Martial arts teachers often make the same comparison to explain why you need good karate stances. Your posture is like the foundation of your house. If you build it on a bad foundation and it falls, no matter how good your house is, the foundation will destroy everything. Your stances are the same for karate. No matter how good you are, if you don’t have good karate stances, you will fall.
We will take our time to look at some karate stances and how we can improve. First of all, let’s take some time to understand why everyone needs to do it. What is the goal behind improving your karate stances? The truth is that the goal is to indirectly increase your attack power. Having a good posture will give you better stability and your balance is crucial to your punching power.
The reason can be explained by the laws of physics, more specifically by Newton’s third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that when you hit, an equal force is also created on you. Think about that simple fact. If you push something heavier than you in a natural position (two feet away), you will easily lose your balance. However, if you take a crescent position (with one leg bent in front of you and one leg behind you), you’ll probably step back without losing your balance. This is a big improvement, but it can be done better. If you put your feet on the ground, you will have a much better chance of moving the object successfully. Your feet push into the ground and this redirects the opposing force into the ground. Later in this article, I will talk about an amazing method to ground your karate stances.
There is an interesting analogy between bamboo and your karate stances. Did you know that bamboo takes four years to take root and hardly grows at all? The most impressive thing is that after four years, he starts to grow two feet a day! That’s a good example of working the basics first.
If you want a solid posture like bamboo, you need to develop your leg muscles. Have you ever done that before? You need to exercise the stabilizing muscles of the legs. You may already be strong with them, but you need to be strong with all four muscles within the quadriceps.
This is one of the main reasons why karate teachers often ask for a long position. Short karate stances are for experts only. You will gain more control and stability in the long run by practicing with long stances. However, you should be given this for educational purposes.
For the five exercises, we will have three exercises to develop your muscles, one exercise to improve your half moon position and another to develop your back posture. We’ll start with three exercises starting in the crescent position.
1. Muscle your front leg in a crescent position
Get into a crescent position. Without moving your front knee, bring your back leg to the side of your front foot and return to the starting position. Make sure you are not putting weight on your back leg before returning to the starting position. Do this exercise for 1 minute for both legs. If it’s too easy or too hard, adjust your speed but never stop.
2. Muscle your back leg in a crescent position
In this exercise, you’ll need to start back in the crescent position and make sure not to move your front knee. For the first 30 seconds, he lowers his back knee close to the ground without touching it and returns to the original position. Do as many reps as you can, and after the 30 seconds, stop your knee close to the ground and don’t move for 30 seconds. Don’t forget to do both legs.
3. Practice your advance in half moon position.
The final exercise for the crescent position is simply to practice your step forward (doing the “crescent” with the back leg). This may be simpler, but no matter what your rank, you still need to practice the basics. If you are quite advanced, you can practice moving backwards, to the left, and to the right.
4. Muscle your back leg in the back position
In back pose, your back leg is the one that carries the most weight and it is crucial to have power on this one. To gain more power, get into the rear position. In slow motion, lower your back leg as far as you can without moving your heel, jump off it, and return to the starting position. Do as many repetitions as possible for 1 minute for each leg.
5. Practice your back position
The back stance shuffle is the most important movement within Kenpo and no matter what level you have, you must practice it a lot. Go to a hallway or somewhere where you have enough space and practice lots of small random movements. When you’re on the wall, practice moving your feet back. Also make sure you never lean forward or backward when you are moving.
If those exercises are too easy, you can do them with 20-pound weights on your hands. That way, it will be more challenging. Make sure you never forget to force the knee of your supporting leg out for good karate stances.
With those karate stances, you will practice your ability to ground yourself. To develop that specific skill, you also need to use your imagination. Imagine that the shin of the bent leg is a metal bar. Look at that bar inside your leg and it’s longer than your leg. In fact, you can see inside your head the bar going through the floor. This bar can’t move and so your knee can’t move either. With practice, your ability to ground yourself will increase tenfold.
The challenging part here is not the complexity of the exercises. You must realize that no matter what level you are, you should always work on your karate stances. If you stop improving, little by little you will lose what you already gained.
If you start doing it right now and once or twice a day, I can promise you that you will have better karate stances after only two weeks. You can do it?