Picking a Fighting Stance: A Theory
Picking a fighting stance historically has the least thought and time put into it, even though it's the most important decision you will make in combat with the most ramifications. Yet there is very little theory or writing on the topic. This essay explores both the theory and practical considerations of this overlooked combat decision: the fighting stance.
For beginners in martial arts, picking a fighting stance is like being sized for your uniform. It's a logistical formality, one that you often have no say in. Most often, it's decided for you, and you're given almost no information on what would be best. Imagine picking any other lifetime relationship this haphazardly? To be fair, there's almost no information provided because there's almost no information on the topic.
There's theory on how two people with the same or opposite stances should fight, but not so much on how people should arrive at those stances. Like arranged marriages, arriving at your stance is based on legacy and tradition.
Major sports have been challenging tradition with the question of effectiveness, and though martial arts prides itself on effectiveness, it has been resistant to challenge tradition since martial arts culture is based in tradition (despite how fabricated the traditions are). There has been much discourse on what is an effective technique but not much on what stance the technique should be applied from when that should be the first consideration (i.e., destination without a starting point).
In general, if you're grappling and your dominant hand is your right, you're told to lead with your right side (though stances in grappling are often fluid due to the nature of scrambles). For striking, if your right hand dominant, you're traditionally told to lead with your left side and to put your dominant side in the back. Transitioning from striking to wrestling can therefore be confusing and often has people wrestling from their non-dominant side. Nevertheless, you're told to stand according to your hand dominance, though there are some inflexible boxing trainers who make everyone stand orthodox (left side lead) because that's what's most comfortable for them. That already lets you know their training is top-down and instructor-centric rather than liberatory and practitioner-centric.
If your martial arts or combat sports gym allows you to choose your stance, one straightforward way to approach this task is by standing in both stances and seeing which stance is most comfortable. Now the decision is personal. This can also account for injuries and pain that can supersede any other considerations.
In Liberation Martial Arts, everyone is encouraged to train from both L-stance (orthodox) and J-stance (southpaw) for the sake of variability and injury prevention, so there is no rush in deciding a primary stance. It's something you can take your time deciding from both experience and understanding stance theory. However, having a primary stance is still suggested because there may be situations where you have to be at your best, which requires a best stance.
Finding a comfortable stance to navigate from is wayfinding. However, the most overlooked aspect of wayfinding when choosing a fighting stance is thinking about what stance gives you the best perception. If you were to let your eyes and perception guide your Way, what stance would you end up with?
Just as you have a dominant hand, you also have a dominant eye. Your dominant hand is the one that best communicates with your brain, which is also the case for your dominant eye. Perception is sometimes the unconscious reason one side feels more comfortable than the other. Your dominant eye often corresponds with your dominant hand, and in life, you already lead with your dominant side. It's your natural perspective.
To determine your dominant eye, find an object that's about 20 feet away at eye level. Extend both arms in front of your body and place the hands together so as to make a small triangular gap between your thumbs and first knuckles. With both eyes open, look through the triangle and line up that object. Make sure the triangle is just big enough to fit that object and nothing else. Keep your head and hands steady.
Slowly bring your hands to your face while keeping that object in focus. The triangular gap will find your dominant eye.
Another way to do this is with a partner. Have them stand directly in front of you. Form the same triangular gap with your hands and place their face within that gap. Ask them which eye they can see through the triangle because you have unconsciously lined up your dominant eye with that gap.
We think we perceive equally with both eyes, but in actuality, we mostly see with our dominant eye, with the non-dominant eye acting as support. That's your perspective. Just as with our concept of push-pull, water, Taoism, yin-yang, or dialectics, perception is the act of engaging and yielding. For one eye to perceive, the other eye must yield. Or, as my friend AJ explains, for a muscle to contract, the antagonistic muscles must yield. How you do one thing is how you do all things; therefore, engaging and yielding apply to both bodies and systems.
Since wayfinding is about perception, and stress reduces your peripheral vision, wouldn't it make sense to put your dominant eye in the lead rather than your non-dominant eye, which is already limited?
Stance also means perspective. You already see the world from the perspective of your dominant eye. Your stance is like a spyglass. Switching stances means switching your lead eyes (perspectives). Consider switching the spyglass from eye to eye, it takes time for your vision and brain to reorient. This is one reason for having and maintaining a dominant stance, to avoid the disorientation of stance switches.
Try looking at the same object from earlier while switching stances. There's a process of reorientation. If you keep switching (the spyglass) while keeping your gaze fixed on the same object, you'll notice fatigue in your eyes and brain setting in.
Something you're always told to do in striking is to "look" and "make reads." But wouldn't you get your best looks and reads by having the spyglass over your dominant eye (having your dominant side in the lead)? Perception guides decisions; having the most informed perception gives you the most informed decisions. Your dominant eye provides the most information.
Around 70% of people have the same hand and eye dominance. From a (training) design perspective, having your dominant eye above your dominant hand makes sense, as that allows for the best hand-eye coordination. Having your dominant stance align with your dominant eye and hand would give you the best hand-eye-stance coordination. Nearly every sport (other than boxing and kickboxing) will have you keep that dominant side in the lead.
