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This seems notably like a guy phenomenon although I have had a few ladies act like they are going to absolutely KILL me on their first day but that's ok I like it and anyhow I'm not a coach so the ego ain't my problem.

Yeah exactly, we all seen examples of the party hard dude that doesn't have it affect his conditioning at all, it's genetically freaky shit. Gotta admit, never seen the other one unfortunately. Like, the guy who comes in and says he's been in tonnes of street fights right off the bat. Always figured that happened in movies or Instagram memes but didn't know it's actually a regular real life thing.

Long live the GOAT:

wait wait wait, so those girls do that to other girls too and not just us?!? Damn

Timothy's vlog #1 - First Day, Arrival If you'd like to follow this thread you can click follow at the top and get alerts when Timothy posts.

We may not be referring to the same set of early fights. Honestly, it was a year ago I read up on this. To me it's not even worth thinking about. Japanese fighting at the time was laughably (seriously, humorously) inferior. (The other day we asked Dieselnoi about the World Championship fights he fought in in 1982 in which the Japanese kickboxers (and all the other kickboxers in the world) were overwhelmed, and he just started giggling. He said, "you have to understand, it was all yodmuay. All the fights went very fast." But he really was giggling like a child. He pointed to his knee where he still has a scar from the tooth of a Korean fighter. And this is 20 years after these original bouts.) At the time we are thinking about these are very likely the best Japanese fighters in the country, or at least in the upper percentile. They are not fighting elite Thais. Putting these guys against the best fighters in Thailand at the time, in lots of fights, would have been an endless embarrassment - again, not because Japanese Karate sucks, it's because of the very deep experience in actual fights top Thais had, and the fact that Karate really was not a full contact fighting sport.

I don't think there is anything wrong with believing that you would win. You should believe it. All the best on your next fight

Thank you to everyone who replied to this post, it has been hugely helpful and i appreciate you taking time out of your day to do so. I'm going to try those gyms listed and just 'gym hop' for a week or so, book somewhere for a week for 10k baht or so to find my bearing in BKK for 3 months i'd like to keep it under around 5k USD. The pound is awful at the moment (thanks to impending brexit) and shows no sign of a changing any time soon. I looked at Samarts place which is something like 49K baht for a month or training/accommodation and food, attatchi is around 18k for training (I can live with that providing it's good training and i can find somewhere nearby for 10k or so). Having only passed through BKK on my way to pattaya (to fight) i guess i need to become accustom to the area, it looks like theres an abundance of muay thai gyms there, kiatphontip has been recommended. If i can't deal with BKK, SKP in chiang mai has been excellent training thus far so i'm only an hour flight away from a familiar and good gym/area. Thanks again, Jonny

And see Im not anti these types either. I really dont care their past, its their "present" Im concerned with. I tell new students to not just empty their cup but put what they already know in a metaphorical mason jar and put it away for later. Fill a new cup with the new info and just add it to their experience. I dont want to take from them, only add. Guys like this, I have a chance at that. Guys like this are in some ways better than the raw new student as they have enough experience that they can know that they dont know and work to fix it.

Yeah I can work with balance if their ego isnt too huge.

Hi Tim Don't get too anxious, just make it on that flight. You've got a battle buddy here now! I'm gonna be out there training with you and I've been living in Bangkok off and on for the last 4 years so. If you need anything at all please feel free to message me here, LINE (tylerbyers1 is my ID), or on Facebook and we'll get you sorted out. I went out last weekend and trained with the General during the seniors class, it was a total blast! Everyone there is super friendly and helpful. I had a bunch of older Thai folks coming around correcting my form as the General expects students to teach everything they have been learning. It's a wonderful philosophy for creating a good learning environment and I think we are going to have a lot of fun. I've taken the next month off school so I've got a lot of free time on my hands. Let me know where you are going to be staying and I can do some prep work to make sure you've got everything you need (i.e. mass travel info, where to get groceries/food, cheap massage, etc.). I look forward to meeting you soon, have a safe flight. - Tyler

