Let me follow up to that post before people misquote me as saying “horse stance is useless” and stuff.
After horse stance training, was I stronger than if I hadn’t trained? Of course. I was generally stronger than untrained people who were my size and weight.
But the first rule of training is SAID (specific adaptation to imposed demands) which states that your body gets better at what you do and gets worse at what you don’t do. So really all I had was minimal strength increases (the first minute or two, as explained in post 4 of the other thread), and lots of static muscular endurance increases. In other words, I could hold a horse stance for a lot longer than most people, and I had only slight strength increases.
Because of SAID, if you do not train with heavy weights, you will not get strong. The body responds to increasing resistance by getting stronger. This is why horse stance does not make you strong. This is why training with high reps (and therefore light weight) does not make you strong. This is why running long distances does not make your sprint times faster. This is why powerlifters spend most of their time training with heavy weights and low reps.
I also did a lot of pushups at the time. On average, I did two sets of 55 pushups every day (I’m pretty OCD and have a log of most of my workouts since 1997).
Most people cannot do one set of 55 pushups, let alone two sets.
So how did that compare to an untrained person? I could do more pushups than them. People who didn’t train were impressed because I could do so many pushups. And because of slight adaptations in strength, I could bench press a little bit more than untrained people who were my size and weight.
But just as horse stance training doesn’t build leg strength, pushups don’t build pressing strength (past the first 30 seconds/15 reps or so).
So was I “strong”? No, not really. I thought I was. I mean dude, when you do TCMA and are surrounded by people who don’t really know what they’re talking about, you start to believe it, too. I would talk to people about “root” and how great horse stance training was, and how weight lifters were wasting their time and getting big and slow and all that nonsense.
But no dude, I was weak and misinformed.
If anything, the TCMA style training I was doing gave me a decent base to begin weight lifting, especially since my body type is naturally skinny and weak, so I wasn’t like a TOTAL total noob. But I would say that realistically, all the horse stance, and pushups, and Stone Warrior strength sets, and all that stuff that I did for over a year, spending an hour or more each day on training, all of that stuff was less effective than a month with a competent weight lifting coach would’ve been, as far as strength development (I say “competent” because there are a lot of bad personal trainers out there).
I wouldn’t say it was a waste of my time, though. I mean, I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t a very efficient use of time. But at the time, I really thought it was the best thing I could be doing. I mean I really did. I would spend a lot of time each day thinking about martial arts and training even as I was doing other stuff throughout the day. Physical fitness was important to me and I thought the TCMA way was the best way (probably biased toward ancient Chinese stuff and secret knowledge). But then I kinda realized I had been drinking the Kool Aid for a while.
It’s not that horse stance training and all that other stuff is useless (ok, some of it is), it’s just that it’s not a very good method for achieving any goal other than being able to hold a horse stance for a long time.
And that’s why I have always said, if your goal is to be able to hold a horse stance for a long period of time, whether for TCMA purposes, or form purposes, or bragging rights, or mental toughness, or personal goals, or anything else, then train horse stance! But if your goal is pretty much anything else, there are much more effective ways to get there.
