Standing Stake, or Zhan Zhuang Practice for Internal Martial Arts

Standing Stake practice, or zhan zhuang, is both a foundational and advanced practice in many Chinese martial arts traditions. It sounds so easy, but it isn't. Standing for 10 minutes, 20, 30, an hour or two is anything BUT easy, and many beginners are ready to jump out of their skins after just a few minutes.

ZZ practice has many benefits. Among them, the practice provides a framework in which one can learn to truly relax. To stand correctly, you must learn to use fewer and fewer of your muscles to hold you up. The muscles you can "disengage" finally have a chance to learn to relax.

In a martial sense,  one of the benefits of relaxation is to learn to be more effective. If you want to throw a punch for example, you want to use only those muscles that are indeed needed to throw the punch. Any other muscle that finds itself involved, ie not relaxed, works at cross purposes to your intent.

The ZZ practice also teaches alignment. If you are using fewer and fewer muscles to hold yourself up, one of the things  you need to get a knack for is to stack your skeleton up so you don't need those extra muscles anyway. A benefit of being aligned well is that your internal organs get lined up the way they were meant to be, and so work better.

For years the heels of my shoes used to wear like this: /\ Whatever it was that I was doing to walk and stand like this, there would surely be a price to pay when I got older. However since several years of standing practice, my heels now wear evenly.

Yet a third benefit of the standing practice is that it gives one's mind a chance to settle and to become quiet. In this regard I think ZZ has much in common with the zazen (sitting posture) of Zen. For me, standing stake is my Zazen practice.

I find that when I've been practicing regularly (this holds true of practicing taijiquan as well as zhan zhuang), my mind is more clear. Time doesn't actually slow down so much as I have the experience of having more time to respond (rather than react). Also, I am much better able to read people. As a salesman, I can read the currents swirling around in a room and pick out the threads that are most useful to me. It's not just body language; there's something more to it.

If you click here, you will be directed to a series of videos on YouTube where Master Lam Kam Chuen teaches a course in zhan zhuang. It is a  progressive series of videos and it is meant for you to stand along with him.

Master Chuen is the author of several books on the subject and related topics. I have a few of his books, and think The Way of Energy and The Way of Power are good introductions to the Standing Stake practice.