously reported, and has pretty direct carryover to the one-leg jump kicks Vallandingham performs. She also incorporates martial arts moves alongside traditional strength exercises. For example, she’ll do a weighted pistol squat to a front kick to a back kick, an insane mobility-balance-strength challenge.
Alongside that, she’ll weave in balance drills—like doing 50 kicks on each leg atop a Bosu ball—as well as resistance band training. “I’ve literally been doing all those [moves] for my entire life, and they work,” Vallandingham says.
Yoga is a can’t-skip activity.
Believe it or not, Vallandingham is “not naturally flexible at all,” a genetic trait she says she inherited from her dad. Because this range of motion is crucial in martial arts, Vallandingham says she has to work “very, very hard” to maintain enough length in her muscles to pull off her high-flying kicks and other gravity-defying feats.
“I have to put so much work into maintaining my splits, because if I don’t stretch for a week, they’re gone,” she says.
And that’s where yoga comes in. She aims to squeeze in sessions a couple times a week, which, in addition to keeping her limber, also helps reduce her chances of injury, she explains. This includes a mix of power yoga, a type of class which combines stretching and strength training (“I definitely love pushing myself,” Vallandingham explains, and finds delight in moves like headstands and crow pose), as well as vinyasa yoga, which she says ushers in calm, grounding vibes.
Vallandingham credits martial arts for her kick-ass confidence.
Vallandingham says she owes “everything” to martial arts, including her unflappable confidence. It’s a hard-won attribute: A self-described “really shy kid”—her parents actually enrolled her in those early tae kwon do lessons to help her break out of her shell—she was often called upon by her martial arts instructors to lead the class for long stretches of time.
Performing in front of her peers was initially really scary, but over time, it helped Vallandingham develop a deep sense of inner strength and confidence. “It’s proving to yourself that you can do the things that scare you,” she says. “I’ve just carried that with me throughout my entire life and every single thing that I do.” That includes acting, she adds.
As for particular moves that help her feel especially powerful, “I just love doing my kicks,” Vallandingham says. “It makes me feel the most like me.”
Beyond the confidence boost, martial arts ticks a lot of other boxes for her too. “The beautiful thing about martial arts is that it can really mold into anything that you want it to be,” Vallandingham explains. Whether it’s a way to celebrate happiness and excitement, an outlet for anger, or a form of meditation when she’s feeling overwhelmed, “it’s literally just like everything to me,” she says.
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