Keith Farrell just put out a new article on 5 Good Reasons to Practice Meyer’s stances, and it’s pretty good — I suggest reading it before this one, although that’s not strictly necessary since the point I’d like to discuss is rather tangential to it. What’s really important to know is that I basically agree with the premise that it’s a very good idea to get beginners in fencing/swordsmanship/swordplay/whatever-one-calls-it working on lower stances and longer steps. It also made me think about how my way of teaching footwork in the Bandung half of Gwaith-i-Megyr has evolved over the years.
Actually, let’s take a step back because the first thing I do in teaching beginners footwork isn’t even getting them to work on deep stances or long steps. It’s really just getting them to memorise what happens in the various kinds of steps, which foot moves first and where, how many foot movements are needed, and all that kind of stuff. I think I didn’t pay enough attention to this at first since most of the people who joined the group and stayed in the early days already had at least some martial-arts experience, so they already had some idea of what was going on and only needed refinements. Things got complicated as we started getting more people who hadn’t had much in the way of sports or other physical disciplines. Such people may not even be very familiar with the concept of paying attention to how their body moves, and first of all we need to help them develop a kinaesthetic understanding of the whole thing — how it feels to move the correct body parts in the correct direction and land/stop at the right place — before we even start working on improving how far and how fast they can perform these movements. And this sounds simple in theory but is much more complicated in practice.
After that initial phase of simply memorising the movements by rote, comes the stage that Keith discussed in his article: teaching people how to use lower stances and take longer steps. He made a good point in saying that deeper stances work the legs harder, but I don’t think it’s only a workout for the legs. As a matter of fact, I find that the beginners often say that deeper stances and long strides (or at least the way I have them practice it) turn out to be a particularly hard workout on the core muscles they need to stabilise their upper body and prevent themselves from leaning their torso around uncontrollably. I don’t think I need to go into this in detail since — like I’ve said before — I agree with pretty much all of Keith’s points on why it’s a good idea. Read them over in his article if you haven’t already.
Maybe another half-phase I like to tack onto the deep stances and long strides is adding explosiveness to the movements. I don’t think of it as a full phase in its own right since it tends to come by itself as a natural result of going deeper and longer with the footwork. The only real difference is that we do it faster than before. Put a snap into the movements.
Deep stances and long strides aren’t the whole story, however. Once the beginner (which by this point is usually no longer such a beginner) gets comfortable with them, I find that it’s often necessary to specifically get them to work on the opposite aspect: shorter, more controlled steps. The previous phase got them used to throw their body hard and fast in one specific direction. Unfortunately, it also often encourages them to overdo it, and this can be fatal since this makes them much slower at changing direction. It also gets important as we move into fencing/bouting/sparring/free-play or even just the less predictable, less cooperative kinds of drills since success in these types of training often depends on the ability to perceive and exploit tiny differences in distance and timing, which often can only be properly done with small but fast adjustment steps rather than long committed ones. However, there’s a reason why I put this stage after the deep stances and long steps; without having gone through that phase first, one wouldn’t have developed the body mechanics and core strength needed to generate adequate power with smaller movements. In other words, one would have the precision but not the power to make that precision matter.
So I guess those are the scattered thoughts I’ve been able to muster over the matter in the wee hours of the night. What do you think? Have your experiences been similar? The complete opposite? Something in between?
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