Hard vs. Soft, with a twist

[exile]

The issue this thread raises—the status of low `hard' stances vs. higher `mobile' stances—is inherently interesting, a lot of useful views have been aired, and all in all the discussion seems valuable. Why shut it down at this point??

I think the whole question of `stances' deserves to be aired, and aired again, and again, if only because it is one of those wonderful cases in the MA in which people get sucked in by terminology and develop elaborate and emotionally deeply held positions based on deliberate... trickery, or maybe, more neutrally, `indirection' in the way MA techs have been presented (not trickery by them, but by earlier MAists trying to conceal major discoveries about combat). And stances are a beautiful example.

So far as I can tell, Anko Itosu was the one responsible for introducing the descriptions `front stance' and `back stance' into the karate-variant arts (Shito-ryu, Isshin-ryu, Shotokan, Taekwondo, Tang Soo Do, and all the rest). Well, we know that AI was interested in disguising the nature of the techs involved. There were school kids involved, after all, and the original apps literally involved butchery. So everything is disguised, and today we argue about `stances'. But what AI had in mind was something very different: the projection of weight into a tech.

What I am getting at (my own $.02 as always) is that for Itosu, a `stance' wasn't actually a thing, an entity on its own. In a sense, there is no `stance' in the fighting art that AI learned from Matusumura. But there are two basic fighting situations, where either (i) you project your body-weight full-strength forward into a tech designed to damage your oppo, with the weight playing a crucial rule in that tech, or (ii) you use your body weight to anchor your attacker—root him to the spot, so to speak—while you take him out with a combination of trapping and targetted striking moves as per the kata. In both of these scenarios, low fixed stances don't involve immobility, because you aren't moving freely. Rather, they encode bringing your body weight to bear to `back up' an armbar, a joint lock or a wrist lock to force your oppo into a vulnerable body position where a well-placed followup strike immobilizes him, and ends the fight. The katas, hyungs and other karate-based patterns faithfully record this use of `stances'—body-weight shifts—without any suggesting that these destructive uses of bodyweight are fixed `things' that constitute real, individual modes of movement.

There was a complaint about lack of examples. So OK, here are two examples, based on a very solid realistic bunkai for a basic response to a very common violence-initiation:

(i) Assailant grabs your shirt, expecting to immobilize you to help deliver a roundhouse `haymaker' punch. You place one hand on his (driving your thumb into the region between his thumb and forefinger), turn 90º pulling and twisting the wrist you counterseized, slam your other forearm down on his upper arm just (repeat, just) above the elbow of his now trapped grabbing arm, and... shift your bodyweight forward onto your front leg, bringing all 180 lbs or whatever to bear on that trapped elbow. He goes down fast, believe it!—he has no choice. And low stance here translates into maximum forceful application of bodyweight to the oppo's weak point above his trapped elbow. I've seen this done, and done it, in seminars matched with (very) noncompliant partners and it's scary how little choice they have when you aim you whole bodyweight at that one point on their locked arm, using the bony edge of your forearm to apply pressure. Here's the crucial point: drive your weight down low, and you will wind up in what looks like a classic low Shotokan front stance.

(ii) Assailant throws a straight punch at you. From your `fence' guard position (which you should have been in, in suitably concealed form, as soon as this guy started looking like trouble, probably 10 minutes ago or so) you deflect his punch to your inside, moving foward and taking control of his punching hand. Twist 90º, pulling him in the direction of his punch (he's gonna follow the punch, he doesn't have much choice!), shifting your weight mostly to the back leg as you twist, bring back your other elbow and ram it as hard as you can into his face, while keeping him trapped on that solidly weighted back leg. The lower your stance, i.e., the lower your bodyweight, the more effectively you've `anchored' them in a sitting-duck position waiting for your damaging, end-of-fight strike. The damage will be very impressive... especially to him. Again, I've used this tech in all but the very last detail on mock-fighting partners who were trying hard not to be decked, and it's quite an eye opener.

