Stances: An Observation

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Natural stances allow the type of movement necessary in self-defense while the often wide and deep stances are not.

The wide and deep are wonderful tools for exercise and keeping the legs strong, flexible (especially the mobility of the hips) and ???.

But, and you knew there was going to be a but, the are not good for self-defense, fighting or combatives. Deep stances reduce, limit and most of all STOP the momentum of you body mass required for power and force. In addition they require you to expose yourself as they result in a pause to reestablish moving and movement.

This does not occur with natural stances for the type of movement that allows you to instantly change tactics involving legs and movement and stability, etc., necessary for self-defense.

BUT, you knew there would be another but, this does not mean that deep stances don’t have a purpose it is just the deep stances in self-defense have a very limited purpose. At least from where I sit, deep stances are awesome when the power and force generation comes from the attacker attacking. In other words when you can use their mass movement as it approaches against them so taking a deep stance for stability, structure and the application of a methodology that actually relies on the attackers mass as it moves toward you to really apply a technique based on the proper methodology while applying principles to achieve a goal. 

BUT, you knew there would be yet another but, most rely on the deep stances assuming they are the best stance for the greatest application of force and power but in truth, not so much. 

First, assuming deep stances actually require more movement and that movement is a tell while the shorter, faster and natural stances with movement are much less likely to tell your attacker and allow you the freedom of movement necessary to get-r-done. 

Second, once in a deep stance and only if the attacker provides you the force and power to achieve a goal your strikes are going to be less powerful and less forceful and that means the attacker has an advantage. Add in that if your move and application fails the extra time and movement you have to do to leave that stance and move again is also a tell and it provides your attacker more time to act, time to act against you putting you on the defense and defending puts you at a disadvantage in an attack as in a self-defense situation. 

This once again also points out the importance of fundamental principles but more important their application in applying multiple methodologies in a self-defense situation. Mobility and speed are paramount and natural stances, provided you have time to use them cause most likely the attack was a complete surprise and your balance and structure were disrupted, so having multiple methodologies and an ability to utilize principles over technique based tactics will give you an opportunity to take back the advantage the attacker got right off the starting line. 

This is just my observation and theory toward a hypothesis toward a more applicable self-defense strategy to survive for survival is the real name of the game of life. Look at it as critical thinking so that one can practice and train so the “sensory motor predictions” of your brain, from the lizard, and create an internal model that will play a critical role in the motor actions necessary to get-r-done. 

I quote, “Our brains construction and make up permit us to transcend stimulus-response behavior, and instead confers the ability to make predictions ahead of actual sensory input. It is the prediction ability that allows us to execute a motor command compensating for the stimuli from vision to brain to be shortened so the hand meets the target through the predictions the brain uses to make it work and that is where training, etc., comes into play.”

The overall idea is to train and encode the brain, the mind, so that we optimize our actions toward survival while deep stances do have benefits in self-defense the likelihood of getting-r-done lies more in optimizing all our movements reducing tells and lengthening our lines so that we get-r-done quickly and efficiently while staying within the self-defense square. 

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