[admin edit: some of the photos in this thread were lost due to a probable attack on our website, unfortunately. We recovered most of the thread. Thank you to everyone who supported us through this.] Hello all. My name is Tim. I live in California and in a few days I’ll be leaving for Bangkok, Thailand to train Muay Thai Lertrit under the guidance of General Tunwakom. I contacted Sylvie some months ago about her participating in interviews for my masters thesis. I ended up spending hours talking with her husband Kevin. The next thing I know, I’m buying a ticket to Thailand. When Kevin proposed I come to Thailand to train with General Tunwakom, I was somewhat skeptical about the proposition coming to fruition, let alone the project turning into a full feature on their websites and media channels. But they made it happen for me. I am so very thankful for the faith both Kevin and Sylvie have in me and the opportunity they have presented me with. Thank you, thank you, thank you to both of them! I started training martial arts at age 17 and it’s been an all consuming venture since. I’ve trained in various disciplines of boxing as well as Brazilian Jiujitsu, and Kung Fu. Currently I’m a Jiujitsu blue belt in the Carlson Gracie organization and I hold a 7º black belt in Kung Fu San Soo. I’m not a fighter by any means however. Fighting as never been an interest of mine. I just like moving. Despite my recent academic achievements, I had an incredibly difficult time in school - I didn’t learn to read until the 6th grade and spent most mornings of my youth throwing heavy objects at my mother in an attempt to avoiding going to school. I sought refuge in sport. I've never been a natural athlete though, I had to write L and R on my shoes for during my first year of high school American football to know which direction to move (left or right), but moving my body was mediative and made me feel like I was a person. It’s what I love about martial arts - the meditative repetition of learning something, not until you get it right, but until you can’t do it wrong. I’ve learned more about my self and the world in the hours spent learning a punch or kick than doing anything else. It was my faith in martial arts which took me back to school. After achieving my black belt I thought: if I could apply half of the effort I put into getting my black belt into school, then it would be no problem. It was true. I always found away to make school about the things that interested me - food, skateboarding and of course martial arts. My master thesis seeks to blend theoretical sociology with martial arts. Which brought me to Kevin and Sylvie. They have presented me with this opportunity I feel is much bigger than me just traveling and training. I don’t know how to process the whole thing. Sitting here trying to articulate my thoughts has been has difficult has writing my thesis. I have all sorts of anxieties and fears about traveling and my skills as a martial artist. What if I miss my flight? What if my kicks are really bad? What if I say something dumb on video!? But anymore, embracing the things that make me anxious, embracing the things I’m afraid of are my favorite things. They make me better as a person. I’ll need to plan well so I don’t miss my flight. If my kicks are bad, I’ll throw 1,000 more. If I say something dumb, I’ve already said a million dumb things, I’ll try better. I expect I’ll be uncomfortable and cry at least once. I also expect I’ll learn much more than Muay Thai. I hope to make all my instructors proud, both the ones who have taught me to punch and kick as well as the ones who taught me to think and write. I hope I have fun and give the General peace of mind that he’s teaching the right student. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who will take the time to read this and comment back. More to come. tm

Agreed. Personally Ive never had a woman say or act this way ever.

OOOooomg yes, the Charlie Zellenoff videos were hilarious. Ok now it's making sense, if we're talking about guys like that. Don't think its a macho / ego thing.... some people are just properly mentally disturbed. Like he would stalk pro boxers on twitter, talk shit to them, death threats, dropping N bombs, the works. Best one had to be when Deontay Wilder invited him to his gym after the keyboard abuse, and the nutcase actually showed up and got his ass handed to him. Brilliant.

This may be the one you're talking about. With regards to Dieselnoi.

You only gotta look at Charlie Zellenoff, 270 something and 0, all in his mind of course. And then you've got those absurd claims, on dubious self defense advertisements. Such and such, ex special forces, 600 street fights and no losses. This kind of clap trap might have something to do with them thinking they need to validate themselves with bullshit.

I'd be very surprised if it occurred among women. With blokes, I guess it would be a way of fitting in within what they perceive as an aggressive environment. From the outside looking in, it would be hard for them to understand friends hitting each other, and it's kinda accepted that men are "The street fighter" so this scenario, whilst it makes no sense to us, makes sense to them.

It's real, dude. Although I'm still waiting to meet someone as bad as Charlie Z.

I find with those that stay, their ego was defence mechanism to a strange environment. After they've been hit and thrown around a few times, they realise they're not dealing with Joe Blow from the local boozer.

