Part 1 of 2
What makes your Kung Fu high level and awesome? Many things! One of the most important is your stances. I recently wrote about the powerful synergy that Northern Shaolin develops by combining extremely low and long stances that develop great flexibility and incredible strength to enhance the speed and power of the dynamic high kicks of Northern Shaolin. In the next series of articles, I will look at three specific areas that you can focus on to improve your skills and level up your Kung Fu. The first topic we will examine is weight shifting.
When people are first learning classical combat-oriented Kung Fu like Northern Shaolin or Lan Shou Quan few peoples legs are ready. If you are fortunate to be learning Northern Shaolin, you will most likely find the Northen Legs with our deep stances and high kicks are not so easy. At first few people can do any of the stances of Northen Shaolin correctly. All of the stances require strength, balance, and body awareness combined and developed through practice.
At first stances are something you “get into” and you get “out of”. Each stance could be a major effort to get into as you line up your feet, ankles, knees, and hips correctly and then lower yourself into the full stance. The lowering yourself part is the hard part where we feel the stretching and strengthening occur.
Working your stances and developing your strength and skill in stances is a core part of your Kung Fu training regardless of style. If you want the strength, flexibility, and balance of proper stances you have to earn it by eating a little bitter and enduring the pain of stretching your hips and working your thighs, calves, shins, and hip muscles. This means lowering yourself downward lower than might be comfortable and still maintaining good posture. This is the “getting into the stance” and when you stand up and move onward that is “getting out of your stance”. Getting out of your stances does take effort too! Especially if it was a low stance!
Once you can correctly get into each stance you have achieved the first stage. Stances aren’t designed to be static poses like yoga. Even though when you are stretching and working your way into a difficult position it can feel like yoga, the purpose of our Kung Fu stances is different.
Sometimes I think people think the point of the stances is to have a “looking good moment” for the cameras, a place to pose and present a face, maybe a fearsome face or maybe a calm face, or a heroic face. This posing moment is more of a feature of modern wushu. If someone is attacking you and you need to defend yourself standing motionless striking a pose will certainly get you run over quickly.
Stay tuned for part 2: Unlocking the Essence of Movement and Power: The Art of Weight Shifting and Stance Transitions in Kung Fu
