Basic Skills (Jibengong) & Stance Training

This page describes what the basic work consists of, what each part is actually for, and how to tell whether it is doing anything.

What the basics consist of

The traditional grouping has five parts. Stance work trains the shapes the legs take and the ability to hold them. Standing practice trains alignment and awareness in a fixed posture. Leg work covers stretching and the kicking exercises. Waist work trains the turning and folding of the torso. And single-movement repetition takes one technique out of context and drills it, usually while walking a line.

None of these is interesting. All of them are cumulative, which means their effects appear slowly and disappear slowly, and a practitioner rarely notices the day on which their stance became solid. This combination — boring and slow-acting — is exactly why the basics are the first thing to be squeezed out of a class schedule.

Stances

The standard set includes the horse stance with the weight even and the thighs approaching horizontal, the bow stance with the weight predominantly forward, the empty stance with almost all the weight on the rear leg, the low crouching stance, and the twisted resting stance. Each appears constantly inside forms, and each trains a different relationship between the legs and the ground.

A frequent misunderstanding is that these are fighting positions. They are not. Nobody fights in a horse stance. They are training positions, adopted deliberately and held, which exaggerate a particular demand so that the body learns to meet it. The horse stance exaggerates symmetrical loading and the requirement to keep the pelvis and spine organised while the legs work hard. In application the same organisation appears in a much smaller, less visible form.

The most important instruction in stance work concerns the knees. The knee should track over the foot and should not collapse inward, and the joint should not be pushed past the toes in a way that loads it at a bad angle. Knee injury is easily the commonest avoidable harm in these arts, and it comes almost entirely from holding low positions with poor alignment because someone was told that low is good.

Standing practice

Standing is the single most characteristic exercise of the internal arts. The practitioner adopts a posture — often upright with the arms rounded as though holding a large ball, or the offset three-body posture of xingyiquan — and stays in it, initially for a few minutes and eventually for much longer.

What it demonstrably does is worth separating from what it is claimed to do. It builds isometric endurance in the postural muscles. It trains proprioception, because a body that is not moving gives the nervous system time to register where its parts are. It reveals asymmetries and habitual tension that are invisible during movement. And it trains the ability to remain in mild discomfort without either fighting it or abandoning the task, which is not a trivial capacity.

What is claimed beyond this is that standing accumulates and circulates qi. This is the tradition's own explanation and it is not testable in the terms in which it is offered. A practitioner can hold the checkable benefits, which are substantial and sufficient reason to do the practice, without committing to the explanation.

Discomfort, and where the line is

Standing and stance work hurt, and students reasonably want to know which sensations to accept. The rough guide is that burning or aching in the large muscles of the thighs is expected, builds tolerance and passes quickly afterwards. Trembling is common in the early weeks and is not a problem. Sharp pain is not acceptable, and pain located in a joint rather than a muscle — particularly the knee or the lower back — means the alignment is wrong and the position should be raised or abandoned rather than endured.

The traditional culture around this work often valorises endurance, and a certain amount of that is useful. But there is no benefit whatever in a lower position with a collapsed structure, and a student holding a high stance correctly is training the art while a student holding a deep one badly is training a knee injury.

Leg work

Traditional curricula devote substantial time to stretching and to kicking exercises — front, side, inward-sweeping and outward-sweeping swings, usually done in lines across the training space. The stretching produces the range of motion the forms require, and the swinging kicks train control of the leg through its full range while the rest of the body stays organised.

One modern qualification is worth mentioning. Prolonged static stretching immediately before vigorous activity is now generally thought to reduce power output temporarily, so the traditional pattern of stretching early in a session is better replaced by warming and dynamic movement first, with sustained stretching at the end. This is a change in ordering, not a rejection of the practice.

Waist work

The waist — meaning the whole region from the hips to the lower ribs — is where these arts locate the origin of movement, and the basic work includes turning, folding and circling exercises to make it mobile and to connect it to the limbs. This is less discussed than stance training and matters at least as much, because a practitioner with strong legs and an immobile middle has a chain that breaks halfway.

Single-movement repetition

Taking one technique and repeating it, usually while advancing across a space, is the bridge between the basics and the art. It is what xingyiquan does with the five fists and what most other systems do with a smaller number of selected movements. The point is volume: a movement performed a few times inside a form each session accumulates too slowly to become structural, while the same movement performed two hundred times becomes available.

Conditioning and the question of strength

A long-running argument in these arts concerns whether ordinary strength training helps or hinders. The traditional position, often stated firmly, is that lifting weights builds the wrong kind of strength — local, stiff and disconnected — and interferes with the relaxation the arts require.

The defensible part of this is that a practitioner who solves every problem by adding muscular effort will never learn to solve it structurally, and that the internal arts are specifically training the second thing. The indefensible part is the inference that general physical conditioning is therefore harmful. Traditional curricula themselves included substantial conditioning — stone locks, weighted implements, heavy poles, and a great deal of hard repetitive work in low positions. What they avoided was not strength but the habit of substituting strength for organisation.

The sensible modern position is that general conditioning supports the practice provided it is kept separate from it, and that a practitioner who is stronger has more capacity available once the organisation is in place. Where this goes wrong is when strength arrives first and becomes the default solution, which is why the traditional sequencing puts the structural work early.

How long, and in what proportion

In a traditional curriculum the basics dominate the first year or two and never disappear entirely; experienced practitioners typically continue to stand and to repeat single movements throughout their training life. A reasonable modern compromise gives roughly a third of a session to basics in the early years, reducing somewhat later but not to nothing.

Progress markers are unglamorous but real. Being able to hold a stance for noticeably longer, at the same depth, with the same alignment. Standing for twenty minutes without the shoulders creeping up. Kicking to the same height at the end of a session as at the beginning. None of these is impressive to watch and all of them predict what will happen later.

Why this component gets dropped

It is worth naming the pressures honestly. Basics are dull to teach and dull to do. They produce no visible new material, so a student cannot see what they gained this month. They are hard to sell in a commercial school and they are the obvious thing to cut when a class has limited time. And a teacher who insists on them will lose some students to a school down the road that teaches a new form every few weeks.

None of this is a criticism of anyone in particular. It is a structural pressure that acts on every school, and the schools that resist it usually do so because someone in charge has decided to accept smaller numbers. A prospective student can reasonably ask how much of a session goes to basic work, and the answer is informative.

Key points

• Basic skills comprise stance work, standing, leg work, waist work and single-movement repetition, and are the component most often dropped.
• Stances are training positions that exaggerate a demand, not fighting positions, and knee alignment matters more than depth.
• Standing demonstrably builds postural endurance, proprioception and tolerance of discomfort; the qi explanation is the tradition's own and is not testable as offered.
• Muscular burning is expected but joint pain means the alignment is wrong and the position should be raised.
• Sustained stretching is better placed at the end of a session than the beginning, which is a change of ordering rather than of practice.
• Single-movement repetition supplies the volume that form practice alone cannot, which is why it is the bridge between basics and the art.