Fencers, like grapplers, stand with their dominant side in the lead to see the attacks and to have the best reach, speed, and accuracy for their own attacks. Bruce Lee argued for putting your dominant side in the lead for these reasons. The traditional striking stance, however, prioritizes muscular power over accuracy (and power from timing).
In swing sports like tennis and baseball, your dominant eye may sometimes be in the back, but only temporarily. In the picture, the batter may technically have his left eye in the lead but is lining up the pitcher with his right eye and coordinating his swing with his right arm and leg.
When the ball arrives at the bat, the right side becomes the lead side facing the ball. During the swing, where is the batter's eye? On the ball. Which eye is lined up with the ball? The dominant right eye. At the moment of contact, his eye, hand, and stance align for the best hand-eye-stance coordination. The batter will even pull further back on the bat to allow the ball to travel deeper into his right side before hitting the ball. But what are you not supposed to do in striking? Rear back or load up a punch. Consider the influence of the eyes when it comes to fighters rearing back or even when it comes to head position. Just as your body follows your head, your head follows your eyes.
To see how much vision affects your orientation, let's do an experiment. Stand with your feet together. Now lift one of your legs off the ground directly in front of you until you have a 90° bend in your knee. Balance there for a while. Now close your eyes. Once you've held your balance for a while or lost your balance, come back here.
Did you notice your balance change?
If you did, it's because much of your balance is about orienting your weight based on the expectations created by your eyes. Without your eyes, you lose a lot of information. Your vision can shift your weight or your posture without you noticing. Just notice how vision pulls people's heads to their screens. Why wouldn't the same happen as you're staring at a target?
Let's do another test. Stand with your feet together and eyes closed. If you can, have someone observe you during this test. Now without opening your eyes, look up for a few seconds. Do the same for looking down, looking left, and looking right. Once you're done, come back here.
Did you notice yourself moving or wanting to move? Did you lift or turn your head? Did you feel your weight shift? Did the observer notice you move or sway? (Sometimes we are so disembodied we don't feel ourselves moving.) That pull to move is the power of gaze. When you move your eyes, your brain thinks you or the things around you moved even though they didn't. Your dominant eye has the most pull on your head and body, and it will either have you move or you will constantly be resisting that urge, which means you're constantly splitting your attention from your environment to your coach's instruction to your body's natural inclination. (Consider how hitting the pads can inadvertently train practitioners to look at the wrong areas or tilt their heads up.)
Splitting your attention among so many different tasks and not centering your environment can cost you. Even thinking about something else can cause a driver to crash. What if you have an opponent actively seeking to hit or hurt you? You don't actually split attention—you break concentration.
A major hindrance to learning in martial arts, particularly self-defense, is the constant eliciting of the fight-flight response. Sometimes participants come in with the expectation of simulated life-or-death training. As educators know, you can't learn, pay attention, properly see, or even properly breathe under high levels of stress (sometimes called toxic stress). Rather than learning to emotionally regulate and develop composure, the participant is told to never turn off the stress response. This lasting stress can harm not only the body but also the brain (spirit and confidence). This is one factor that turns gym environments into toxic ones and accounts for much of the turnover.
During the serve, which eye is tracking the ball? The right. Which hand is holding the racket? The right.
You're always told in ball sports to keep your eyes on the ball. But it's mostly one eye doing most of the work, your dominant eye. During this right-handed tennis swing, which eye is lined up with the ball? The right. The hand, eye, and stance are aligned.
In tennis, since you're almost always holding the racket with the same hand, your lead leg will change, but your dominant eye will track the ball, and you'll almost always hit the ball with your dominant side being closest to the ball. (This is also true for ball catching in baseball.) At the highest level, you want everything to be aligned.
In tennis, since there is reciprocity between you and the ball, you're either bringing your lead to the ball or allowing the ball to come to your lead. This is why in swing sports, sometimes the lead is temporarily in the rear—to catch the ball as it comes to it.
Think of it like rising sea levels and beachfront houses. As the water rises past the beachfront houses, the houses behind them become the new beachfront homes. If you know the ball is coming to you, place the lead in the back because the back will become the new lead.
In striking, much like ball sports, we're told to keep our eyes on the target, except we're often tracking the target with our non-dominant eye. Also, unlike tennis or baseball, the target is not coming to us; we have to go to the target. Unless our opponent tries to ram our rear fist with their head, our rear side won't become our lead. In fact, our opponents will try to keep their heads as far away as they can from our rear fists. This is why reach is so important, and we have the best and most accurate reach on our dominant side.
Besides the mechanical similarities between the swing and the punch, the game sense of baseball hitting is antithetical to boxing. Batting has you position your dominant side in the rear to ultimately be closer to the target as it comes to you. In boxing, the dominant side is always furthest from the target, and the target will not come to you. Furthermore, baseball is turn-based, and boxing is real-time. Since the batter only worries about hitting the ball, they only need to think about accuracy and power. For the boxer, hitting is only one concern, but the greater concern is not being hit. Applying the game sense of a baseball swing to the rear punch will not only teach you the wrong way to land a punch but have you forgetting about defense.
