Tekki Sandan 鉄騎三段
Iron horse, third level
What Tekki Sandan is.
The longest and densest of the three, packing more technique into the same straight line and the same single stance than either of the others. Blocks arrive in rapid paired sequences with almost no travel between them, and the form demands that the hips keep supplying power at a tempo that leaves no room to reset. It is the form that shows whether the horse stance has actually become strong or has merely become familiar.
What it develops
- Sustained tempo — many techniques in succession with no recovery step
- Independent arm work, with each arm on its own task
- Rooted stability under fatigue, late in a long sequence
- Focus at the end of each technique rather than at the end of each phrase
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Tekki Sandan 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 Sandan.
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. |
| uchi-uke | 内受け | inside block | The mirror of the outside block: the forearm sweeps from inside the body outward, taking the attack on the inner side and opening the opponent up. Beginners regularly swap the two names, and the way to keep them straight is to name the direction the arm travels, not where it ends. |
| gedan-barai | 下段払い | downward sweep | The forearm sweeps down and across to clear an attack to the lower body, finishing just above the front thigh. It is the first block most students learn and it is a sweep rather than a stop — the arm brushes the attack off its line instead of meeting it head on. |
| 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. |
| kime | 決め | focus | The instantaneous tightening of the whole body at the end of a technique, followed immediately by release. It is what makes a karate technique stop dead rather than push, and a kata performed without it looks like a dance no matter how correct the shapes are. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Tekki Sandan.
There is no verified video of Tekki Sandan 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.