Dedicated to discussing insights and misconceptions about this powerful art.
In this world of newest, greatest hybrid martial art/fighting system inventions, one of the aspects of Chinese martial arts criticized and questioned regularly by practitioners of something else is the stances that we train. It's reasonable enough in the 21st century to wonder why stances still matter or how they could possibly serve a real function in combat. Stances are a subject upon which I will write a number of times, because there is just so much about them that can be said.
The kung-fu community, in my opinion, has done a poor job of presenting the case for stances since the Chinese sifu started finally to open up and publicly present the deeper knowledge of their arts. The single thing that we have all done wrong is to take the static posture approach to explaining stances. "Here is a square horse, and here is how the weight is distributed, and here is how it is strong, and here is where it is weak and this is how it can be used." Of course, there is a photo of someone sitting in a fully flexed square horse in the book or the kung-fu magazine article and the discussion stops there. The problem is that it begins and ends with a discussion of a set, static posture. It's a fair enough discussion of the posture, but insufficient for understanding stances. It's bad enough for the uninitiated who is trying to understand the art and gauge its merits. It's terrible for the student who needs to think more deeply about all of his or her fighting tools and who will be hampered in his or her attempts to fight with real skill until he or she sees the real dynamism of the art.
Now, speaking for the version of Hung-Ga that I have learned, and only for that, I can say that the truth of stances is that they are not just postures, but the movement into those postures. In our style, stances are fighting tools. They are dynamic. They do things. For a student of Hung-Ga, it is well worth the time to pay great attention to how one moves into and out of stances and what is being achieved as the stance is adopted. In Hung-Ga, at least, a punching technique, for example, is not an arm movement. It is a body movement, and much of that movement is achieved by transitioning into a stance, then continuing the technique with the arm and waist as the feet are rooted and the leg muscles start the wave of energy that will drive the punch. The technique is what the entire body is doing, beginning to end, and the static posture mentioned earlier, the stance, is the culmination of the movement. It is an instant in time when the power is issued, and the body is placed, only momentarily, in a position designed to provide stability and limited exposure long enough to deliver the hit with 100 percent commitment and no more. When the technique is over, so too is the stance. In that sense, all stances, at least as we use them, are transitional.
So why sit in stances? Simple. It's a tried and true method to make the legs strong and to practice root in order to have the most solid and stable platform possible for that instant when the stance is applied. And if anything should clash with the boxer, the structure won't crumble. Just remember that in hung-ga training, we don't just sit, but also shift and twist and step and rise and sink through the stances, thus developing and internalizing the dynamism of the stances. This is the student's golden opportunity to closely study footwork and combat mobility. Besides, as a fighting tool, the stance can be actively attacking the other guys's structure. But that's for another day.
