The "battle stance" of xingyi
Stances: the foundation of traditional martial arts Four years ago, almost to the day, I wrote an article about the function of stances in traditional martial arts. At the time I was pleased to see that my piece met with a fairly universal positive reaction in traditional martial circles - regardless of style. I suspect this is because almost all traditional martial arts share the same stances (more or less) and these are used for pretty much the same pedagogic reasons: You have a forward (or bow) stance, a reverse stance, a cat stance, a horse stance, a twisted stance and, from southern China and Okinawa, " sanzhan/sanchin " - an hourglass stance. While there are a host of other less common stances, for the most part these constitute nothing more than minor variations of, or transitions between, the previously-mentioned stances. The "odd man out": xingyi's principle stance But what if there were a stance that seemingly "bucked the trend...