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. 

[bushido_man96]

I think the evolution of stances as the way we see them in forms/katas now has more to do with aesthetics than actual practicality when using techniques.  I agree that stances should be seen as the means for transitioning between techniques or generating power in techniques.  I see more and more applications of this as I train in Aikido, which is not concerned about static stances, but the movements required to get from point A to point B.

[crash]

10 hours ago, bushido_man96 said:

I think the evolution of stances as the way we see them in forms/katas now has more to do with aesthetics than actual practicality when using techniques.  I agree that stances should be seen as the means for transitioning between techniques or generating power in techniques.  I see more and more applications of this as I train in Aikido, which is not concerned about static stances, but the movements required to get from point A to point B.

i found the movements of aikido to fit very well with my core style. the couple years i studied, i loved the circular style of movement and found it could be easily incorporated or intertwined with my core training. very multi-directional, almost to the point of directional change without seeing it beforehand.... if that makes sense...lol 

[sensei8]

The beauty about stances is that in short order how one was taught any said stance changes to fit one’s fighting abilities. 

The other beauty is that one doesn’t always, if ever, see a textbook stance during sparring. We see that practitioner’s adaptation of said textbook stance. It’s so inevitable.

No one uses every taught stance when engaging as their preferences, which is another beauty of stances.

Textbook taught stances are great for Kata and that’s about it, imho.

”Use what is effective; discard the rest.”~Bruce Lee

 

[aurik]

In Uechi-Ryu, we have a saying, "All is in Sanchin", and as far as stances go, this is no exception.  Almost all of our kata and drills are performed in Sanchin stance, and this stance is pretty basic yet subtle.  You can tell someone "feet shoulder width apart, move one foot forward slightly, turn it in about 30-45 degrees."  However, that is the beginning of Sanchin.  There are quite a few subtleties that you only learn after practicing Sanchin kata for some time and having instructors test your stability.  We perform kata almost exclusively in Sanchin, we perform our drills in Sanchin, and to a certain degree, we are expected to fight/spar in Sanchin.  

The other stances we utilize are all derived from Sanchin, and are used in specific situations for a specific purpose.  We have a neko dachi (cat stance), which starts in Sanchin where you basically shift the weight to the back foot and lift the front foot up to rest on the toe (not the ball of the foot).  This is frequently used prior to or immediately following a crane (e.g. shin) block.  We also have a version of Zenkutsu dachi, where you start from Sanchin and use your rear leg to drive yourself forward, usually to do an elbow strike into an opponent's sternum.  Where your foot naturally lands -- that's a Zenkutsu dachi.  Finally, we have a low stance, nominally a shiko-dachi, which starts from a sanchin stance, and you slide your front foot forward and to the (out) side enough to drop your center of gravity such you're below your opponent's center of gravity, and an elbow strike will land right at your opponent's sternum.

Again, these 3 other stances are transitional stances, and used for specific brief sequences.  For the vast majority of our kata and drills, we live in Sanchin

[Wado Heretic]

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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? 

 

 

With regards to Shōtōkai-ryū (karate as taught by Funakoshi Gichin), and its different modern permeations, if we look to older photos from what Funakoshi was teaching  in the 1920s he was already using longer and deeper stances than his contemporaries. Not significantly at first glance, however, his stance in Naihanchi is wider than his shoulders, his kukatsudachi has his back leg behind rather than under him, and his cat stance features an already more pronounced lift of the heel off the floor than many Okinawan styles. My current hypothesis is that this is the influence of his other key teacher aside from Itosu, Asato Ankō. Funakoshi, who is the primary source of much of what we know of Asato, claimed that Asato was also a student and expert in Jigen-ryū Kenjutsu (Sword Method). Funakoshi’s wider, more bladed, and deeper stances, make sense if we consider the influence of swordsmanship on their formulation. Which is to say they make holding a relatively heavy object easier, which Funakoshi would likely have appreciated also being an expert in Kobudo, and they facilitate north-south movement. Funakoshi may have also seen a benefit in the challenge they present in creating the martial body for karate. There are many excellent videos of Jigen-Ryu on Youtube thanks to channels such as Seido Budo. If one finds the time to watch and compare the stances they use and Funakoshi’ 1920s Tode Jutsu, one will hopefully grasp where my hypothesis has come from.