Now the point is, there are no `stances' here. You aren't assuming any particular position at all; you're moving freely, imposing controls on a hostile and violent attacker and using the positioning of that bodyweight to support the techs you've trained, techs which your kata or hyungs are an incredibly deep and broad library of (both (i) and (ii) are straight out of a number of TKD hyungs). It's not just that there's no either/or, you use both high/mobile and low/firm stances, and so on. It's more that the very notion of `stance' is mistaken: you move into whatever configuration and weight placement will support the combination of controlling and striking moves you are, on the basis of intelligent, realistic bunkai, choosing to apply in the current situation. What you do is based on evasion/deflection of strikes, establishment of control of the attacker based on that evasion, and delivery of maximum-level destructive force to the eyes, neck, throat, mouth, side of head and so on in order to take your assailant out of the aggression game for, um, a long, long time...

In order to respond to the habitual acts of violence which typically initiate a dangerous attack, you need a set of trained responses, a sound, physically realistic strategy which works with intinctive responses, and the willingness to deliver severely damaging force in a very short time interval. `Stances' are just code for how your bodyweight enters into the applications of your strategy.

 

[Steel Tiger]

The issue this thread raises—the status of low `hard' stances vs. higher `mobile' stances—is inherently interesting, a lot of useful views have been aired, and all in all the discussion seems valuable. Why shut it down at this point??

I think the whole question of `stances' deserves to be aired, and aired again, and again, if only because it is one of those wonderful cases in the MA in which people get sucked in by terminology and develop elaborate and emotionally deeply held positions based on deliberate... trickery, or maybe, more neutrally, `indirection' in the way MA techs have been presented. And stances are a beautiful example.

So far as I can tell, Anko Itosu was the one responsible for introducing the descriptions `front stance' and `back stance' into the karate-variant arts (Shito-ryu, Isshin-ryu, Shotokan, Taekwondo, Tang Soo Do, and all the rest). Well, we know that AI was interested in disguising the nature of the techs involved. There were school kids involved, after all, and the original apps literally involved butchery. So everything is disguised, and today we argue about `stances'. But what AI had in mind was something very different: the projection of weight into a tech.

What I am getting at (my own $.02 as always) is that for Itosu, a `stance' wasn't actually a thing, an entity on its own. In a sense, there is no `stance' in the fighting art that AI learned from Matusumura. But there are two basic fighting situations, where either (i) you project your body-weight full-strength forward into a tech designed to damage your oppo, with the weight playing a crucial rule in that tech, or (ii) you use your body weight to anchor your attacker—root him to the spot, so to speak—while you take him out with a combination of trapping and targetted striking moves as per the kata. In both of these scenarios, low fixed stances don't involve immobility, because you aren't moving freely. Rather, they encode bringing your body weight to bear to `back up' an armbar, a joint lock or a wrist lock to force your oppo into a vulnerable body position where a well-placed followup strike immobilizes him, and ends the fight. The katas, hyungs and other karate-based patterns faithfully record this use of `stances'—body-weight shifts—without any suggesting that these destructive uses of bodyweight are fixed `things' that constitute real, individual modes of movement.

There was a complaint about lack of examples. So OK, here are two examples, based on a very solid realistic bunkai for a basic response to a very common violence-initiation:

(i) Assailant grabs your shirt, expecting to immobilize you to help deliver a roundhouse `haymaker' punch. You place one hand on his (driving your thumb into the region between his thumb and forefinger), turn 90º pulling and twisting the wrist you counterseized, slam your other forearm down on his upper arm just (repeat, just) above the elbow of his now trapped grabbing arm, and... shift your bodyweight forward onto your front leg, bringing all 180 lbs or whatever to bear on that trapped elbow. He goes down fast, believe it!—he has no choice. And low stance here translates into maximum forceful application of bodyweight to the oppo's weak point above his trapped elbow. I've seen this done, and done it, in seminars matched with (very) noncompliant partners and it's scary how little choice they have when you aim you whole bodyweight at that one point on their locked arm, using the bony edge of your forearm to apply pressure. Here's the crucial point: drive your weight down low, and you will wind up in what looks like a classic low Shotokan front stance.

(ii) Assailant throws a straight punch at you. From your `fence' guard position (which you should have been in, in suitably concealed form, as soon as this guy started looking like trouble, probably 10 minutes ago or so) you deflect his punch to your inside, moving foward and taking control of his punching hand. Twist 90º, pulling him in the direction of his punch (he's gonna follow the punch, he doesn't have much choice!), shifting your weight mostly to the back leg as you twist, bring back your other elbow and ram it as hard as you can into his face, while keeping him trapped on that solidly weighted back leg. The lower your stance, i.e., the lower your bodyweight, the more effectively you've `anchored' them in a sitting-duck position waiting for your damaging, end-of-fight strike. The damage will be very impressive... especially to him. Again, I've used this tech in all but the very last detail on mock-fighting partners who were trying hard not to be decked, and it's quite an eye opener.

