Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

A good stance is every bit as important as individual attacking or defensive techniques, but many people don’t seem to realise just how important they are. A good solid stance will make it harder for an attacker to push you around or knock or throw you down, and will also influence both the range of different techniques available to you and also the power that you can put into any given technique.

Most martial arts have their own unique stances, but there are some basic principles that are common to them all which I will explain here, along with some additional considerations specific to street fighting self defense.

The most important thing that a stance must give you is stability. The most stable ‘general’ stance, for dealing with any eventuality, is a ’square stance’. This means that the distance sideways between your right and left foot is the same as the distance in the other direction between your front and back foot. Basically you should imagie that you are standing on a square, with (for example) your left foot on the front left corner, and your other foot on the back right corner. This gives you maximum stability in every direction.

Whatever stance you use you should alwats keep your knees slightly bent and in most stances you should make sure that your toes are pointing towards your opponent. Generally a defensive stance has the arms crossed in an X to provide maximum coverage, an attacking stance has uncrossed arms, and a median stance has the arms slightly crossed over.

If you want to do a little training to increase the strength of your stance there is a great exercise used in kung fu called the horse stance, which develops the specific kind of strength needed for a powerful, immovable stance. To do this just place your feet about one and a half to two times your shouder width apart and then bend your knees until your thighs are almost parallel to the ground, and then hold that position for as long as you can, making sure that you keep your back straight and dont lean forwards. If you can hold it for one minute then you have pretty strong legs, and if you can hold it for 5 minutes you will have developed a very strong stance.

In street fighting the ‘ready stance’ that you adopt in anticipation of violence can also be used to influence your opponent psychologically and gain the element of surprise. Holding your arms out with the hands open and palms facing your opponent is an unaggressive appeasing gesture, but it is also an effective fighting stance which easily allows both strikes and grabs. If you are trying to talk your way out of a situation then this kind of body language can help in talking someone down, but if they do attack then you can really catch them by surprise because they will often assume that you just aren’t prepared for a fight (because it’s not an obvious fighting stance), whereas in actual fact you are in the perfect stance to defend and counter attack.

I’ll write more about specific stances (such as for fighting mutiple opponents) and stance training in a later post.