 

Funakoshi Yoshitaka, better known as Gigo, also had a degree of influence due to taking on many teaching responsibilities during the 30s. He has been credited with introducing deeper stances, dynamic kicking, and the focuses on sequential striking techniques with have come to be characterised by modern Shotokan. I am going to quote myself from another time this topic came up regarding the the influence of Funakoshi Yoshitaka:

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Regarding the theory of Yoshitaka being the primary architect of Shōtōkan-ryū I would offer the opposition that it does not adequately explain the post-war development of the style by people such as Masatoshi Nakayama, Isao Obata, and Hidetaka Nishiyama. Said people had never studied with Yoshitaka but had been students of Gichin and had been peers of Ohtsuka and Konishi when they were Gichin’s primary assistants. Even if we acknowledge that Genshin Hironishi became the primary instructor at the Shōtōkan in 1943, had been a close student of Yoshitaka’s, and was the leading force in re-establishing the Dai-Nippon Karate-Do Shōtōkai in 1949/50 this is insufficient to argue that Yoshitaka was a significant influence on the Karate of the Japanese Karate Federation: the system of karate commonly called Shōtōkan.

In 1949, the leading figures of the JKA were Obata Isao, Saigo Kichinosuke, Takagi Masatomo, and Nakayama Masatoshi. All men who had not been students of Yoshitaka. These men were also the ones most responsible for the University clubs and associations. In contrast, the close students of Yoshitaka: Egami Shigeru, Okuyuma Tadao, and Genshin Hironishi, were nowhere to be seen in the leadership of the JKA. Indeed, of all those who credited Yoshitaka as a teacher, Kase Taiji alone remained with the JKA. They instead continued the legacy of the Dai-Nippon Karate-Do Shōtōkai after the death of Funakoshi Gichin in 1956.

Yet, even in the Shōtōkai significant parts of Yoshitaka\'s karate are no longer practised. For examples, the stance Yoshitaka formulated Fudodachi (unmoveable stance), and his \'Ten-no-kata\' are rarely seen nowadays in any branch of the Shōtō Ha Karate Tree. The Ten-no-kata is only one kata of a series consisting of Ten-no-kata, Ji-no-kata, and Jin-no-kata, standing for Heaven (Ten), Earth (Ji) and Man (Jin). As far as I am aware Ji-no-kata and Jin-no-kata no longer exist. Instead, the karate of the Shōtōkai is very much a reflection of Egami’s personal reflection on the Karate of Funakoshi Gichin, an exploration of the physical feats he attributed to Yoshitaka, with influences and ideas from Okuyama Tadao, and his own thorough experimentation with technique and body dynamics.

The the creation of JKA Shōtōkan, and the so-called University Shōtōkan, was in the hands of men who never trained with Funakoshi Yoshitaka, or if they did, they did so very briefly. Even the Shōtōkai whom credit Funakoshi Yoshitaka as a great teacher has not perpetuated much in the way of his innovations. I suspect Yoshitaka’s legacy is the dynamic kicking he introduced through the war years, that were then adopted by returning senior students, however, I would not credit him as the real architect of Shōtōkan or Shōtōkai. I believe one must argue Nakayama and Egami deserve the credit, respectively.

 

 

Keep this aside in mind for a later point I wish to make. Moving back to Funakoshi Gichin’s direct teachings, I think that there has also been a fundamental misunderstanding of Funakoshi’s precepts 17 and 18:

 

Kamae wa shoshinsha ni ato wa shizentai - Fixed positions are for beginners: later, one moves naturally.

 

Kata wa tadashiku jissen wa betsu mono - Kata is practised perfectly, real fighting is another thing.

