Stances

Training stances is usually considered a boring practice, and most teachers no longer emphasize it as was traditionally done. Why? Because for a beginner it IS boring! No one can argue that stances are a fun practice for beginners. However I'd like to remind students of the Chinese maxim “Chi Ku” which translates as "Eat Bitter” or "Eating Bitterness". It is a Chinese phrase for enduring hardship to achieve the sweetness of power and/or success. We can't learn to read and write without first learning letters. They are the basic building blocks of written language. Letters let us build words, with words we make sentences, next come paragraphs and then pages of full of text; but without learning letters any attempt to learn to write will be amateurish and flawed (at best). The same applies to martial efforts. That said, it is imperative that students start by practicing breathing, posture and balance. Over millennia Chinese martial arts have found that the most effective exercise for a beginner to train all of these is by doing stance practice, first static then dynamic. Therefore the most fundamental part of my own teachings is stance practice.

I like to begin with Zhan Zhuang or “Standing Post” meditation described in an earlier post. This is about as basic as you can get in Tai Chi Chuan practice. The posture is basically a relaxed or at ease position which is universal to every normal human being on the planet. You stand with feet about shoulder width apart and try to relax; the only minor difference between this and the way every one on the planet regularly stands still is that the arms are kept in front of the body. Honestly it's simplicity itself and sounds like the most idiot-proof thing on the planet for anyone who's ever used an average human body to exist, but ask anyone who's ever done the practice and they'll tell you otherwise. Whenever you begin to train any traditional martial art of any sort the first thing you'll usually hear from senior students are all the horror stories about all the grueling, torturous exercises that are involved. For my Tai Chi Chuan students the first horror stories start from day one with this stance. Though as I and their seniors will gladly tell them there is a justification and a method for this practice; their efforts in the beginning will bear fruits later in their practice, the first of which is learning how to relax.

For many reasons learning to relax, especially when under pressure, is about the most difficult thing to learn for people any and every person who's ever been in a tense situation. Every professional fighter, as well as military and police personal the planet over will attest to this. The conundrum however is that the more relaxed we are in a tense situation the more easily we can act and overcome the threats and challenges before us. To solve this problem training has been created to accustom individuals to stressful situations. Over time the student is trained within ever more difficult and stressful scenarios so that they slowly learn to asses the danger without becoming tense themselves. We train to learn to be the calm eye in even the most terrible storm. Otherwise we tense up, slow down and get taken out.

Standing Post Meditation is the first “baby step” I employ with my students on the long road of exercises designed to accustom them to stop being tense. Essentially you learn how to get relaxed and stay relaxed in while the most comfortable posture possible. Once this first and most basic posture has become a comfortable practice for the student staying relaxed while holding other, more difficult, postures is trained. Which postures are trained will vary depending on the school and the style, but many are standard within the Chinese Martial arts as well as other styles across the globe. As the student begins to master how to correctly hold the postures comfortably the next step is dynamic movement. The students can now learn how to make the transitions from posture to posture quickly and effectively while staying relaxed and balanced. Only after all of this has been trained will students learn the basic forms so that they learn how to coordinate the upper and lower extremities (aka the six harmonies) in movement. This is another huge milestone and the precursor to learning techniques and applications.

I must remind the reader however that posture training is a vital and necessary first step in effective Tai Chi Chuan training; it's what allows the student to learn how to properly apply the techniques. Much like building any structure if you want it to stay up you need a firm base, doubly so if the structure has to sustain vibrations and/or movement. If you've ever tried to apply any technique without proper form all you're doing is opening yourself up to your opponent's counters. Any technique fails without proper form, merely becoming a detriment to the student's safety by leaving them open and distracting them from the actions of their opponent. Therefore I must emphasize the virtue of this most fundamental and basic of all trainings, after all any baby who tries to run before he/she can walk, or worse, stand is doomed to fall and cry; don't be that baby.

-Jon

Here are some links that may be helpful:
How to: Tai Chi Chuan stance training
Gilman Studio On-Line Lessons
In addition take a look at this book:
Tai Chi Chuan 24 & 48 Postures by Master Liang, Shou-Yu and Wu, Wen-Ching. In addition to explaining how to perform both forms it gives detailed instructions on all the poses along with step-by-step pictures. Definetely a good buy.