Now the point is, there are no `stances' here. You aren't assuming any particular position at all; you're moving freely, imposing controls on a hostile and violent attacker and using the positioning of that bodyweight to support the techs you've trained, techs which your kata or hyungs are an incredibly deep and broad library of (both (i) and (ii) are straight out of a number of TKD hyungs). It's not just that there's no either/or, you use both high/mobile and low/firm stances, and so on. It's more that the very notion of `stance' is mistaken: you move into whatever configuration and weight placement will support the combination of controlling and striking moves you are, on the basis of intelligent, realistic bunkai, choosing to apply in the current situation. What you do is based on evasion/deflection of strikes, establishment of control of the attacker based on that evasion, and delivery of maximum-level destructive force to the eyes, neck, throat, mouth, side of head and so on in order to take your assailant out of the aggression game for, um, a long, long time...

In order to respond to the habitual acts of violence which typically initiate a dangerous attack, you need a set of trained responses, a sound, physically realistic strategy which works with intinctive responses, and the willingness to deliver severely damaging force in a very short time interval. `Stances' are just code for how your bodyweight enters into the applications of your strategy.

Very interesting. I can see exactly where you are coming from. Speaking from a CMA background, though, stances are strange hybrid entities that need discussion and explanation. Their origin as individual positions may stem from a similar attempt to hide the actuality of the techniques employing them, or it may not I don't really know.

I have eight basic stances that I teach. These are fundamental to understanding movement and balance. When learning the stances, students move from one to another, usually through a horse stance (ie horse to left mountain-climbing, back to horse, then to right mountain-climbing, or in Mandarin - ma bu, deng shan bu, ma bu, deng shan bu). This allows the student to understand and feel the movement into and between these balanced positions.

Thus when learning the forms they already have an understanding of position and motion.

Of course, when doing application work the classical shape of the forms is contracted, so mountain-climbing becomes a forward step off-line or a forward movement into a strike.

I like your examples, especially the first one. Its a lot like a qinna technique I know called "Placing Incense at the Altar".

 

[exile]

Very interesting. I can see exactly where you are coming from. Speaking from a CMA background, though, stances are strange hybrid entities that need discussion and explanation. Their origin as individual positions may stem from a similar attempt to hide the actuality of the techniques employing them, or it may not I don't really know.

That wouldn't surprise me in the least, ST. I have the impression, from various sources I've read that struck me as reliable, that the Chinese went furthest of all in concealing the technical apparata that their forms contain. In Okinawa, Japan and Korea, so far as I can tell, MA techs weren't proprietary family secrets. Yes, they might be dojo/dojang secrets in the karate-based arts, and kept relatively secret in that context; but CMAs techs were much more like crown jewels, trump cards that you might have to play against the bozos from next door when 15 of their nastier twelfth cousins showed up to settle that eight-generation-old argument about property boundaries you've had going... settle it at your expense, naturally.

I have eight basic stances that I teach. These are fundamental to understanding movement and balance. When learning the stances, students move from one to another, usually through a horse stance (ie horse to left mountain-climbing, back to horse, then to right mountain-climbing, or in Mandarin - ma bu, deng shan bu, ma bu, deng shan bu). This allows the student to understand and feel the movement into and between these balanced positions.

Thus when learning the forms they already have an understanding of position and motion.

Of course, when doing application work the classical shape of the forms is contracted, so mountain-climbing becomes a forward step off-line or a forward movement into a strike.

I like your examples, especially the first one. Its a lot like a qinna technique I know called "Placing Incense at the Altar".

You can tell, I believe, that I was just talking about the basics of the stance situation in the OJK-MAs... In the perspective I've been developing (none of it original, alas... or maybe, not alas; I wouldn't want too much to hang on the basis of my own still-naive judgments), things like 180º turns in kata/hyungs aren't necessarily simply ways to show how the tech works on the other side (the assumption being that every tech needs to be shown on both the right and left side, that there is some kind of requirement of symmetry in the display of technique). There may well be such a convention in kata structure, but it's also true that the 180º turns correspond to throws: trap your oppo, deck him with a blow to the neck/throat/head, and then, converting the striking hand into a grabbing hand (standard muchimi tech in Okinawan and Japanese practice), turn quickly in the opposite direction to throw the fairly stunned oppo to the ground, or near the ground (but still in the crosshairs of a followup strike to the head on the `new' side).

