The Stance

The most important thing in all Kung Fu styles is the stance. If the stance is no good then your Kung Fu is no good.

 In my Karate days in the early 60’s I learned that the stances should be very rooted and powerful in order to always have good balance and to be able to deliver the one powerful hit to knock out any opponent.

Then I moved from Calgary to Toronto to do my Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. I joined a Chinese Kung Fu club that taught Hung Gar. This is a very famous style in China. Hung style basically relies on powerful smashes, uppercuts, hooks, kicks etc. They have arms of steel and super strong stances. Nobody can knock them off their feet. Because of the variety of weapons that they use, they need a variety of stances too. In Hung style if you could not do the low Horse stance for 30 minutes then you may as well go home because they would not teach you anything else and your techniques would basically have no power and suck.

Then I moved to Vancouver and started to study Yang style Tai Chi under Raymond Chung. In Karate I thought my stances were good but not as good as those in the Hung style club. They trained 5 days a week. So then I discovered that the Tai Chi people could knock me off my feet easily too. I thought by now and being able to stand in a Hung style stance for 20 minutes should be good enough. But each art has their special tricks and again I was thrown to the floor.

So moving the clock forward, now I had a background of Karate and Hung style and Tai Chi and I encountered a Wing Chun expert by the name of Patrick Chow who was a private student of Ip Man.That was in 1976. In 1992 after training Wing Chun for all that time I had the chance to meet Master Kenneth Chung. I thought I knew a lot, was very relaxed and had super good stances. I found out against a Master, nothing worked. He taught me all kinds of things in a two hour lesson filled with information. At the end of it all he said just forget everything I said and go home and work on your stance. He easily off-balanced me no matter what I did. Wing Chun was not just hand play but off-balancing people was an essential part of the art.

Lately I read an article by some Hong Kong teachers that said these days nobody seems to train the stance anymore and hence their Wing Chun was very bad. Mostly people enjoy fancy hand play like Donnie Yen does in the moves but in real, this does not work.

Ken said there were five key points to the basic Wing Chun stance posture. I found his student Ben Der who I met posted these guidelines on Pinterest. So here they are: