Tekki Shodan 鉄騎初段
Iron horse, first level
What Tekki Shodan is.
Performed entirely in the horse stance, travelling only sideways along a single straight line. There is no forward step and no long stance anywhere in it, which makes it the strangest-looking form in the canon and the most physically demanding to hold. The old reading is that it teaches fighting with the back to a wall or on the narrow ridge of a rice field; the modern reading is that it teaches the hips. Funakoshi reportedly spent years on this form alone before being permitted another.
What it develops
- Hip and thigh strength, from a stance that never lets the legs rest
- Power generated sideways, with no room to step into a technique
- Close-quarters hand work — hooking punches and elbows thrown inside arm length
- Defending the legs without moving the feet, through the returning-wave motion
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Tekki Shodan sits in an examination, because the federation has not decided it. There is a named, empty place in the library for that association, and it stays empty until the federation fills it. What the federation has published about belts and progression is on the belt system page.
The belt system & grading →The Japanese in Tekki Shodan.
The words a student meets in this form, with the English beside them and an explanation of what each one actually is. These definitions are shared across the whole library, so they mean the same thing on every page.
| Term | Kanji | English | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| kiba-dachi | 騎馬立ち | horse-riding stance | Feet parallel and roughly twice shoulder width, knees pushed outward, weight even, back vertical. It is punishing to hold and that is the training effect: it builds the hip and thigh strength that everything else borrows from, and it teaches the student to generate power sideways rather than only forward. |
| nami-gaeshi | 波返し | returning wave | The foot snaps up and inward across the front of the standing leg and returns, like a wave breaking back. It is read as blocking a kick to the shin or the groin without moving the stance, and it is the movement that makes the horse-stance kata unmistakable. |
| kagi-zuki | 鉤突き | hook punch | A short punch across the front of the body with the elbow bent, thrown to the side rather than the front. It exists for an opponent who is already too close to straighten an arm at, which is why it belongs to the kata performed entirely in the horse stance. |
| uraken-uchi | 裏拳打ち | back-fist strike | A whipping strike with the back of the first two knuckles, the elbow acting as the hinge. It travels the shortest distance of any hand technique and returns as fast as it goes, which is why kata use it against the face and then continue as though nothing happened. |
| hikite | 引き手 | drawing hand | The hand pulled sharply back to the hip as the other one strikes. It is not a resting position: the pull is half the power of the punch, and in application it is usually holding an arm, a wrist or a garment that is being dragged onto the strike. |
| embusen | 演武線 | performance line | The floor pattern a kata travels — the map of every step, turn and direction change. A performer who finishes away from where they began has lost ground somewhere, and because the pattern is fixed, the kata itself reports the error without anyone having to point it out. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Tekki Shodan.
There is no verified video of Tekki Shodan here.
MMAKF has not recorded a performance of each kata, and this library will not present another organisation's video as the federation's. Where the federation's own kata footage exists it is published below, described as what it is: training, not a performance of any single form.
This page would rather carry no recording than a guessed one. A video is published here only with the evidence of its check attached — the id, the channel it actually resolved to, the date and the method — and nothing that has not been loaded and read is linked as though it had been.
The federation’s own kata training footage — general practice, not a performance of this or any other single form — is listed on the library index.