 

Japanese being a tricky language, one can also view 17 as implying that fixed positions are for the youthful and relaxed stances for the less youthful. With Shotokan largely becoming the domain of young men during the war years, and post-war years in the Universities, and then being spread by young men to the world, it was an inevitability that more athletically demanding, and arguably more aesthetically appealing, stances would become normalised. Then these students, as they became teachers, would teach what they were taught. As a teacher you must show what you want from your students to your students. This affects your own growth if you do not find time to train yourself or find someone to take over as the model for you while you evolve your personal practice. Thus, many got locked into repeating what they were taught when young, and this became the model for practice.

 

If we then consider the idea that there is a right and wrong way to do a kata, reinforced by the idea of practicing perfectly, then there becomes a proscribed way to perform kata. Which is going to either be directed by a force of personality, or by democratic means of following what everyone is doing. For Shōtōkan the forces of personalities were Nakayama Masatoshi who formulated the curriculum, and Kase Taiji who held responsibility for teaching aspiring instructors kumite. Kase Taiji’s most influential teacher was the aforementioned Genshin Hironishi, and this is likely where Yoshitaka’s influence truly comes from. Hironishi would have also set the character of the Dojo that Nakayama and others returned to after the war, and they probably had to go with the flow to an extent, rather than try and claw back the practices to what they were doing before they left for the war. Thus, if deeper stances, and dynamic movement had become normal practice, they likely adapted to it and evolved it in their own manner afterwards.

 

Which leads me to what I think is the final ingredient and cause of Shōtōkan’s dramatic stances: Yakusoku Kumite. The Ippon through to Gohon Kumite forms essentially amount to an Oi-Tsuki stopped by a powerful Uke-Waza. If I am trying to stop you hitting me, and you are trying to hit me, but we are moving back and forwards in a line, my only realistic choice to maximise my chances is to move my feet more than you. Which stepping backwards and forwards means long and deeper stances.

 

This is inevitably going to bleed into the performance of Kihon Waza as people aim to develop an edge in kumite. And the forward moving nature of line drills lends itself to people just trying to move forward as dynamically as possible, and longer and deeper stances help this. This may also be why we see more dramatic preparation of uke-waza in Shōtōkan, because when you know what attack is coming you can prepare and deflect with power. Zenkutsu Dachi thus fulfils a very specific tactical role in the practice of Shōtōkan exercise, thus taking on its current character. And when one stance, which is your most basic stance, takes on a deeper and longer nature it is only natural for all other stances to follow along.

 

There is probably a story common to all styles which explain the length of their stances. They will have evolved to meet the tactical needs of the drills being practiced. If those drills become disconnected from actual fighting then we may seem them evolve out of practicality for actual fighting, but exceptionally good at the drills they are used for. And this is not a critique of Shōtōkan explicitly, it is an implicit critique of all styles that we need to remain aware we are training to get good at our Ryuha, and sometimes we may have lost sight of the nature of fighting unwittingly. As long as we remain honest to what we are doing that is fine to an extent, but it should raise a question about whether we are practicing Fighting Arts.

 

But beyond individual dojos, rather than monolithic organisations, I doubt individual characters would have that much impact. 

 

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

 

My immediate speculation would be that one is Higoanna’s and the other is Miyagi’s. Which is to say Miyagi seems to have tried to make his kata symmetrical. That includes those he learnt from Higoanna If we compare them to the versions found in Toon-Ryu and Shito-Ryu. The only kata he does not appear to have given this treatment is Sanseiryu, which likely contributes to the idea that he did not particularly like it as a kata.

 

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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? 

 

Depends on the kata which contextualises the stance. However, the basic idea is that we should be rooted with regards to which hand is in contact with the attacker/opponent for strength. 

When I was recovering from my knee surgery, which was a two-year period in total, I did use to do some variations to protect. But now it has healed I no longer do so. But that is one of the few reasons I allow variations, or show variations, which is to work around injury to get as close to desired outcome as possible. I explain through showing and adjusting through testing. If the goal is to have strength against front pressure, then we test against front pressure until the compromise we have settled generally works as well as we can get it to. But this is a process I use with everyone anyway to make sure their stances are working as intended. Everyone is different so golden rules are at best useful guides, but pressure testing is the only real way forward.