On the down lo

Funakoshi Principle #17: Beginners must master low stance and posture, natural body positions are for the advanced.

I've always been fascinated by this subject. In Funakoshi's style of martial art, Shotokhan, and related styles like Wado Ryu, students are always taught deep stances that are low to the ground and very wide. The stances stress form and balance, as well as leg muscle strength. Naturally, if you were a trained fighter, you would look at these stances and think, "Wtf?" They don't exactly look practical because they slow you down and make it tougher for you to evade. On the other hand, they root you to the ground and make you a little tougher to knock over.

As people advance in those arts, their stances start to get a bit higher, lighter, and more mobile. However, since the person spent his or her early years training deep stances, their legs are now strong, and they have the same sense of balance when they are high up in a stance as they did when they were low in a stance. The key is to retain the feeling and mechanics of the low stance when you become advanced enough to do the high stance.

Somebody who starts out in high stances when training will not have this advantage, or will need to learn it another way. A lot of other styles never do deep stances, for example, tai quan do, Issyn Ryu, kickboxing, and many others.

Hell, Funakoshi also believed that you should not practice with weapons until you were already good with your bare hands, and many other martial arts schools believe that too. Then there's martial arts schools that put weapons into the hands of 3-year olds or teenage girls who can barely walk and chew gum at the same time. (Ok, I admit this irks the hell out of me when schools do this, because I come from the school of thought that you need to be able to punch and kick before you worry about using an implement as an extension of yourself, but it is certainly possible to do it the completely opposite way: going from weapon to empty hand at the advanced levels. Look at escrima.)

So what's the deal here? Funakoshi is obviously not preaching anything absolute because so many other groups are doing the exact opposite and they're doing fine.

The essence of this Funakoshi principle is that when you begin to learn something, you need to stick to the basics.... whatever they are. You start out being unconsciously incompetent. By sticking to the basics, you realize what you don't know and you become consciously incompetent. With more practice, you become good, i.e. consciously competent.

Once you are consciously competent, you go even further until you can just let go of the basics and allow them to happen on their own... you become unconsciously competent. This is a basic sequence of learning for most things:

unconscious incompetence --> conscious incompetence --> conscious competence --> unconscious competence

Think about it.

The lesson here is not to think that you know something when you really don't! The first stage of learning is to know that you don't know. That enables you to grow.