Horse Stance experiences

hi gb-community,

 

does anyone of you have middle- or long-term experience with the horse stance for middle splits? a lot of folks (especially tom kurz) advocate the horse stance as one of the best ways to train for middle splits. my current routine consists of:

- daily: 5 min of accumulated time in my widest possible horse stance (widening the stance whenever i reach parallel thighs with knee and toes in line)

- on training days (3-4/week): 5 sets of 10 horse stance squats (50kg) in my widest possible horse stance (widening the stance whenever i reach parallel thighs with knee and toes in line)

 

my main goal is to get a better hip mobility/flexibility to:

a) become better at GST (especially as a better method of bridging between different progressions)

b) become better at sumo-deadlifts (hips closer to the bar = profit)

c) look cool as f**k

 

before someone asks: yes i am using foundation- and h2-mobility-stuff but i would like to speed up my progress.

 

i cannot really talk much about my personal experience with the horse stance because i just started recently but i hope to get some motivating input from you guys for what its worth: my hips feel already a bit "freed up" but that might be my imagination running wild...

 

thanks a lot

I do use them, but not must and just recently. I plan to do them a lot more after SLS PE3 mastery.

I would explore Kelly Starrett's youtube channel, lots of great hip mobility stuff in there. 

With the horse stance, as long as it doesn't interfere with foundation, keep working that too and see if/how it helps.

I have done martial arts for 16 years.  I can hold fairly comfortably a horse stance that looks like more or less like this:

 

 

I cannot yet do the splits.  Closest I've got is this, as of Feb 1st, 2015.

 

 

Granted, I've never done horse stance drills with an eye towards splits training; I did it because it was part of every class.  Hold durations range from multiple 30sec to 5min.  I've never noticed any connection between horse stance and my splits.

Emmet (the amazing one) and Antranik are running a horse stance "motivation month" over at www.reddit.com/r/flexibility

Please come along and share your experience, I'm currently integrating Kurz's method into my workout on H1 days.

I played with the horse stances in November and noticed after every sessions that my hips were quite a lot more free. Then I started overdoing it a little I suppose and overstrained my hip flexor. Ever since then I have been stretching the hip flexors and piriformis and doing tailor pose religiously to prepare myself for horse stances again. I am keeping an eye on the reddit motivational, since I really expect this to have results.

I also came from a background of an Asian fighting art that featured the horse stance (aka kiba dachi), namely Shotokan, and other low, long, wide stances.  I cannot say with any certainty whether or not that helped me do the side splits, but I do feel that having done it so much, it did help train the hips move through a range of motion under load.  That is, holding a stance for an extended period was one part of it, but so too was keeping a low stance and moving in and out of it.  I am also not sure whether this ability or training ever translated directly into a better hand-to-hand fighting ability, but it was beneficial attribute training in the general sense.

 

On of the things I have added to my training in warm-ups or just for fun are sumo shiko squats and other sumo training.  I also find that doing squats in and out of a horse stance just plain feels good for my hips.  

I do a lot of sei ping ma and I have quite flexible hips... I could not swear as to which is the cause and which the effect however...

I can't see it being a bad thing but I would not stack my entire splits stretching on stance training personally

Kurz uses the horse stance to strengthen the adductor, using either 5 or 7 step width you then perform isometric contractions, deep squats and overhead press.

Kurz says you should be able to achieve the splits in weeks using this method though I don't know of anyone actually doing so.

In addition to horse stance, I know a few people from TKD who've achieved success using loaded isometrics.  They use something like the Redcoat method found here: http://www.martialartsplanet.com/forums/showthread.php?t=96381

 

Also, when I was practicing TKD, we had a stretch machine that a bunch of guys used.  It did nothing for strength development in those ROMs, which is why I view it as inferior to loaded stretching.  It looked like this:

 

 

That looks dangerous!

We had a fellow in our dojo who had such tight legs that he blew out the same kind of contraption.  For some reason I remember it actually exploding.  I think one of the flying gears stuck into one of the students.  He tried to pretend it wasn't there, but I couldn't ignore it.   

 

Anyway, I had not found the machine too useful, so I was not sad to see it fall victim to my fellow student's sinews of steel.