The following post is excerpted from my article No Point: The Case Against Competition in the Martial Arts, which was published in the January 2001 issue of Taekwondo Times magazine.
While stances are an extremely important part of martial arts training; stances in and of themselves have no function. The purpose of a stance is to provide a suitable foundation from which techniques can be executed. Without a proper stance, a martial artist would have ineffective techniques, be they slow, off balance, or what have you; or would be unprepared for an incoming attack. For many tournament competitors, stances are more a way of answering the question, “How low can you go?” This approach to stances, while is may show strength and muscle control, does not show a true understanding of the purpose martial art stances should serve.
In Martial Arts Training interviews with Richard Branden and Suzann Kay Wancket, both of these tournament competitors stress the importance of leg strength, but fail to make the connection between deep stances and martial arts, other than their experience in the ring. “The great warrior Miyamoto Musashi once wrote, ‘Make your fighting stance your everyday stance, and make your everyday stance your fighting stance.’” [1] If Branden and Wancket were to take the advice of the man considered the greatest swordsman in history, they would either have to stand around in a stance so low as to be ineffective, or raise their stances to a natural level that will to allow them to be effective in a self-defense situation.
The insistence of low stances, knowing that they make reacting in a self-defense situation impossible, is an indicator that forms competitions are more about difficulty than effectiveness. Maybe someday a competitor will bow in and start singing “I am the very model of a modern major general” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, a difficult song and probably as irrelevant to martial arts as low stances. Difficulty isn’t relevant in the real world, especially since the simplest techniques are undoubtedly the most effective. The same is true of stances.
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[1] Blaur, Tony. “Where Do You Stand?” Martial Arts Training. May 1997: 45.
