Stances

Before you can make a stand to stop violence, you must first know how to stand. The most fundamental fighting skill is good posture. (It sounds strange, but it’s true.) Untrained people will instinctively hit in a way that feels strong to them, but it is actually quite weak. A proper karate punch feels weak to its thrower -- but not to its receiver -- because proper a stance absorbs the strike's recoil and redirects through the skeleton and into the ground -- not into the muscles.

Proper stances and good posture allow karate practitioners (karateka) to maintain their balance, enabling them to perform powerful punches, kicks, and strikes while resisting various reaps, sweeps, trips, throws, and takedowns. This stability is a result of keeping the center-of-mass low. In general, your legs should never feel comfortable, because a proper stance is 2” (5 cm) lower than what feels comfortable.

Low stances are often criticized as being “immobile,” but this is a slanderous lie. A stance's mobility is a function of the area it encloses, so if mobility is impacted, it is not because the center is too low; it is because the stance is too wide, or too long. Maintaining a high center-of-mass, or bouncing about, grants an opponent the leverage they need to execute takedowns. Additionally, bouncing people have no foundation, and cannot add the power of their legs into their techniques.

Before delving into specifics, there are a few general principles that all karate stances share:

• Carry your bodyweight exclusively on your balls of the feet, and never upon your heels. This requires walk in a cat-like “toe-heel” fashion, instead of the conventional “heel-toe” way. (Pretend you're wearing pumps.)
• The knees and toes must always point in the same direction. This prevents knee injuries, and allows you to exploit the full range-of-motion of all your major muscles.
• The feet stick to the floor like suction cups, with the toes clawing at the ground like weird little fingers.
• Each stance has directions from where it is inherently weak, and can be toppled. Remaining perfectly stable in a three-dimensional space requires three legs. However, it is unlikely that you have more than two. While this cannot be fixed, it can be mitigated by re-positioning yourself into a safer stance or angle each time the opponent moves.

Our lessons will utilize the following stances:

• Attention stance
• Ready stance
• Front stance
• Back stance
• Fighting stance
• Cat stance
• Seiza
• Horse stance
• Crane stance
• Hook stance
• Sanchin dachi
• Full-side-facing
• Low-level fighting stance

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