I'm very interested in what you say about the existence of an explicit CMA technique (the `Incense/Alter' example you mention) which matches the KMA tech I mentioned, which is itself derivative from O/J-MA bunkai. Here's what it suggests to me.... just this: that all fighting arts with any depth have discovered the basic logic of unarmed combat (including the role of `stances', i.e., the way to position bodyweight in support of a specific tech), and have devised ways to express those discoveries. I'd expect it to go back further in the CMAs than anywhere else... after all, Chinese kids were cramming for civil service exams at a time when their counterparts in what is now Europe were, in Disraeli's wonderful phrase, painting themselves blue and howling at the moon.

So I very strongly suspect that if we took the assembled technical content of the O/J/K arts and compared them to the CMAs, we'd find everthing the former has to offer pretty much attested in the latter going back hundreds or thousands of years. But emphasis and training come into it as well: Matsumura's linear karate was probably a specialized development of possibilities in the CMAs never fully developed, which suited the 19th c. Okinawan scene in a way that hadn't been taken advantage of previously...

 

[Steel Tiger]

That wouldn't surprise me in the least, ST. I have the impression, from various sources I've read that struck me as reliable, that the Chinese went furthest of all in concealing the technical apparata that their forms contain. In Okinawa, Japan and Korea, so far as I can tell, MA techs weren't proprietary family secrets. Yes, they might be dojo/dojang secrets in the karate-based arts, and kept relatively secret in that context; but CMAs techs were much more like crown jewels, trump cards that you might have to play against the bozos from next door when 15 of their nastier twelfth cousins showed up to settle that eight-generation-old argument about property boundaries you've had going... settle it at your expense, naturally.

It is quite explicit in the taiji community. Techniques were changed to remove or obscure elements. All done to protect those valuable family secrets, just in case someone learned the art from somewhere else.

You can tell, I believe, that I was just talking about the basics of the stance situation in the OJK-MAs... In the perspective I've been developing (none of it original, alas... or maybe, not alas; I wouldn't want too much to hang on the basis of my own still-naive judgments), things like 180º turns in kata/hyungs aren't necessarily simply ways to show how the tech works on the other side (the assumption being that every tech needs to be shown on both the right and left side, that there is some kind of requirement of symmetry in the display of technique). There may well be such a convention in kata structure, but it's also true that the 180º turns correspond to throws: trap your oppo, deck him with a blow to the neck/throat/head, and then, converting the striking hand into a grabbing hand (standard muchimi tech in Okinawan and Japanese practice), turn quickly in the opposite direction to throw the fairly stunned oppo to the ground, or near the ground (but still in the crosshairs of a followup strike to the head on the `new' side).

180° turns in the forms I know also represent throws, two I can think of right now are quite explicit (but tiger forms are like that).

I'm very interested in what you say about the existence of an explicit CMA technique (the `Incense/Alter' example you mention) which matches the KMA tech I mentioned, which is itself derivative from O/J-MA bunkai. Here's what it suggests to me.... just this: that all fighting arts with any depth have discovered the basic logic of unarmed combat (including the role of `stances', i.e., the way to position bodyweight in support of a specific tech), and have devised ways to express those discoveries. I'd expect it to go back further in the CMAs than anywhere else... after all, Chinese kids were cramming for civil service exams at a time when their counterparts in what is now Europe were, in Disraeli's wonderful phrase, painting themselves blue and howling at the moon.

The Placing Incense technique is part of the "dividing the muscle" school and the version I know comes from the snake techniques of Western Wu Dang. It develops from a throat grap, but could easily work from a lapel or gi, or kimono grap as well. I don't really know how old it might be, but probably a couple of hundred years. I cannot but agree about all fighting arts with any depth discovering an underlying logic to unarmed combat.

By the way if you want to see an interesting demonstration of this qinna tech, check out Jet Li's film Once Upon a Time in China II. He teaches it to aunt Yee.

