This week we added three new stances to our repertoir. We’d seen them before when others have been doing bassai dai, but they’ve never been explained or practiced.

We were introduced to:

1. Sanchin Dachi
2. Nekoashi Dachi
3. Kokutsu Dachi – this style will be most familar to anyone familiar with the work of Hong Kong Phooey, who often adopted this as his stance of choice.

Of all of these Kokutsu Dachi was possibly the hardest, but all of them feel strange. We’ve spent every lesson so far in the parallel stances, or Zenkutsu Dachi, so adding three new ways to apportion weight was very strange, and the reason Kokutsu Dachi was so stange is that it’s pretty much the same as Zenkutsu Dachi, but with the weight reversed, so it’s easy to mistakenly lapse into “normality”.

Combination

We did a few interesting combinations this week too, the most fun (difficult) being

1. Begin in Zenkutsu Dachi,
2. Move the front foot across the body and turn 180,
3. Ushiro Geri, kicking towards the direction we were just facing
4. Then without putting the foot down, place the foot behind and across the body
5. Turn 180