Changing your stance might seem like a small adjustment, but it can completely change what you get out of a mace swing.
Two variations we use are what we call an athletic stance and a traditional stance.
With an athletic stance, your feet are roughly shoulder width apart or slightly narrower. With a traditional stance, your feet come all the way together with your ankles touching or as close together as you can comfortably get them.
You're still swinging the same mace.
You're still performing the same 360 or 10 to 2.
But the stability demands are very different.
Athletic Stance: Give Yourself a Stable Base
For someone learning to swing a mace, we generally recommend starting with a comfortable athletic stance.
Your feet are somewhere around shoulder width apart, giving you a solid connection to the ground and enough room to use your legs and trunk naturally as you learn the swing.
A wider base of support generally means more stability.
That's useful when you're learning because there's already plenty to think about: your grip, the path of the mace, the pullover, your timing, your trunk movement, and controlling the weight as it moves around your body.
There's usually no reason to make the movement less stable before you've developed some proficiency with the swing itself.
Traditional Stance: Take Away the Stability
Traditional stance changes the equation.
Bring your ankles together and suddenly you have a much narrower base to work from. You don't have the same side to side margin for error.
Now you have to manage the mace differently.
If you allow the weight to pull you too far to one side, you'll know immediately because you're going to lose your balance or have to step out to catch yourself.
That's part of what makes traditional stance such a useful training variation.
Instead of creating stability by simply spreading your feet farther apart, you're forced to control the mace and organize your body around a much smaller base.
The mace can't just push you around.
Narrower Base, Greater Stability Demand
You can actually feel this on a continuum.
Start with your ankles touching and perform a few swings.
Then move your feet a few inches apart.
Then a little farther.
As your base gets wider, maintaining your balance generally gets easier.
This is also why we wouldn't recommend immediately using the same weight for traditional stance swings that you use with your normal athletic stance.
Lighten the mace and learn the variation first.
As your technique and control improve, you can gradually build the load back up.
That's where traditional stance training gets really fun.
You can build heavy swings with an athletic stance, then separately work toward building heavy, controlled swings with your ankles together.
They're different challenges.
What About Really Wide Stances?
If you've watched competitive mace lifting, you've probably seen athletes use a much wider stance than we're talking about here.
There's a reason for that.
When you're trying to accumulate a huge number of reps or move very heavy loads, the legs, ankles, and entire body can become part of generating and managing momentum.
That's a specific skill for a specific goal.
For general mace training, especially while learning, we prefer keeping things simpler.
Start with a natural athletic stance. Learn how to swing and control the mace.
Then, if you want to challenge that control even further, bring the feet together.
Try a Mechanical Drop Set
There's also a fun way to combine both variations without changing the weight.
Start your set in traditional stance with your ankles together.
Perform your 360s or 10 to 2s until maintaining the position becomes difficult or your technique starts to deteriorate.
Then, instead of ending the set, move your feet apart into your normal athletic stance.
You've instantly given yourself a more stable base without making the mace any lighter.
Think of it almost like a mechanical drop set: same mace, same exercise, but an easier variation that allows you to extend the set.
Both Stances Have a Place
Traditional stance isn't necessarily "better" than athletic stance.
They simply create different constraints.
An athletic stance gives you more stability and is an excellent way to learn the movement, build strength, and swing heavier loads.
Traditional stance deliberately takes some of that stability away. That forces you to pay closer attention to balance, trunk involvement, technique, and your ability to control the mace instead of letting the mace control you.
Sometimes one of the easiest ways to make a familiar movement challenging again isn't to add more weight.
It's to change the rules.