So I very strongly suspect that if we took the assembled technical content of the O/J/K arts and compared them to the CMAs, we'd find everthing the former has to offer pretty much attested in the latter going back hundreds or thousands of years. But emphasis and training come into it as well: Matsumura's linear karate was probably a specialized development of possibilities in the CMAs never fully developed, which suited the 19th c. Okinawan scene in a way that hadn't been taken advantage of previously...

My first teacher went to Shaolin in 1984 and was able to train with three little old men. They were the only actual monks at the temple (they were prohibited from teaching Chan Buddhism, however, so the line died with them). He brought back video footage of one performing a form and, for the life of me, I thought I was watching a Karate kata.

 

[Drac]

I'm mostly just want this thread to die. I want it to end before I'm tempted to get rude. Also, I'm hoping that if it gets locked I will stop getting negitive rep from people who shall remain nameless. Mostly because they're a coward.

Why is it that everytime someone gets a negative rep and the sender refuses to attach their name they get called coward??? I've been neg repped numerous times and no name was attached..I didn't say a word..I figured I did something to earn it

 

[MJS]

The issue this thread raises—the status of low `hard' stances vs. higher `mobile' stances—is inherently interesting, a lot of useful views have been aired, and all in all the discussion seems valuable. Why shut it down at this point??

I think the whole question of `stances' deserves to be aired, and aired again, and again, if only because it is one of those wonderful cases in the MA in which people get sucked in by terminology and develop elaborate and emotionally deeply held positions based on deliberate... trickery, or maybe, more neutrally, `indirection' in the way MA techs have been presented (not trickery by them, but by earlier MAists trying to conceal major discoveries about combat). And stances are a beautiful example.

So far as I can tell, Anko Itosu was the one responsible for introducing the descriptions `front stance' and `back stance' into the karate-variant arts (Shito-ryu, Isshin-ryu, Shotokan, Taekwondo, Tang Soo Do, and all the rest). Well, we know that AI was interested in disguising the nature of the techs involved. There were school kids involved, after all, and the original apps literally involved butchery. So everything is disguised, and today we argue about `stances'. But what AI had in mind was something very different: the projection of weight into a tech.

What I am getting at (my own $.02 as always) is that for Itosu, a `stance' wasn't actually a thing, an entity on its own. In a sense, there is no `stance' in the fighting art that AI learned from Matusumura. But there are two basic fighting situations, where either (i) you project your body-weight full-strength forward into a tech designed to damage your oppo, with the weight playing a crucial rule in that tech, or (ii) you use your body weight to anchor your attacker—root him to the spot, so to speak—while you take him out with a combination of trapping and targetted striking moves as per the kata. In both of these scenarios, low fixed stances don't involve immobility, because you aren't moving freely. Rather, they encode bringing your body weight to bear to `back up' an armbar, a joint lock or a wrist lock to force your oppo into a vulnerable body position where a well-placed followup strike immobilizes him, and ends the fight. The katas, hyungs and other karate-based patterns faithfully record this use of `stances'—body-weight shifts—without any suggesting that these destructive uses of bodyweight are fixed `things' that constitute real, individual modes of movement.

There was a complaint about lack of examples. So OK, here are two examples, based on a very solid realistic bunkai for a basic response to a very common violence-initiation:

(i) Assailant grabs your shirt, expecting to immobilize you to help deliver a roundhouse `haymaker' punch. You place one hand on his (driving your thumb into the region between his thumb and forefinger), turn 90º pulling and twisting the wrist you counterseized, slam your other forearm down on his upper arm just (repeat, just) above the elbow of his now trapped grabbing arm, and... shift your bodyweight forward onto your front leg, bringing all 180 lbs or whatever to bear on that trapped elbow. He goes down fast, believe it!—he has no choice. And low stance here translates into maximum forceful application of bodyweight to the oppo's weak point above his trapped elbow. I've seen this done, and done it, in seminars matched with (very) noncompliant partners and it's scary how little choice they have when you aim you whole bodyweight at that one point on their locked arm, using the bony edge of your forearm to apply pressure. Here's the crucial point: drive your weight down low, and you will wind up in what looks like a classic low Shotokan front stance.

