Stances over time

[Nidan Melbourne]

Read a post elsewhere regarding stances; they talked about height, depth and width of stances across the styles. 

Now when I first started out training, I never questioned why and how we did things. 

Then one of my instructors instructors mentioned to me this about stances: 

- Stances in Karate are only a snapshot of what they were when you look at the movements it came from in Kung Fu. 

- Stances should be adjusted to the person. 

      - Why? My 6 foot 8 (30 year old) friend would have different dimensions for all our stances in comparison to my 4 foot (10 year old) student who would have much smaller dimensions. 

 

But I got to thinking about how things came to be: 

- like how did Zenkutsu Dachi come to be so (in a way) different between Shotokan and Goju? 

        - Was the person being taught a lot taller than others?

        - Was the person sore that day? were they stretching out a bit and didn't know how to translate it? 

- In Suparinpei why does Shito-Ryu go one way (when u do the Gedan Ipponken) and Goju-Ryu go the other? 

 

But back to the point; how has your instructors explained why you do stances the way that you do? Or if you do a variation to what is considered the norm to the dojo? How to you explain it/teach the correct thing with variations? 

[crash]

we really only had right or left front fighting stances and side stance.... we did other stances for forms but not at the level in common training as most styles rely on. our instructor had a saying that when fighting, standing still was certain defeat. always be moving, we had constant drills of transitioning from one position to the next, forward, backwards, side to side, circular, left and right foot forward, etc.... never sink into a still stance once the fight begins.