Jack Slack is always recommending Edwin Haislet’s Boxing to students of the sweet science, and they often come back asking, What’s the deal with the stance?
This knock-kneed position is the one which Haislet prescribes as the best for mobility and hitting power, yet if you saw someone in this position without the gloves or shorts, you’d assume they had been in some kind of terrible accident.
What you’ll notice is that the lead knee being pointed slightly inward almost as like a spring. Square your hips as if you had thrown the right hand or as if to load up the left hook. You will notice that your body is providing resistance. You are coiled and ready to explode into a wicked left hook with tremendous speed and force. It’s not as if you are creating force to square yourself up and then stopping and changing direction, your lead hip joint halts your squaring movement and launches you back the other way, you just need to let it go. But equally, throw a right straight and you can get decent pop on it because of the positioning of the rear foot.
His closing paragraph struck me as more of an introduction:
It’s no secret that the art of hitting is about using the feet to drive off of the floor, and that the art of boxing is about hitting and not getting hit. But the combination of the two often seems to involve more complexity in the footwork than the most elaborate of flamencos. That is why the old timers always say, don’t look at the hands while you’re watching a fight, the hands mean nothing. Now the feet, those are what do the boxing.
Coincidentally, it is practically the same as the Sanchin stance in Okinawan Karate.
Steve Morris also recommends this stance. He shows how it is used dynamically for fast powerful striking.