Fighters know the mechanics of punching and blocking but not necessarily how to land or block punches. Landing and blocking punches require you to see punching opportunities and oncoming punches, but the traditional stance doesn't prioritize perception. The most significant disconnect in striking is knowing the mechanics of a technique versus actually landing it. That gap is perception. The better you see, the better you can see those opportunities for punches and blocks.
We make a lot of comparisons to basketball, but again, striking's game sense is more like basketball (real-time) than baseball (turn-based). The target is not coming to you; you are coming to the target while defending against attacks. How can you land your shot under such tense and chaotic conditions? You need your best foot forward, along with reach and accuracy. In basketball, you put your dominant side in the lead to see your potential threats but also the target.
If it was just about power, you might want to keep your dominant hand in the rear. That's what many beginners do, seek power. But as you develop in striking, you realize it's less about power and more about accuracy, defense, and getting there first. However, by the time you know that, you've already become habituated to a power-striking (traditional) stance.
The "advantage" of having your dominant eye in the rear is to line up your rear punch (often incentivized by scoring and the possibility of a knockout). Similar to a pool player. But look at the pool player's eyes. The dominant eye isn't actually in the rear, his face is facing the target (just like the batter). That also happens even with elite fighters when throwing their right hand, in trying to see their target, they expose their entire face. They're following the target with their dominant eye.
Just as all rivers seek the ocean, all dominant eyes seek their target. Your dominant eye will keep wanting to come forward, and you'll consciously have to keep resisting that. However, a skillful boxer often throws punches based on anticipation of where the target will be, so constantly staring at the head is not a real advantage. If anything, it's a disadvantage, as the opponent's eyes and head movement can throw the boxer off.
Leading with the face is also a side effect of rearing back on the punch like you would for a baseball swing. If you prioritize power by putting your dominant side in the rear, it only tracks that you would consciously or unconsciously pull your fist back further from your face to hit a home run punch.
But why put people in an unnatural stance to only tell them everything they're doing from that stance is wrong when you can design a situation that elicits the correct responses? This is the difference between a top-down instructor that creates problems to correct and a training organizer that designs conditions that produce desired behaviors.
Why seek the path of most resistance and then tell people to "be like water?" Why set people up for failure and then demand they win? If everything elicited from the "correct" position is wrong, then maybe it's not the practitioner but the position (and instructor) that's wrong. If you get the wrong effect, don't try to change the results, change the cause. It's like giving a left-hander right-handed scissors and pointing out all the ways they're lacking rather than giving them left-handed scissors. Or putting the spyglass over the wrong eye and yelling at them for going the wrong way. It only instills doubt and hesitation in the practitioner rather than wayfinding. A guide does not completely turn someone around and then yell at them for being lost.
For wayfinding, your stance is your compass, and if it's always leading you astray, then the compass is broken, not you. If something works only through constant instruction and badgering, then it doesn't really work. You're never finding your Way, and you don't have a system of finding your Way. You'll also always be resisting the default and lacking in confidence. Constantly thinking during a fight, constantly resisting against your natural reactions, is distracting and fatiguing. You shouldn't be thinking but doing, but you can't do if you second-guess everything.
Yet the more tired you are, the more your movements will degenerate to the default. When you're misaligned and reliant on constant correction, there will always be an automatic level of fatigue, tension, doubt, fear, imposter syndrome, and hypervigilance, and the more you resist it, the worse it gets. You will be in your head or attuned to your instructor when your attention should be focused on your environment (where all the threats and problems are). The consequences of misplaced attention and not being present in the moment and environment can be devastating. On the other hand, if your teacher has always been the environment (through training design), then you're always attuned to your environment and making the appropriate choices based on your changing conditions without doubt or hesitation.
From day one, when your instructor picked your stance, you've been told (explicitly and/or tacitly) the point is power. Power is the point of your whole fighting stance. Your stance (perspective) is always seeking power. So, of course, you will seek more time-space to create more power for your punch, leaving your face more unguarded. You're seeking more power. If defense was the priority, why would you put your dominant side in the rear in the first place?
However, even if you're already invested in a stance, understanding eye dominance is valuable because now you know your blindspots, strengths, and tendencies. If you're right-eye dominant and stand orthodox, protect your left and look for opportunities to land your right without overswinging and lunging with your face. Think of punching as turning in place rather than reaching forward with your rear hand. With your right eye, you'll see shots coming to your right side, so use those opportunities to make your opponent miss to land your right counter.
If you are cross-dominant where your dominant eye is on one side and your dominant hand is on the other, standing in a traditional power stance would not only put your dominant eye in the lead but your power hand in the rear—a best-of-both-worlds. This is what most instructors wrongly assume they are doing. They think putting your dominant hand in the rear automatically gets you the best combination of vision and power because they're unaware of eye dominance. But now that you know better, what will you do with this knowledge?
Ultimately, choosing your fighting stance is a personal and, hopefully, thoughtful decision made by you rather than anyone else. But remember, you're not just deciding on a fighting stance but also a fighting perspective. Where will you place your spyglass?
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