(ii) Assailant throws a straight punch at you. From your `fence' guard position (which you should have been in, in suitably concealed form, as soon as this guy started looking like trouble, probably 10 minutes ago or so) you deflect his punch to your inside, moving foward and taking control of his punching hand. Twist 90º, pulling him in the direction of his punch (he's gonna follow the punch, he doesn't have much choice!), shifting your weight mostly to the back leg as you twist, bring back your other elbow and ram it as hard as you can into his face, while keeping him trapped on that solidly weighted back leg. The lower your stance, i.e., the lower your bodyweight, the more effectively you've `anchored' them in a sitting-duck position waiting for your damaging, end-of-fight strike. The damage will be very impressive... especially to him. Again, I've used this tech in all but the very last detail on mock-fighting partners who were trying hard not to be decked, and it's quite an eye opener.

Now the point is, there are no `stances' here. You aren't assuming any particular position at all; you're moving freely, imposing controls on a hostile and violent attacker and using the positioning of that bodyweight to support the techs you've trained, techs which your kata or hyungs are an incredibly deep and broad library of (both (i) and (ii) are straight out of a number of TKD hyungs). It's not just that there's no either/or, you use both high/mobile and low/firm stances, and so on. It's more that the very notion of `stance' is mistaken: you move into whatever configuration and weight placement will support the combination of controlling and striking moves you are, on the basis of intelligent, realistic bunkai, choosing to apply in the current situation. What you do is based on evasion/deflection of strikes, establishment of control of the attacker based on that evasion, and delivery of maximum-level destructive force to the eyes, neck, throat, mouth, side of head and so on in order to take your assailant out of the aggression game for, um, a long, long time...

In order to respond to the habitual acts of violence which typically initiate a dangerous attack, you need a set of trained responses, a sound, physically realistic strategy which works with intinctive responses, and the willingness to deliver severely damaging force in a very short time interval. `Stances' are just code for how your bodyweight enters into the applications of your strategy.

Great points as always! I agree with not shutting it down. We have a great thread, great replies, so IMHO, if someone chooses not to reply, thats fine.

As far as stances go...I think alot of times when people view stances, they tend to view them as something that are a) static or b) held for a certain amount of time. I feel that many stances are used to flow from one move to the next. During a SD technique, I may 'transition' to a neutral bow stance (Kenpo) during my initial block, but its nothing that I maintain, as I flow to the next move.

As far as sparring goes..again, when I spar, I do my best to stay loose and keep moving. When a strike is thrown, you become static for a brief moment, so to allow proper body mechanics, but then its right back to moving again.

Just my .02

Mike

 

[Em MacIntosh]

I like to use a shigo dachi (similar to a horse stance) in sparring sometimes. I've never been told not to do it, but most people don't think it's a good idea. I pull my punch when it makes contact but I put the full force of my stance behind it. Often I'll step on someone's foot and they get stuck just long enough for a strike and a takedown. You can move pretty fast in a rooted stance if you practice it enough. Tight but loose...still working on that. As are many you, I imagine.

 

[Shotgun Buddha]

The only logical answer for this question is this: Whatever the situation demands.
Both static and loose positioning have their uses and are used to accomplish different things.
In order to deal with a grappler, you have to maintain solid stance, but also have the mobilty to shift weight another solid position.
In order to strike and deal with a striker, you have to be light enough on your feet that you can evade and position for striking, but solid enough to correctly deliver weight to your strikes.
Consequently the logical approach would be to always maintain solid connection with the ground, and maintain tight body mechanics, but moving in a loose relaxed manner.

Remember, economy of motion is one of the core principals of combat. You only ever move as much as you need to. This is coupled with the principal of positioning. Always place yourself in the position which places you closest to achieving your objective.
So whatever stance you use should always try use the smallest movement possible to achieve the largest possible gain.
Stances that involve an excessive amount of movement simply leave you vulnerable.

 

[Nomad]

I think the whole question of `stances' deserves to be aired, and aired again, and again, if only because it is one of those wonderful cases in the MA in which people get sucked in by terminology and develop elaborate and emotionally deeply held positions based on deliberate... trickery, or maybe, more neutrally, `indirection' in the way MA techs have been presented (not trickery by them, but by earlier MAists trying to conceal major discoveries about combat). And stances are a beautiful example.

I cut your quote for the sake of brevity, but wanted to thank you for stating explicitely what one of my earlier posts was trying to get at, in a much more eloquent fashion. I couldn't agree more. :asian:

 

[Blindside]

As far as stances go...I think alot of times when people view stances, they tend to view them as something that are a) static or b) held for a certain amount of time. I feel that many stances are used to flow from one move to the next. During a SD technique, I may 'transition' to a neutral bow stance (Kenpo) during my initial block, but its nothing that I maintain, as I flow to the next move.

