Heian Yondan 平安四段
Peaceful mind, fourth level
What Heian Yondan is.
The longest and the most obviously combative of the five. It opens slowly with wide two-handed blocks and then accelerates into kicks paired with back-fists, a wedge block that breaks a two-handed grip, and a closing sequence in which both hands pull down while the knee drives up. That last movement is the point at which the series stops being an exercise in shapes: nothing about it makes sense until somebody explains that the hands are holding a head.
What it develops
- Contrast of speed — deliberately slow openings against explosive combinations
- Kicking and striking as one movement rather than two in sequence
- Breaking a grab from the inside using both arms together
- Pulling and striking simultaneously, which is the principle underneath the whole style
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Heian Yondan 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 Heian Yondan.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| kokutsu-dachi | 後屈立ち | back stance | Weight sits back — around seventy per cent on the rear leg — with the feet at right angles and the hips half-facing. It is a receiving stance: the body is already withdrawn, so a block can meet an attack without the defender having to retreat first, and the front foot is light enough to kick with. |
| shuto-uke | 手刀受け | knife-hand block | An open hand, fingers together and thumb folded in, striking or receiving with the muscled edge below the little finger. Almost always performed in the back stance, it is a block that is already a strike, which is why so many kata use it to turn a corner. |
| yoko-geri-keage | 横蹴り蹴上げ | side snap kick | A sideways kick that snaps up and out with the edge of the foot and is pulled straight back. It is quick and light rather than heavy, aimed at whatever is exposed on the way past, and it is usually paired in kata with a back-fist to the same side. |
| 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. |
| kakiwake-uke | 掻き分け受け | wedge block | Both wrists cross in front of the chest and then drive apart, forcing a two-handed grab or a lapel grip open from the inside. It is one of the few techniques whose application is unmistakable the moment somebody grabs you and you do it. |
| mae-geri | 前蹴り | front kick | The knee lifts first, then the lower leg snaps out and returns along the same path, striking with the ball of the foot. Lifting the knee before extending is what makes it a kick rather than a swing, and it is the first kick every student is taught for that reason. |
| empi-uchi | 肘打ち | elbow strike | A strike with the point of the elbow, forward, upward, sideways or backward. It is the hardest weapon on the body and it only works in close, so a kata that uses one is telling you the distance the sequence is imagining. |
| hiza-geri | 膝蹴り | knee strike | A strike with the point of the knee, driven upward. In kata it is nearly always accompanied by both hands pulling downward, which tells you the application: the head or the arm is being brought onto the knee rather than the knee travelling to find it. |
| zenkutsu-dachi | 前屈立ち | front stance | The long forward stance: front knee bent over the toes, back leg straight, roughly seventy per cent of the weight on the front foot. It is the stance that lets a technique carry the whole body behind it, and the reason the first kata a student learns is mostly walking. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Heian Yondan.
There is no verified video of Heian Yondan 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.