VashHash wrote: ↑Thu Oct 22, 2020 8:18 am
Horse stance is the basis of all martial arts. Without horse stance you have nothing.
On a more serious note Mark Dacascos has a lot of experience in horse stance. Also a very interesting journey that leads back to horse stance. Jump to about 7:00 and 16:40 for horse stance. If you have the time it's a really good interview.
https://youtu.be/ygvdRXCwFoQ
You are very right. Thanks for posting that. And you know what? Mark Dacascos is another child of martial artists that had totally slipped my mind as someone who became very, very good. And I should have remembered, because my Choy Lee Fut Kung Fu teacher knew his father, Al Dacascos, very well back in the ‘70s.
As far as horse stance, or more appropriately horse riding stance, all of my TCMA (traditional Chinese martial arts) teachers placed a heavy emphasis on stance development. The longest I’ve held the full “square horse stance” (the most basic ) without coming up or changing position was 40 minutes, and that was only a few times. Mostly it was from 5 to 15, and sometimes 20 minutes in the one position. Most people can barely even do one minute. There are other stances, too (I’m simplifying the names): forward stance, hanging stance (cat stance), twist stance, golden rooster (one-legged crane stance), etc., that also need to be held on each side for periods of time (but not as long as the basic horse stance). It wasn’t uncommon to take most of an hour on just holding stances alone in my training. Then there was transitional footwork training, so as not to develop only static power.
My statement in my last post about being dubious regarding the Silat practitioner’s horse stance training was about her saying she holds (or practices) just the horse stance for 3 to 5 hours at a time. I took her meaning to be that she holds the position without coming up for that amount of time. Maybe she can do it (many amazing things are possible and do happen in this world), but that would make her the only person I’ve ever heard of who can do that. During their developmental stages, many of the old-time masters had to hold their horse stance, without coming up out of it, for the length of the burning of an incense stick, reportedly about 45 minutes. Which is amazing, especially in these modern times, but still not close to 3 to 5 hours.
The first Kung Fu teacher I had in Taiwan, who taught Northern Tanglang (Mantis), told us his entire first year of training was only stances (his training began at age 10 in 1925, in China’s Shandong Province). He was a live-in disciple of his teacher, who was not above beating students for laziness or disobedience. But even he never claimed to hold his horse stance for 3 to 5 hours at a time. He practiced them throughout the day, in addition to all of his daily chores as a live-in student. After his first year, he began learning movements; only one new movement per month for years; and if at month’s end he hadn’t perfected the last movement and its applications to his teacher’s satisfaction, he had to wait another month to be taught the next technique. Of course, he couldn’t have taught that way himself; he never would have kept any students.
Jim