Where you stand on one leg with your hands up and out to sides.Isn't standing on one leg in a fight leaving you exposed and vulnerable? What techniques can you actually do from that stance anyway (other than jumping up and kicking with the leg that was on the ground like the karate kid).
Good question. Apart from the aspect of training, if you use it as a stance like in The Karate Kid in a real street fight or in a pub, it is comically useless. Movies are only movies and the moves are choreographed to captivate the audience's romanticism with Kungfu. But, having said this, the crane stance if used as a transitional move is a practical technique but both outstretched hands are either spear-hands or tiger-claws, not crane-beaks rising from the sides as in The Karate Kid. Or, if targeting only to the frontal opponent, both hands are forward, one fore and the other behind the front hand. The lifted leg is a frontal leg block either with the shin or knee. The knee must reach your solar plexus as a proper position. The whole centre-line is protected for an immediate instance, and is particularly used when there is a sneak attack from the front. But, don't ever use it as a stance waiting for an attack nor with any fanciful stances for that matter in real situations. To be effective with this technique, the person must be able to resist a frontal push while standing on one leg. To achieve this, he has to spend long hours on the 'horse-stance'. The common term for this single-legged stance is Golden Cockerel Standing On One leg, Jin Zi Du Li (my romanisation of Chinese is not to be trusted, but it sounds somewhat like that in Mandarin). As I said earlier, this is a transitional technique and really what follows after is the interesting part.