In Pekiti Tirsia Kali, there are no stances, all positions are transitions to the next. There are right and wrong ways of moving, but no "stances."

Lamont

 

[Steel Tiger]

As far as stances go...I think alot of times when people view stances, they tend to view them as something that are a) static or b) held for a certain amount of time. I feel that many stances are used to flow from one move to the next. During a SD technique, I may 'transition' to a neutral bow stance (Kenpo) during my initial block, but its nothing that I maintain, as I flow to the next move.

Mike, I have made bold the point that really leaped out at me in your post. This is an attitude that has been accentuated by the vast number of MA movies around where adopt a stance before and after delivering a technique. It seems to have seaped into the mindset of many people, that that is what stances are for.

Having said that, I should point out in some of the forms I know there are points called mai (not exactly sure of the spelling). These are places where you pause momentarily, usually after a powerful, or supposedly lethal technique has been delivered.

 

[jks9199]

I think I'd have rephrased the original topic as being about using solid/rooted stances or more flexible/mobile stances; I don't think that high always means mobile/loose or low always means solid/rooted. Yes -- generally, lower stances are more rooted, but there are people who, through training, are amazingly mobile even in a "low" stance (a recent post that showed a Mantis form is a great example). But -- you've got to root/anchor, however briefly and whether on one or both feet, to generate power beyond your own muscle power. And, unless you've got incredibly fast hands to block with, there are times when you need to be loose and mobile.

The real trick is being able to shift from hard to mobile as you need...

 

[Steel Tiger]

I think I'd have rephrased the original topic as being about using solid/rooted stances or more flexible/mobile stances; I don't think that high always means mobile/loose or low always means solid/rooted. Yes -- generally, lower stances are more rooted, but there are people who, through training, are amazingly mobile even in a "low" stance (a recent post that showed a Mantis form is a great example). But -- you've got to root/anchor, however briefly and whether on one or both feet, to generate power beyond your own muscle power. And, unless you've got incredibly fast hands to block with, there are times when you need to be loose and mobile.

The real trick is being able to shift from hard to mobile as you need...

Its a good point you make that a low stance is not necessarily a static or immobile one.

Yes, transition is the name of the game.

 

[exile]

As far as stances go...I think alot of times when people view stances, they tend to view them as something that are a) static or b) held for a certain amount of time. I feel that many stances are used to flow from one move to the next. During a SD technique, I may 'transition' to a neutral bow stance (Kenpo) during my initial block, but its nothing that I maintain, as I flow to the next move.

As far as sparring goes..again, when I spar, I do my best to stay loose and keep moving. When a strike is thrown, you become static for a brief moment, so to allow proper body mechanics, but then its right back to moving again.

Just my .02

Mike

Mike, I have made bold the point that really leaped out at me in your post. This is an attitude that has been accentuated by the vast number of MA movies around where adopt a stance before and after delivering a technique. It seems to have seaped into the mindset of many people, that that is what stances are for.

Having said that, I should point out in some of the forms I know there are points called mai (not exactly sure of the spelling). These are places where you pause momentarily, usually after a powerful, or supposedly lethal technique has been delivered.

Its a good point you make that a low stance is not necessarily a static or immobile one.

Yes, transition is the name of the game.

I think there is a serious consensus reflected in the above posts, from a number of different practitioners with considerable collective experience in a range of martial arts (and many of the other posts above that I didn't post echo the same idea). The problem everyone is getting at is that a stance is a position which you assume and hold, whereas in the MAs, you can't do that in 99% of the cases or you're toast (the 1% being those cases where you've decisively taken out your oppo and are standing above his prone form flexing your biceps...)

I've appealed to this analogy from skiing before, so apologies to those who've already seen it, but it just seems so apt for this discussion. I taught and raced alpine skiing in the mid 1970s in Wyoming, and one of the interesting things about skiing in those days was that a whole generation of skiiers and some of their instructors were reared on the mechanically fallacious doctrine that the best, most efficient racing technique involved sitting back on your skis and letting them shoot out ahead of you. To get the needed leverage to pull yourself back onto your skis from that position so that you didn't wind up on your *** when you did this, boot manufacturers had to make ski boots which terminated at the top just below your knees... I'm not kidding! Take a look at some of the old Langs, circa 1978 or so, if you ever come across a museum of downhill ski technology, and you'll see what I mean. So where did people get such a hare-brained idea from??

