front stance
Please note that all stances, strikes, walks and kicks are described as we teach them in our school. Your school may teach you differently, and the way your school teaches you is correct. There are many flavors of martial arts, and in each flavor the techniques will vary slightly. Always practice your techniques the way your instructor has taught you when you are practicing your forms, but learning other styles and techniques will broaden your knowledge of the martial arts.
To begin our front stance style, start by standing with your feet shoulder-width apart, with your weight resting on the balls of your feet. For a right front stance, step forward with your right foot. Your right foot should be one to one-half feet in front of your left foot and your feet should remain shoulder-width apart. It’s important to keep your feet pointed straight ahead, so check your foot position frequently.
From this position, look at the toes of your right foot. Keeping your eyes on your toes, begin to bend your right knee; As soon as you can’t see your toes, stop. At this point, your knees should be right over your heel. This should result in around 65% of your weight gain being on your front foot. While you’ll feel the quads in your front leg working, you shouldn’t feel pain in your front knee. If you feel pain, you are probably bending your front knee too much. (You want to be able to move easily from front stance to another stance or to a kick; if you have too much weight on your front foot, you’ll need to shift your weight back before executing the next technique, which is slowing you down.)
Your rear leg should remain straight. Be careful not to let your back foot roll out. If this happens, it usually means your stance is too long: your front foot is more than a foot in front of your back foot, or it’s too wide. (As you gain experience and practice, you will be able to take a wider stance while keeping your back foot pointed forward. However, stability and balance in the stance are more important than width or length; if you feel balanced and able to move forward with ease, then remain in that posture for length and width.)
Although we want to keep our weight on the balls of our feet, don’t let your back heel come off the ground. This happens when you lean forward and your shoulders and head are in front of your hips. Keep your weight centered on your hips.
While in front pose, keep your shoulders over your hips: don’t lean forward or backward. Be careful to make sure you don’t stick your head forward either. The easiest way to do this is to keep looking straight ahead, instead of looking down. (If you feel any discomfort in your back, neck, or shoulders, you may be tilting your head forward.) When you first start working on your poses, you may need to make a conscious effort to keep your head up. instead of leaning forward or looking down; Practicing good body position now will help make it an automatic action as you progress through ranges too high.
Raise your hands in a guard position. Your hands should be between your head and waist, with your arms bent and protecting your chest area. Keep your hands in fists, making sure the thumb is wrapped in front of the fingers; don’t put your thumb inside your fist, and don’t put your thumb next to your fist – both ways can result in injury to your thumb when blocking or punching. Don’t put your hands too close to your body; you want to be far enough in front of you that they can block a kick or punch before it gets close to your body. Likewise, don’t put your hands too far out in front of you; keeping your elbows bent will help protect your chest and allow you to respond faster.
The left front stance is done in the same way, but with the left foot in front.
Although we teach the front stance as the first stance, it is not the easiest stance to learn or execute. Adopting the frontal posture and maintaining a good position takes practice. You can do this by stepping forward into a right front stance 10 times, checking your body position and foot position each time, then stepping into a left front stance ten times. If you find your back foot is turning out, try this technique: Start with your feet shoulder-width apart, then step back with your right foot, letting your toes touch first, then let your foot roll back to heel. If you feel your weight shift from your front leg to your back leg, then you are turning your foot; get back on your toes and lower your heel once more.
The front stance is an important technique for executing front kicks, punches, and blocks in our forms and should be practiced regularly. However, it is equally important to learn how to move from one frontal position to the next. Check out some of our practice exercises to move from one pose to another!