We also have to, I would STRONGLY suggest, accept the possibility that an almost decimated art would then become cross-influenced by the dominant art of the day. It may very well be it looks like Muay Thai because in attempting to assemble the art into a style, it draws on what it sees as well. This for instance is what supposedly happened when TKD arose in Korea, but almost exclusively as a derivative of Japanese Karate. In fact, it pretty much WAS Japanese Karate. After the war it become imperative for TKD to not be Japanese at all, and so began the long path of creating a supposedly "original" Korean martial art that TKD was derived from. And they found the thinnest little trace of one (nearly extinct at the time of Karate's arrival in Korea). So, the story building began, and that art, apparently called t'aekkyon, came to be claimed as the origin of TKD, something that a study of early TKD martial art manuals suggest isn't the case at all. t'aekkyon then itself gradually began a reconstruction, retroactively, with people claiming to know and teach it. The connective tissue between it and modern TKD came to be grandfathered in. And this had strong ideological motivations. Make TKD Korean in origin, not Japanese. My gut feeling is that something like this is happening in some cases of fragmented SEA martial arts that claim to be older than Muay Thai (an ideological claim). These arts can be reconstructed, from the present, into the past, and give the illusion to be origins. This actually is a problem with many of the Muay Boran claims in Thailand as well. We don't really know if any of these are actual lineages, or how much of them are reconstructions. Arjan Surat, who had a Boran teacher who is up on the wall of his gym, shook his head when talking about Muay Boran masters of today. "If he didn't know (pointing to the photo on the wall), how do they know?". That is one of the special, and indeed remarkable thing about General Tunwakom's Muay Lertrit. It is handed straight down from its creator, who himself was fusing Muay Khorat with other influences (apparently).

It reminds me of cultures that had an architectural history in wood. Almost all lost. Cultures that built in stone, highly favored in the invented histories of the world.

There's places to rent listed on here as well: https://www.bahtsold.com/ If you're after a cheaper room you're probably best off asking a local to point a place out to you once you're there, as a lot of places with cheap rooms won't advertise. When I was after a cheap place to stay a Thai translated my request to a taxi driver and he dropped me at an apartment block. I think I paid about 4K plus bills for a month for a basic room with cold shower. As has been suggested elsewhere, try a few gyms out first before committing. Once you've found your gym you can ask around about accommodation.

Thank you so much for the encouragement! Please keep it coming!

Only once but the dude didn't actually talk about it - you had to get to know him, but down the bar after a couple of drinks his stories came out... which were both shocking and hilarious - but also 100% true. Not a bullshitter at all. Fairly quiet guy in the gym actually, from Russia. Came up in sketchy places where these altercations weren't uncommon for young guys growing up. Extremely polite and courteous, with an understated cleverness to him, but also *really* fucking strong, *really* fucking athletic, and *really* fucking skilled. He'd be out getting trashed and high on god knows what every Friday night, then Saturday morning he rolls in to sparring session with no sleep, still wearing the same clothes, stinking of whiskey and ky jelly. Then kicks all our asses in sparring. Half way through training we're looking around wondering where he is, and it turns out he snuck outside for a cigarette break. Got curious so asked him once about Russian athletes and what made them so successful in so many sports, expecting more street fight stories or something. He just said one word in his usual stoic demeanour. "Attitude".

I'm sure you will do fine. I'm also really looking forward to following your progress with this, and like Kevin said, look at it like a conversation rather than writing a post to update people on your progress. You would be surprised how much you could Yammer on in a conversation if it was actually typed out There is no right or wrong thing to say, and you will have a whole community of people behind you who believe in your ability 100% Most of all, have fun with it. It will definitely be an experience you will look back on with fond memories

Best of luck man just have fun - very few people get a chance to do what you get to do!

Thank you for your support and enthusiasm, hope I meet your expectations!

Soooo. The kickboxing talent pool is incredibly weak, you say. But the Kyokushin talent pool is amazing. I sense, well, someone who loves Kyokushin, hahaha. No matter this isn't going to reach agreement. I personally am really interested in the heritage and changes of martial arts, but honestly listening to Karate people tug of war over who was an authentic teacher, and who was the fraud is incredible boring. You never get any of this in Muay Thai, why? Because the quality of the Muay Thai is shown in actual, high level fights, fights that become incredibly famous. In actual fighters. It would be like arguing about the greatest baseball players the history of Baseball in America, but then there was an totally different version of the sport in, let's say, Norway, where it was customary to argue about who was the best TEACHER of alter-baseball, and not actual Norwegenian alter-baseball games, actual alter-baseball players. When you say: Wow, Karuhat was as good any fighter Thailand has every produced, you never get "But who was his master? Where did he get his "fight style" from?! What school is he? All these questions really point to nonsense for me. You know where Karuhat got his fighting style when you ask him? He made it up. He made it up because he was forced as a kid to spar and play with lots of other high level fighters, and he was pushed through a beautiful and difficult regime. And he made it up because he had to beat the very best fighters who ever walked, in real fights, with lots of money on the line. Please give me a fighting art that has no "masters", as the definition of its authenticity.

