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This is a topic I have been meaning to bring up a while, but being hesitant since it might get a bit heated. However my curiosity won this battle as I am very interested in hearing other peoples’ views, especially trainers/coaches/teachers/instructors. So here goes. The self-appointed assisting coach or as some name them, mansplainers. The person, not a teacher, who comes with unsolicited advice in the gym. I have always done some kind of exercise one way or the other, but it never became a true interest until I started yoga seven years ago. And with yoga, only the teacher will adjust your alignment (with few exceptions). The teacher understands anatomy, the asanas (posture/movements), and is trained to perform physical adjustments. If you have a good teacher, physical adjustments are done with such care and compassion. You are gently but firmly guided into the posture. It is a great way to learn. On a job mission a few years back, I visited a studio that offer Budokon yoga, a special kind of modern yoga which is infused with martial arts. A great experience and highly recommended. Afterwards though I was talking to the teacher and this fellow student chats me up and out of nowhere he says he noticed I had over-extended my knee during practice. I am what you might call an experienced, advanced level yogi in terms of difficulties of the asanas I can master. But yoga has very little to do with difficult arm balances and so much more to do with presence and his comment brought me out of my presence, out of my physical body and mind, and into the thinking and judging brain of mine where I started over-thinking of where I kept my limbs and if I am doing things correctly and suddenly hyper-aware of the other people in the room. And this to me is what unsolicited advice does. It robs me of my presence in training and learning and suddenly I become aware I am being observed by others. When learning muay thai in Thailand as an adult. Well, it is an incredibly humbling experience. Due to language barriers, you will be made fun of when teachers instruct you, with exaggerated charades they will show you what kind of mistakes you do. And there is a clear hierarchy you need to submit to. And if you do not speak the language, you will have a hard time explaining yourself when being criticized and you can just nod and say yes. People will laugh and make jokes you do not understand. In these situations it is wonderful to have training buddies who know you. Who can help you. Where there is mutual trust. What you don’t need is someone you do not know giving you advice you did not ask for. And I think it was Timothy who said it well in a different thread, you need the space to make your own mistakes. As stated above, this is just my perspective and I am interested in other peoples’ views on this.

From a western perspective, in a group class setting, senior students are expected to give training advice. One reason is in anticipation of them being teachers themselves one day, another is kru's eyes can't be everywhere at once. I personally don't mind it, if I find it valid. If I don't find the critique valid, I just tell them that's the way I do it.

I think this is why, often in real, long term training gyms that raise Thai boys up there is very little correction. And, why, you don't get everyone on the gym doing the same motions, having the same muay. Growing young fighters tend to be more nudged towards better technique, rather than "corrected", especially not repeatedly. And emulation becomes a strong tool of honing techniques, rather than teacher direction. This may be related to the guest post I wrote for Sylvie's blog: Precision – A Basic Motivation Mistake in Some Western Training

I try not to give unsolicited advice, but I am certain I have been guilty of it at some point. I usually only suggest things or mention things if I am drilling or sparring with someone. For me this is an appropriate setting because we are supposed to be helping each other to get better. Just walking up to someone you don't know and spot correcting them is weird lol. Also, never under any circumstances should they touch your body to make a correction without asking first. I don't care if you are male, female, or whatever, don't touch people without asking first. I personally don't like people touching me even if I do know them, and if you do it without knowing me you are likely to get a bad reaction out of me. I think most people have good intentions with all this, but you never know how the other person is going to take it or what kind of past personal issues they may have.

At the yoga class I attend, the instructor frequently tells the students they have "beautiful variations". We all are working toward the same posture but because we are all individuals, our forms are unique to us. I definitely think the way that men and women are socialized affects our confidence about giving advice to others. I have offered advice to new people in various contexts if the teacher is occupied elsewhere, but I usually phrase it as a question "May I make a suggestion?, Would you like some help/advice?". If the person says no, then I keep my advice to myself.

