This all requires them to be quick and agile and often them stepping forward and into the attack which karate also teaches. You don't learn about aspects like that in karate though until you get to the intermediate and advanced black-belt levels and one steps are a good example of what I am saying here. With one steps students are taught to move back or in the same direction as the attack to give them more time to react. There also then is a margin of safety here as well for students when they learn and practice.
However in a good school with high standards they will start at the black-belt levels for students to instead step forward, meeting and intercepting the attack much like what is taught and emphasized from the beginning in Aikido.
I have little exposure to Aikido though I do know some practitioners. They do have stances and they do incorporate them though as you say they don’t seem to separate them when explaining a technique.
They seem to incorporate it as a whole and not emphasize stance as a separate thing rather the whole movement as one more fluid kind of thing. We in Taekwando seem to teach our techniques as broken down into parts. This is I reason why Taekwando spread so fast as it is easy to teach to the very young and less athletically inclined student. In the end though it must flow smoothly like Aikido or many other arts. My higher rank students can tell you I’m big on making fluid movements and learning to put your whole technique into smooth and fast movement as if it were one. Many of the moves will be done as a single move rather than like a step up than punch, it would become the step and punch becoming one move where the punch world land as the step is completed as an example. I see many instructors fail their students by never getting this across.
I don’t want to start a “this better than that” kind of thing. Each art has its own beauty and somewhat different approach to a problem, some cultural and some because of its history of purpose.
Yes I have seen this. I recall when I began learning aikido. I asked some questions about how to step. Thn in came up about stances and not to worry about it. I wasn't asking about a stance though, but they knew my karate background so this is why they thought this. I wanted to know about stepping for the evasion and to complete the technique. They wanted to stress the important thing is to get out of the way of the strike. I was concerned about getting hit. I knew how not to get hit. But the end of the technique was to ay the wrist lock. I needed to step in the right direction to complete the lock and keep my one point.
Interesting question.
In my Aikijutsu class my teacher really drills footwork as being in the correct place makes a difference in the way the techniques work. Moreover I found that often in Aiki it even makes a difference in the techniques where your weight is at just on your foot, i.e. weight more to the front of the foot or more to the heel of the foot. We use the Japanese names for the stances.
In Taiji footwork also is important as incorrect footwork and stances will twist your joints and obscure your posture, if your posture is off and your joints are twisted, relaxation and balance becomes difficult and twisted joints tend to cause pain after a while. The stances in Taiji have no names to the best of my knowledge or I never learned them and how you execute them is more important to your body type, so it is not quite as rigid in the execution of the stances as the Japanese martial arts. In Shaolin Kung Fu we have a drill that systematically goes through all the basic stances and they do have names and are a thigh killer if done the way they are supposed to be done. However they do often substitute easier/higher stances for hard stances even in their forms. Chinese martial arts seem to much more conform to the practitioners ability than Japanese martial arts but I have to say all the martial arts styles that I have trained in do drill stances and footwork. Maybe it is just the type of teachers I tend to pick rather than the styles. Idk.
So the other day I was contemplating the philosophical differences between styles, or at least, the teaching therein.
In the taekwondo and karate classes, there seemed a great emphasis on stances. It isn't unusual to see the instructor have students do drills whereby they walk up and down a line just doing the stance, turn around, and then do it again.
But in my aikido class, and all that I've seen in other places, stances don't seem to take such a prominent priority. Of course they have stances, but there is a striking difference in stance philosophy. In one, the stance is given a name and then it becomes a teaching thing. In the other, the stance has no name, and is never practiced without a technique applied to it.
I observe that taekwondo-in and karate-ka always ask "what's this stance used for", but I never hear aikido-ka asking the same question, probably because the word "stance" hardly ever comes up. I see taekwondo and karate test graders have students demonstrate a forward, back, cat, or horse stance, but I never hear of aikido-ka being asked to do the same.
It just seems that once given a name, the thing becomes a focal point and is a basis for discussion (and testing).
Thoughts on this? Have you seen this?