The problem was a particular, historical problem. I'm sure there is no contemporary Thai who thinks about Japanese Kickboxing as anything at all. The tensions around the 1982 World Championships were apparently VERY high. The Japanese didn't steal techniques, they copied the commercial product of fighting, put on 3 weekly televised kickboxing shows, made huge iconic stars (probably through lots of fixed fights), and then tried to bring it over to Thailand. That, apparently was the problem. As to taking the "Thai kick" or the whatever, Thais wouldn't care less. Maybe on the forums and conversation spaces you visit this is a big deal - because westerners are all about authentic technique, etc, because gyms commercially sell themselves as holding authentic technique - but Thais couldn't care less. There is so much variety of technique in Thailand it isn't even funny.

I think this is a huge problem when discussing this subject. One part of that problem is I have no idea what you are referring to because Sylvie developed outside of US gym culture, and all the online history. Everything she's done is far removed, and me as well. My opinions mostly formed far from any of the talk of Muay Thai's superiority. I'd run into old AX Forum stuffy from Googling, but it's a different world for me. I don't have fighters to defend, a gym to run, students to attract. I'm only really interested in preserving and acknowledging what is special about Muay Thai, because we neck deep in it, and we personally know and are closely connected to many of the legends of the sport who are now being forgotten, not only by westerners, but by Thais themselves. But, I understand that this kind of talk, the kind I'm putting forward, probably connects up with all sorts of western conversations about martial art vs martial art which honestly I'd run away from a million miles an hour. Thais don't talk or think like that, at least how I've seen. They don't even think about comparisons. If they saw another martial art they might think such a thing is silly, or that it's totally worth stealing because Thais love efficacy. I think it was only in the period when Thais felt that the Japanese were stealing their art, creating their own copycat sport, and then kind of staging its superiority, that they were like: Hey, fuck off! But all the same, other Thais were very willing to fight on Japanese TV and fall down for one of Fujiwara's amazing 99 KOs too.

I think people get confused. They want to compare "martial arts" or "fighting styles" in the complete abstract, as if they are software programs that exist out there in some other reality, and they argue that one is better than another. Muay Thai is proven, in actual fights, as superior probably MOSTLY because Thai fighters have grown up fighting an incredibly inordinate number of full contact fights, from youth. No other art or fighting style on the planet is like this, to this degree. The average run of the mill Thai fighters is incredibly comfortable with the fight space and violence, if only because of early and very frequent exposure. The Thai Muay Thai fighters walked through Japanese Karate fighters not because abstractly "Muay Thai" is better than "Karate", per se. It's because Thai Muay Thai fighters have been fighting since they were kids, in highly contested, full contact fights, and a lot of them. It's like the rich kid walking up and fighting the poor kid in the mean streets. Most things being equal, it's not the fighting style of each. It's that one kid has been fighting his way to the top of a pile his whole life, and the other guy has been taking lots of a classes and "sparring hard". Early Karate fighters in these Japanese vs Thai faceoffs really were kind of social elites. Karate was passed down to relatively affluent Japanese students (it moved through the University system). While that was happening poor kids in every village of Thailand were fighting in endless full contact festival fights. Put the two to together, and you get a mismatch. People look at this question in completely the wrong way, as if "Muay Thai" in the abstract is somehow proven better than "Karate" in the abstract. Ok, if you are saying "I'm going to study a martial art, which one is best!", maybe there is some interest in knowing what is "best", but really it's about what protocol and experiences are you going to undergo. You can learn "Muay Thai" in a mall gym and suck. You can learn Karate under much more fight heavy situations, and be pretty awesome. But, the protocol and process that produces the average Muay Thai fighter, since youth, is pretty much unparalleled in the world. There is a secondary case to be made, and I make this case, that Muay Thai has a superiority in the sense that the overall art of its techniques actually developed through real fighting, with lots of weapons, over decades and decades. That is, you didn't have "master" coaches inventing principals or moves out of their own creative impulses (which may or may not be effective), as much as you had repeated experiments and feedback pushed through 100,000s of thousands of real fights. The whole sport/art form takes on, I think, a certain efficacy and vocabulary. This is just a theory though. You can't prove it by simply putting a Thai Muay Thai fighter vs a Japanese Karate fighter because I think the real difference in efficacy comes from the personal experiences of each fighter, and their comfort in the space, not from some abstract "style". But it makes good sense to me. I think the same thing informs the efficacy of western boxing, which today rests on the developments of 10,000s and 10,000s of real fights, many of them in the impoverished classes, for now at least a hundred years. You can see the weight of the techniques that come out of that heritage. Thai fighters, as in, real elite Thai fighters in their prime don't even fight in these kinds of rulesets (rulesets designed to remove many of the Thai's weapons, to keep them fighting in limited vocabularies so the westerners and others can keep up). Buakaw wasn't even an elite fighter when he moved over to K1. He was a good young fighter, but that's about it. They were like "hey kid, go over there and do this thing in Japan". He walked through K1. You talk to Thais and most feel that Buakaw would be blown out by the best Thai fighters in Thailand in a Muay Thai fight, and they've felt that way for many years. They are proud of him as a Thai icon, but people seriously in the game don't think he's close to being a top Muay Thai fighter, I've heard many laugh about it. There are almost no examples of top Thais crossing over to fight others. Today you have someone like Yodwicha who is ripping through the Top King promotion, hilariously doing so as a puncher. Why is it funny that he's doing it as a heavy handed puncher? Because when he was fighting at the highest level in Muay Thai (won co-Fighter of the Year), he was endlessly criticized for having "no weapons" and being only a clinch fighter. He moved onto kickboxing and had to give up his one big weapon, the clinch, and just started knocking people out left and right, something you never saw in Thailand:

