Stance Training

About eight years ago I was introduced to Xingyi Quan, an ancient martial arts style that was developed in China for spear fighting. The base of xingyi quan training involves something known in Chinese martial arts as Zhan Zhuang or stance training. Sometimes it is also referred to as "standing like a tree" in which practitioners will stand in a fixed posture for a few minutes up to one or two hours.

Standing in a fixed posture for a long period of time requires proper body mechanics, joint alignment and discipline. The breath becomes your best friend, and over time you learn how to guide the breath into areas of tension and ultimately relax those areas or let go of old patterns of muscular tension that no longer serve you.

When I first began training in the internal arts (xingyi, bagua & taiji) I was eager to learn all the movements and remember all of the forms, I did not stand much those first few years. This past year, 2024, I have made it a point to stand every day at least for a few minutes and sometimes up to an hour. This simple practice, simple not easy, has had a profound impact on my skateboarding, martial arts and meditation practices and I would highly recommend anyone with legs and a pulse to look into this method of standing meditation.

Skateboarders know about stance all too well, are you goofy or regular? Stance is probably one of the first things we learn as skateboarders. Keeping your stance in skateboarding is the difference between skateboarding and falling on the concrete. If you look close enough at a skateboarder, and keep an open mind, you can see the structural alignments that are present in Santi also present while standing on the board. In fact, you can see Santi in every sport, every human bio-mechanic for that matter. The way the knees are in line over the ankles, the hips over the knees, the shoulders over the hips, the hands coordinated with the feet and the upright, erect nature of the spine.

Vincent Black, Tom Bisio and Tim Cartmell are three American martial artists who have written and taught extensively on these arts. Up until the latter half of the 1900's these arts had never been taught to American students, and concepts from this rich lineage of both fighting and healing have not been implemented into American systems of sports training and recovery. Connecting with these teachers, training with their students and studying their work has been life changing for me and set me on a path of lifelong study. It is my vision to help introduce these arts to skateboarders, action sports athletes and anyone who is interested in mental and physical well-being.

Thanks for reading!