The short story is that the French team that Killy was a member of was using a technique pioneered by one of their number named Patrick Russel, in which you pulled your legs up under you when you hit a mogul (or the top of a rut in a slalom course), thereby `swallowing' the rut, so the technique was christened avalement; when you do this, of course, you wind up looking like you're sitting back on your skis. But the fact is, at the moment you do this, you've effectively unweighted your skis, and what you do in that split second of unweighting is shift your body position to the new outside ski and then press forward, reweighting the ski so that it starts carving the new turn. Avalement is therefore nothing more than using the legs to `level out' the terrain, making it as two-dimensional as possible, and the key point is, you're only back on your skis at a transition point in the turn, when you're shifting your weight from one ski to the other in anticipation of the upcoming short radius turn. But in the photos, all people could see were racers who looked like they were sitting way back... as though they had assumed a static, sitting-back position and were riding hell-bent-for-lether two feet behind the tails of their Rossignols. It was bad skiing journalism, mostly, because a lot of the mags didn't really understand what was going on. When their own technicians finally figured it out, there were all kinds of articles about how you shouldn't sit back, how the racers weren't really sitting back but were rather unweighting via avalement, but by that point the damage had been done. And you'd see people blasting out of their bindings all over the place on ski hills as a result of slamming out of control into hip-high moguls because they's been sitting back at the beginning of the run.

Sanity returned by the mid-1980s, but it made a big impression on me, how a mistaken graphic image of what was happening—a picture which gave a serious misimpression of what the dynamical situation was—could lead people to take up physical positions that were just all wrong and then try to horse those positions into some semblance of effectiveness in action—in vain, of course. The idea of `assuming a stance' in the MAs and then acting as though that stance were your default, `home' position makes no more sense than the idea that you sit back on your skis because some photo of Killy on the way to another World Cup victory makes it look as though he has his center of gravity well behind the center of his skis. And the outcome is the same... you're gonna wind up bouncing along the ground, all black and blue, in either case!

 

[Steel Tiger]

Sanity returned by the mid-1980s, but it made a big impression on me, how a mistaken graphic image of what was happening—a picture which gave a serious misimpression of what the dynamical situation was—could lead people to take up physical positions that were just all wrong and then try to horse those positions into some semblance of effectiveness in action—in vain, of course. The idea of `assuming a stance' in the MAs and then acting as though that stance were your default, `home' position makes no more sense than the idea that you sit back on your skis because some photo of Killy on the way to another World Cup victory makes it look as though he has his center of gravity well behind the center of his skis. And the outcome is the same... you're gonna wind up bouncing along the ground, all black and blue, in either case!

I like your example my friend. I'm something of a fan of competition skiing, especially downhill, even though I don't ski myself. It is a strong point you make about misimpression of images, whether they be sporting photo stills or pictures in a MA manual, they lose their dynamism and allow people to make assumptions about what is, or should, be happening.

You made me think about some things with this example. The situation with stances and mobility is further complicated, at least in TCMA, by the use of stances to do strengthening and coordination work without reference to forms or applications. It can create confusion as to the nature of a stance when it is used in multiple ways.

 

[MJS]

Mike, I have made bold the point that really leaped out at me in your post. This is an attitude that has been accentuated by the vast number of MA movies around where adopt a stance before and after delivering a technique. It seems to have seaped into the mindset of many people, that that is what stances are for.

Having said that, I should point out in some of the forms I know there are points called mai (not exactly sure of the spelling). These are places where you pause momentarily, usually after a powerful, or supposedly lethal technique has been delivered.

I agree. I think that while the MA movies are good, as they give exposure to the arts, they're bad in the sense that people take what they see for granted.

As for the forms...yes, there are times while doing a form, that I stop or maintain a stance, however, its just for the purpose of the form. Like the movies, I think people tend to look at a form and think, "Well, if I'm doing it in the form, I probably will and should do it in a fight!" but again, thats a misunderstanding on their part IMHO. Similar those people that bash a kata, thinking that thats how you will fight.

Mike