Not really worth mentioning - I mean you can mention it, but you would also have to mention that they "Muay Thai fighters" that they beat were not Thais, hahahaha. And, you can guess just how good those non-Thais were. Non-Thai "Muay Thai" fighters in 1963? It's amazing they could find them. It pretty much let's you know the purpose of the match. Fly all the way to Thailand, fight and win again non-Thais. Oi. The one Thai who fought a Japanese fighter obliterated him. This dominance was repeated in the World Championships of combat Martial Arts in Bangkok, I believe 1982. When all the Thais made quick work, sometimes VERY quick work of the Japanese fighters (and everyone else), almost 2 decades of training and fighting since these initial embarrassing losses. The only loss of a Thai to a Japanese fighter in those bouts (Headline: "Japanese kickboxing beats Muay Thai!") was due to disqualification because the Thai was judged to be clowning the Japanese fighter - not to mention that there were apparently accusations that the Japanese coalition was attempting to fix fights. Yes I've run into his description a few times. Some people like to pass this off as if some every day unprepared "coach" was just pulled in unexpectedly. Yes, he may have fought without a lot of prep, but he was not just some coach. He probably would be the closest thing one could find as a Kyokushin Master. I've seen lineages which claim he was even a Kyokushin co-creator (10 years before, 1953) (these schools like to fight over who is the progenitor). In any case, he was about as powerful a representative of Kyokushin as one could possibly come up with, or at least an elite one. He wasn't just one of many random coaches on a team. You have a Karate Master, a man who helped create and disseminate Kyokushin, going up against a Thai the history books otherwise would have forgotten. I'm pretty sure the Thai wasn't training months for this fight either, to be honest. Sounds like a fight a Thai would take on a few days notice. Suffice to say, Kurosaki understood himself to be thoroughly and intensely beaten. His response wasn't "Gee, if I only had a fight camp!" and "I must train harder!". His response was to completely reinvent his art and create "Kickboxing" which was eventually passed to the Dutch. I suspect that he ended up thinking that it was a blessing that he fought instead of just a student of his, as he might have blamed the loss on just the skill of the student. Instead he experienced first hand the difference (and deficit) of his Kyokushin, and focused his life on making very big, in fact profound changes.

Two background articles on this project: The Lone Master In Need of a Student – Saving Muay Lertrit Legacy Projects: Documenting 3 Student Weeks with General Tunwakom a video clip of General Tunwakom

This is a poison of western fight culture. I've learned to never underestimate anybody. There's no such thing as an easy fight, really and truly. I was listening to Kru Nu tell me about how this opponent couldn't fight me, which is a Thai phrase that is often used to imply that skill levels are just crazy different. But even after telling me this, he paused and then told me never to underestimate anybody. He said anything can happen in a fight, it depends on how important it is to the other person, etc. I've felt that in my opponents. And I think that when your opponent is talked down - and people mean well when they do that, even though it's so shitty - it takes something from your own heart. It makes it seem less important. It allows you, even for a moment, even if you know better, to let your guard down a little. You SHOULD have an appropriate level of fear, or awareness, for every single person you will ever get in the ring with. Even if on paper it looks like there's no way you could lose. It's a fight. You've prepared for it. It's your preparation that will let you win, not your expectations about your opponent. You can fight anyone, Lisa. Literally anyone. You can be the one who everyone is down-talking and you can win in those conditions. Your opponent has the same possibilities. But don't doubt yourself or believe in yourself based on who or what your opponent is. Believe in yourself for what you've done, for who you are, for the work you've put in. None of that guarantees a win. But you can't disappoint yourself if you know you've done the work. Just do the work. The fight is part of it, not the result of it.