A lot of us have seen the memes that talk about someone complaining about Horse stance, which is when someone else says that they need more Horse stance. It gets repeated in our Kung Fu classes often enough.
Most of those who’ve done any of the classes at AFC716 has been in a Horse stance. It’s the position we would be in if we were in a horse’s saddle on their back. Our feet are wide, our knees are bent, and our back is straight. Our head, shoulders and hips are stacked over the center of our feet.
The strength that training this stance offers our legs is why we use it. It’s not highly effective in any fight, which is why it’s typically not seen as a fighting stance martial artists use.
When training Horse stance for strength, we often get into the stance and stay there for long periods of time. I’ve recently pushed my students to stay in this position for 4 minutes. Each student trains it as low as they can manage holding the stance, but going no lower than if their thighs were parallel with the ground.
The lower we go, the tougher this becomes. Our breath picks up pace, our heart’s beat faster, and our thigh’s start to burn. Eventually, if we’re doing this as long as we can, our legs are so tired, that we can barely stand up after wards.
That being said, this is training for our Kung Fu classes, but not our Tai Chi Classes. The Kung Fu classes require, and build a great deal of strength. Our Tai Chi classes are a re-energizing, or a renewing exercise. Tai Chi builds our body’s energy back up, whereas, the Kung Fu uses that energy.
Why would we want to push ourselves to the point of muscle failure though? I’m sure we’ve all heard the term “No pain, no gain”. This gets to the heart of it.
Martial artists don’t love pain. We really want to stay healthy and live long lives. The strength we gain far outweighs any discomfort the training puts us through.
Any of our strengthening exercises builds each of us up. From our Kung Fu Blitz endurance only class, to our Kung Fu Fundamentals classes, to our Traditional Kung Fu Classes, our strengthening exercises do one thing… They build us up.
We not only have the strength to succeed, but the will to succeed, and drive to never give up! This is really why we need more Horse stance. It’s not about anything but building our strength. Physical, mental and spiritual strength. I would define spiritual strength here as our will, or our drive to keep improving. It’s all there in one stance, one exercise. It’s all there every time we do anything really. We just train this here.
Shifu Daniel