I’m far from being an expert, but here is my current level of understanding of horse stance training.
Horse stance training should be done everyday because it is more of a stretching exercise than a strength building exercise. The muscles will certainly gain endurance but it’s the stretch in the hips that is the key. Like any stretching regimen, it should be done everyday.
Horse stance training is also good for making the mind stronger. We all know that holding a proper horse stance hurts like hell. It takes strength of will to overcome the pain.
Curving the lower back slightly such that the tailbone points a bit more forward helps steady you as you’re increasingly able to acquire that square looking horse stance while maintaining a vertical, straight back.
Ok… that’s enough of my BS for now.
Oh… I just about forgot. I prefer timing the duration of a horse stance by an analog clock as well. However, my true favorite is to listen to some nasty heavy metal music and try for the duration of a song. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the best.
My understanding of stretching is that you don’t have to do it everyday. And I wouldn’t say that horse is a stretching rather than a muscle building exercise. Personally I prefer to do it not everyday because of the strain it puts on your knees. But I suppose it depends on how much time you can hold it for, and the way you hold the stance.
Maybe the analogue clock helps psychologically because you are thinking “only another 20 seconds to go” rather than there being no end in sight.
Horse stance is good training - something i should really get back into…For me, i remember asking my Sifu this same question.
have any of you guys read the post on Southern Kung Fu to do with ‘high VS low stances’? There’s some pretty imformative posts there.
I think stance training should be done every day, to develop the posture, mind and qi. I have found that it makes me feel very warm once i get past the discomfort stage and relax.
Also i find doing Siu Lum Tao a similar experience, when i do it for a long time.
just my thoughts,
one of the breathing exercises i do can be done from pretty much any position, but is best from horse so i use this time as my stance training. the set takes anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes depending on whether i do half the set or the full set. i stand in a meidum stance most of the time and force myself to go lower if i start getting uncomfortable (which is very rare at this point).
immedietly after this i go into another breathing set without coming out of my stance to further work the legs. this set involves allot of going down to thighs parallel, holding, rising back to medium, and then back down again. all of this is done very slowly and the first couple times i did the sets back to back i thought i was going to cry. it took me about a month of this befoe i could stand in a medium horse stance forever. also when i say medium i don’t mean knees slightly bent, but with thighs less than 45 degrees to the floor but not quite 180 degrees.
what i have found from this is that it’s much easier to maintain your horse stance if you are doing something else allong with it. doing the sets forces me to focus on my center more than i think i’d be able to do otherwise. i think focusing on your center is key to relaxing and setteling into the stance at least for myself. if i start thinking about my legs being tired they want to tense up making it impossible.
my advice would be to do it every day and start giving yourself a regimin of so many punches or blocks to complete rather than watching a clock.
also make sure that you are really rooting with every single technique you dowhen sparring, flowing, practicing individual techniques, etc. no matter how tired your legs are always sink into the ground to give every punch, bock, even kick a stable base to work with.
if you didn’t need advice but was just wondering if it could be over trained my answer would obviously be no. i think it can only be undertrained.
If you’re doing a low and/or tense horse stance to build muscle, you should not do it more than every second day. If you’re doing stance training to build connectivity and relaxation, I think six days a week is best.
GDA - Even though we’re ‘just standing there,’ in my horse stance training, there is an awful lot going on. It’s definitely a whole body and mind exercise. It’s alot easier to do if you neglect all that stuff though, but on the other hand, I don’t see the point in doing it just for strong legs.
You know I just had a thought. If t-mag (Biotest) came up with a horse stance supplement, they would say “improves your horse stance time by 294742959832.288392874958%”
“Even though we’re ‘just standing there,’ in my horse stance training, there is an awful lot going on. It’s definitely a whole body and mind exercise. It’s alot easier to do if you neglect all that stuff though, but on the other hand, I don’t see the point in doing it just for strong legs.”
i agree. even if i don’t understand all of it yet, i didn’t mean to imply that there wasn’t allot of internal work going on when just doing the stance.
my question still stands though, at least if doing chigung.
do you think that chigung that requires (or can be done in) a horse stance for the entire set is as good as motionless practice? or are they different means to different ends?
I’ve been doing reverse punches from the deep horse stance, thighs parallel to the floor, at least 200 at a time. It helps to time it, loosens the upper body and trains the chi. Also, you can see your progression. But now I’m switching off to more just holding the stance, varying the level, and holding my hands in different chi-gong positions. It allows me to relax more. It’s almost like two different exercise that train mostly the same thing, from differnet angles. I think the vibration from the punching makes it slightly more difficult to hold the stance, but the difference is really very little. It’s good to vary your training. But, I still want to be able to pop off at least 500 punches. I figure it will take me about 1 year more of horse training to be able to do so.
-FJ
“do you think that chigung that requires (or can be done in) a horse stance for the entire set is as good as motionless practice? or are they different means to different ends?”
I’m not sure what you mean by these two categories.
Yor “muscular endurance” lasts as long as u have air in yor lungs. Yor muscles cant work without oxygen. U ever get punched in the solar plexus? Well, when I got hit my whole body collapsed. If “muscular endurance” really existed, my whole body wouldnt have collapsed when the air left my lungs and would’ve stayed upright by itself. But it didnt.
Their are two different types of muscle fibers, slow twitch and fast twitch which showcase the my point. Muscular endurance and muscular strength are very much two different animals when applied in isolated training regiments.
Oxgyen is one thing, your muscles giving out on you is another.
I know guys who can do hindu squats, jumping squats, lunges, aerboics and other non-weighted excersices intell they are blue in the face but these same guys can not lift half as much as the guy in the gym who just lifts weights and the guy who just lifts weights in the gym does not have the muscular endurance to last half as many endurance sets as the non-weight guy does.
You will gain some strength from endurance based workouts but not even close to what you can gain with direct weight training.
You need the best of both worlds to find a perfect fit.
for the last time. yor talking about endurance. Meaning, the guys who do all the jumping but cant lift have a bigger oxygen capacity in their lungs. There’s no such thing as “muscular endurance” because muscles have no endurance without the lungs!
Maybe if I called it aerobic endurance you would feel better but what you are stating still indicates a difference in the two types of well-known training regiments.
I am not a physical trainer but I believe knife fighter is and if he comes on here he can best give a educated viewpoint.
Muscular strength refers to power, the ability to produce force at a high intensity for a brief period of time. Muscular endurance refers to the ability to sustain energy over a long period of time or maintain a fixed contraction for longer.
These two terms are used throughout the physical health/weighlifting industry.
Out of these two descriptions, horse stance training is the latter.
Both types of training have been “noted” to produce different muscluar fibers, which for the last time would indicate different reactions to training, which would grant different attributes, endurance based training has shown a higher number of fiber composition and capillary fiberation where weight training/heavy load training has shown larger mean muscle fiber growth.
Of course their will be a interconnection between the two though,