Many physical endeavors begin with a “stance.” Martial Arts have dozens of stances, as do many sports. All stances are a compromise between being mobile and being stable. Generally stances are optimized for movement in a particular direction or to resist force in a particular direction.

What is lost is that a stance is a position that is occupied for a moment in time. Generally something is called a “stance” when the practitioner is static, or rooted in place. If a practitioner changes from one stance to another what is that transitional position called?

Because a stance is a compromise, stances change with the task at hand. For example the boxer in his ready position is standing differently than a boxer who is throwing a committed punch with his trailing hand. His shoulders, hips, and feet are all optimized to deliver as much power as possible in that punch and he is sacrificing his ability to move in another direction or to absorb the impact of a strike from a different set of angles.

Shooting also has a number of stances (sometimes called positions.) Prone, supine, kneeling, and sitting all completely sacrifice movement to gain maximum stability and/or better utilize available cover. Handgun shooters once spent a lot of time debating the merits of “weaver stance” vs. “isosceles stance” but it doesn’t have much relevance to real-world, force on force shooting. The pistol doesn’t care where your feet are, it will put the bullet where the sights are aligned at the moment the trigger breaks the shot.

From the perspective of force-on-force: if you aren’t moving you are doing it wrong. Unfortunately shooting on the move has to be taught after the fundamentals of marksmanship, to do otherwise doesn’t produce very good results. Since the basics are taught from a static position, this generates a bunch of confusion later because a student will believe that the stance is somehow connected to fighting rather than learning to shoot.

This problem is quickly compounded when a situation requires inter-disciplinary skills like both shooting and physical combatives. If you need to strike some targets and shoot others you either have to apply combatives from your shooting stance or shoot from your combatives stance. This tends to trip up the traditional martial artists that need to change their orientation to the target (switch their feet) to apply a strike. Likewise try punching a heavy bag from your weaver stance.

Your default position (another way of saying ’stance’) should be consistent across weapons systems, it should be optimized for movement but able to withstand some amount of impact. Statically this is the “modern isosceles” or “boxers stance”. From that basic platform we deviate as the situation requires. By way of example: a target at more than 45 degrees on your non-dominant side and your arms begin to move into a weaver position (unless you orient your feet with a pivot.)

All of the folks who are “cross-eye dominant” (Eye Dominance and Shooting Positions) are making this really complicated once you add handgun/long gun transitions into the equation. If you shoot hand guns left handed, but rifles right handed you are constantly going to need to be changing your feet.