Straight rear leg with heel on the floor in TMA -why?

Hi Nick,

I am wondering for ages why for example in Karate you have to have a straight rear leg and the heel on the ground in Kihon practice. Seeing from your DVD and others it does seem better to move the rear leg forward with a rear punch in terms of power development.
Could the stances be designed to give stability in close-range combat?
I would question this a bit since - as you have demonstrated - TMA deals with multiple opponents and there mobility should be the key.

While I find many useful things in the karate style I currently do (yoshukai) the thing with the straight leg and the heel on the floor confuses me.

Any insight from you would be appreciated.

Hi Boris,

Thanks for the question.

There are several answers that I've heard over the years. The one I lean towards the most is that there are two ways to generate power in the punch. One is to push off the rear leg as in lunging with an epee as in fencing (seen here)



and the other is to step up as if you're hinged on one side and slamming the door. TMA opted for the latter with beginners as it's easier to teach whereas the latter version requires better timing.

The idea is, as in fencing, that this would be a transient position and not held during the whole fight. In other words your stance would be shorter - we called it han zen (half zen kutsu dachi) and then you'd explode forward into the deep lunging stance to bridge the gap and score.

Other explanations I've heard was that it was used to develop the legs (Karate came from Okinawa which took its arts from Southern style kung fu which featured lots of deep stances and hand work as opposed to Northern systems which favoured higher stances and more kicking) and you weren't actually supposed to fight from it at all, and the rear leg was braced into the floor to stop you being shoved backwards.

What I find funny is that I run into a lot of people saying deep stances don't work (and I'm not advocating trying to fight in them) who end up in those positions many times momentarily during fights. Watch one of the MMA guys when they shoot one leg back to avoid it being grabbed by an attempted double leg tackle. Watch cops when they've got a suspect in a headlock and are attempting to tackle him and/or roll him over their leg to get him on the ground...deep stance again.

this picture is from a law enforcement grappling class....looks like a pretty deep stance to me.



Nick

If you don't mind me sticking my nose in Nick.

I think that you have caught this just right. Lots of people seem to think that TMA advocate fighting from a deep stance when in actual fact they are just snapshots of technique.

I feel that TMA are binned by many before they understand why they are doing what they are doing.

That's not totally fair, as their instructors, senior instructors and overall Masters often seem to share the same misunderstandings.

Brian S wrote:That's not totally fair, as their instructors, senior instructors and overall Masters often seem to share the same misunderstandings.

Unfortunatley I'd have to agree with you there

But not in all cases.

There's a story I tell to illustrate the principle at my seminars.

A young girl is watching her mum cut the bone of the ham before she puts it in the pot and asks her "why do you cut the bone off?"

"because that's the way my mum did it."

"why did she do it?"

"I don't know, but while this is cooking let's go ask her"

They pop round to the grandmother's house and ask

"Why did you always cut the bone off the ham"

"Because that's the way my mum did it"

"Why did she do it?"

"No idea, lets go round and see her and ask"

So they all pop round to the great grandmother's house and ask

"Why did you always cut the bone off the ham?"

"Because" she said "I only had a really tiny pot and the bone would never fit."

There's a ton of that in TMA sadly...the blind very much leading the blind...not the fault of the TMA.

Nick

My old karate instructor would talk for half the lesson about having you back heel on the floor and why and how much better it was than having your heel of the floor, every lesson we got it.

Then when he demoed a technique he would take his back heel off the floor. He used to be a boxer and it influened his karate style. But it was ridiculous. It would literally be 30 seconds after he's went on about the heel.

Another good one was the web page way back i nthe early days of the internet where it had all our 5th dans training and on the first picture it said 'note the back heel on the floor to generate power' and in every other picture no one person had their heel on the floor when they.

And how di they explain this away 'because we're 5th dans and we've been doing it like that for years so now we don 't need to cos we can generate t he power anyway.'

PHAH

I think the best one had to be when they decided that the back leg didn't have to be stright because higher lvls trained with a bent back leg so they started teaching it from white belt. Ergo the hip muscles weren't built up form early training and so few of the kyu grades could genereate the punch power that Shotokai karate boasted about constantly.

This one was right up there with 'you don't have to be fit' thus all strenuous training was taken out. I went to a karate lesson a few months ago to see what the crack was and not one person broke sweat throughout the lesson

AXE
Jagunco