“Is this the right way?” “Where does my left foot go?” “Now what?” These are the kinds of questions that come up every day across the entire landscape of sports, dance, martial arts, and pretty much any movement-based activity. The heart of many of these disciplines is “formal training,” with a constant focus on learning the proper forms.

 Having spent a lot of time in various sports and martial arts training, I appreciate this emphasis on how to move one’s body in optimal ways to achieve specific goals. If you want to hit a golf ball straight (-ish), then you need to move the club a certain way, and moving the club this certain way requires that you move your body in a certain way. Hence, practicing the form of a “proper swing” is a key part of learning how to hit a golf ball straight (-ish).

 The concept of “formal training” exists across many other domains as well. From cooking and music to medicine and law, “formal training” is a basic requirement for almost anything that you can pursue as a career. Any kind of skill learning requires the intentional engagement of testing your ability against reality, or your mental map against the physical territory. However, there is another, deeper context that is both the background from which the forms arise as well as the ether they must dissolve into for true mastery to emerge.

 When I started taking Krav Maga classes back in Philly I found that my instructor, Kevin, kept repeating the same lessons and going over the same techniques, week in and week out. This really began to bother me. I wanted to learn new stuff every time I walked in. Where are the fancy kicks? The cool combos?

 After a several weeks of this repetition, Kevin surprisingly called the small group of us newer students to come up to the front of the class and stand in a row in front of him. He then asked us to demonstrate some of the forms we had been practicing, unfortunately starting with me. I had been showing up to class diligently and paying attention, so I confidently started to do a basic block/punch move when Kevin suddenly reached down, grabbed my foot, and pulled it straight up, causing me to topple over in a flailing puddle. “Next!” was all I heard as I gathered my wits and started to get back up. He then went down the line, one by one, tripping, pushing, pulling, and otherwise gently taking out all of us newbies. When he was finished, we all stood there silently humbled.

 “What did you learn?”, he loudly asked. Nobody said anything.

 “You’ve all been practicing your forms, right? So how come I was able to take you all down so easily?” Again, silence.

 “None of you were thinking about your stance! Forms are nothing without a good stance, one that is balanced, stable, ready. Stance is the most fundamental part of this practice. Each of you were off balance in different ways, I just simply showed you where.” He paused, and then slowly walked back to my end of the row.

 “Let’s try this again, but this time I want you to pay much more attention to your stance and much less to your forms. Get balanced, stable, ready.”

 He looked at me briefly, and then quickly reached down for my ankle again. This time I was able to avoid his grasp, and his other attempts to push me over. I even performed a few decent moves in between using the forms I had been learning. Same with the rest of the gang as he went down the line.

 “See?” Kevin asked. “Your forms are fine, because you have been practicing them. But they all depend on proper stance. This is what we will be focusing on tonight and the rest of the week.”

 Kevin taught me a valuable lesson that night when it comes to remembering that stance is the root of all forms, and that different forms flow much easier from different stances. A left jab is best performed from one stance, while a sweeping leg kick flows more easily from another. Looking at other sports, it’s easy to see this dynamic at play there too. The “ready position” is the proper stance for playing short stop in baseball, but there is another stance that one takes when batting at the plate. Similar “stance” differentials become apparent when gazing out across the other domains when examining the basis of their forms, like how to properly hold different knives when prepping food or where to place your hand and chin when playing violin vs cello.

 Technical forms in action are, by definition, focused, methodical, and repetitive. They are each designed to accomplish very specific things. A stance, on the other hand, is not. It is loose, adaptive, and pure potential, designed to maximize the range of creative responses to what could happen.

Next time you are struggling with learning something, or find yourself falling on your butt, check in with your stance as well as your forms. You might indeed benefit from more practice with your forms, but you also might need to improve or change your stance as well.