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"When beginners practice the postures and movements, the foot stance should be extended. The standard length of the stance should allow one leg to be straight and the other to be bent, up to a position where the knee is above the toes. In this posture, the waist may be relaxed and sunk down, and this allows the freedom of forward, backward, and twisting movements of your trunk. With a short foot stance, the scope of your waist movement will be restricted, and there is no leeway to yield to a fierce attack. When the only defense is to retreat, you will get caught if space is limited. If the stance is longer, you can twist your waist to yield or deflect his force and return your attack."

"If you attack your opponent with a short stance, you cannot sink down your waist. Your body may lean forward too much and you become unbalanced. You must step forward your front foot so that your attacking hands advance with your waist. This is the use of your integrated strength."

"Low foot stance is accompanied by long foot stance, with a larger scope of waist movement. A high stance must also be short, with limited waist movement. If the stance is too low, however, you will have difficulty to move forward or to differentiate between firmness and lightness, and become stagnant."

"The Taichichuan classic says, ‘first seek to stretch and extend; later seek to be compact.’ After you become very skillful, you may use shorter foot stance and circle your hands in smaller circles. The shortness is derived from longness, the highness is derived from the lowness, the compactness is derived from the extendedness, the break is derived from the continuity. This way, you have full control of your shortness, highness, compactness, and breakage. Otherwise, you cannot act according to circumstance to meet emergency and may lose your control or get stuck."

Translators’ Note: Chen Wei-ming had been a spokesman of Yang Cheng-fu in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The foot stance described is exactly that of Yang Cheng-fu’s forward postures in his photographs published both in 1925 and 1931. When Chen says one leg is straight and the other bent, he did not mean that the knee joint of the straightened leg is locked. What he meant is that while the front leg is bent over the toes, the rear leg, which provides the forward strength, is stretched much more straight. This is in contrast to certain styles with short and high stance where the two knees are bent to almost the same extent (e.g. about 135 degrees at the knees).

If we examine the photographs of Yang Cheng-fu published in 1925 and 1931, as well as those of Chen Wei-ming published in 1925 and 1929, we will find that in the forward stance their rear knees are slightly bent toward the camera, although the bending is much less than the front knee. In the poor quality photographs and reproduction, where shadows are lacking, however, the rear leg sometimes looks as if it is straight. The rear leg in this form generates the maximum integrated forward strength to the body, yet the slightly bent knee retains sufficient pliability.

The above reconciles the controversy whether in Taichichuan one of the legs should be straight. In Chinese, this stance, with the front leg bent and the rear leg almost straight, is called archery stance, with both the legs springing. The front leg is also called "bowed leg."