Gojushiho Dai - Advance Kata for tournament

The predominant stance is Neko-achi-dachi (cat stance), all done on the left leg which makes this kata though of your left quads. The trade mark hand position is the wood pecker and it appears throughout the kata.

The following information is what I've dug up from a quick search online. 

Here's the wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) description of the Gojushiho kata series. 

Gojūshiho (五十四歩 lit. 54 steps^?) is a kata practiced in karate. In some styles of karate, there are two versions of this kata - Gojūshiho Shō andGojūshiho Dai. An advantage of the two versions of the kata is to better master the difficult techniques presented therein, but not without facing some confusion, for many sequences are the same and others only slightly different. The embusen of both Gojūshiho Shō and Gojūshiho Dai are nearly identical. Gojūshiho Shō begins straight off with a wide variety of advanced techniques and, as such, is highly recommended for study.Gojūshiho Dai consists of many advanced open-handed techniques and attacks to the collar bone.

Gojūshiho Shō and Gojūshiho Dai are two versions in Shotokan of the same, single Shōrin-ryū kata called Useishi (54) or Gojūshiho. Originally, the names were reversed so that Dai was called Shō, and Shō was called Dai. The name change seems to have happened sometime in the 1960's or 1970's.

It should be noted that, within the Shotokan Karate-dō International Federation of Kanazawa Hirokazu, the "Dai" and "Shō" forms are reversed.

Here's a couple of different performances of the kata on youtube:

Here's Sensei Kanazawa performing the same kata, although he calls it Gojushiho Sho (as outlined in the wikipedia article above)

Here's another version!

There's some interesting commentary on this version with Sensei Ohta:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOXm5kO2nrk

The author has requested that I don't embed it here on our site but the link will bring you to the video regardless!

Here's an epic version of the kata with some serious movie editing to accentuate the power of the movements. Performed by Sensei Carlos Rocha II

Here's a brief description of the kata from www.TheShotokanWay.com:  http://www.theshotokanway.com/gojushihodai.html.

For those of you who wish to print off a picture diagram of the kata, visit this site: http://www.karate-psv-hattingen.de/images/Kata/GojushihoDai_g.gif

Enjoy!!!