In our lineage the centerline is from the center point of your body to the center point of your opponent’s body. This is the shortest distance between our opponent and us. If we can keep our hands here, it forces the opponent to take a longer path around to reach our targets, and allows us to hit them before they get the chance to hit us. Other lineages call the vertical mid-line the centerline and those terms are not synonyms for us. The vertical mid-line is the line that runs through your body like a wick through a candle, where we want to land our strikes and stay facing nose to nose. This has a few benefits, namely it affects their balance (where if you hit off side of this line it just rotates them), and most of the vital targets of the body can be found on this line.