The General

While I don’t think it was his intention, the General all but melted our brains tonight. Honestly, he did melt our brains tonight. Intentional or not, the General is very eager to show us as much of the Lertrit style as he can. Because I am only spending a short time in Thailand, the General is pretty much doing an intensive seminar every time we meet with him. Each session is much more mental taxing than physically - both Tyler and I are are trying to soak up as much information as we can while also trying to bypass most of the habits we’ve developed in prior trainings. As we enter the home stretch of my stay in Thailand, the General has introduced, “The Mothers Moves” or the Muay Thai tricks, as he sometimes refers to them. The mother moves are counter attacks seemingly applied to end a fight. From these mother moves, there are exponentially more offspring moves which make up the other styles fo Muay Thai. All of the basics we’ve learned till now make up the foundation for which the mothers moves should rest. Without the basics, the Mother Moves will be less effective, meaning not effective at all. Pretty much all of the training leading till now has lead to this point. If I am remembering correctly, there are 15 mother moves. Each mother move could be it’s own weekend long seminar, yet we were introduced to four tonight. Is this why my brains feels like an egg?

Yeah, white guys like you and me are privileged. We can coast through lots of situations and not have to think extra "negative" thoughts because we have a passport to get through all kinds of things that others don't. It's a luxury. The first step, at least for me, is realizing that yeah, I'm privileged, and other people in the same space don't experience it quite so smoothly as I do. If these people bring up certain problems that would never occur to me I take a step back and don't immediately say "Hey, you are being negative" or "why you looking for all that stuff". Sylvie tells a great story about how she wasn't able to clinch train in the main ring of her gym in Chiang Mai. It was the "man's ring", women were not allowed to enter it. It's where almost all the heavy clinch was done, and the hard sparring. Muppets were getting pretty high level clinch work, western guys who were not even fighters, while Sylvie (who was actually a clinch fighter with maybe at the time 50 or 70 fights) was getting almost no clinch work. It wasn't on purpose. It wasn't nasty, it's just the way it shook out. All the guys would just climb in and clinch. They hadn't a clue that Sylvie couldn't go in there. Occasionally a guy would say "Hey Sylvie, why don't you come in and clinch". They had a passport, one they completely took for granted. It wouldn't even cross their mind that you actually needed a passport (a penis, really) to clinch. But you kind of did. These kinds of invisible barriers are everywhere, often in much more subtle ways. Just because the barriers don't affect you or me doesn't mean that people who are stopped or slowed by them are being negative by calling attention to them. Sylvie didn't make a stink about that ring. But she suffered under it and its prohibition for a long time. She finally just left the gym and found a gym where women can clinch with males in a single ring and get all the real work. The same thing goes on with power dynamics and how instruction or information is passed between individuals. The tendency to "mansplain", broadly speaking, is really not much different than a bunch of western dudes climbing into the men's only ring to clinch. It isn't something special they are doing. That's just how one talks. It isn't something that feels privileged, it would never occur to them that you have to be a special type to do this. If you aren't clinching in the ring - as Sylvie wasn't in that ring - it must be that that's just not what you want to do. At least for me these are really important distinctions.

What I find really fascinating about the General's Muay Lertrit, from the Muay Thai perspective, is that it adds an entirely distinct and new vocabulary of strikes to an already pretty potent vocabulary in Ring Muay Thai. The truth of the matter is that ring Muay Thai, even at its best - and I consider it the best fighting art in the world in the hands of the Thais - still becomes cul-de-sac'd by aesthetics over time. You have John Wayne Parr chain punching elite fighters into submission, perhaps not because he was better than them (if you want to invent a criteria), but because he fought off- or out-of rhythm, pushing them into the deep zone. All fighting arts become aesthetisized. Ring Muay Thai is no different. The aesthetic does become refreshed because fighters are always looking for "what works", but still there are era-specific channels through which it all flows. What is really cool about Muay Lertrit from this perspective is that one discovers not one, not three, but an entire family of strikes and defenses that can operate withing ring Muay Thai, because they are ancestrally related. They fit within the fighting program of Muay Thai, because they are evolutionarily related. It's like you suddenly discovered all the Anglo-Saxon derived words of English, after becoming proficient at the Latinate words which predominate because of Style - a rough analogy admittedly. The Muay Lertrit strikes, aside from the deeper, perhaps much more meaningful elements of balance, breathing and movement, seem to fall into certain holes or blindspots in modern Muay Thai.

Bro. *dramatic pause* My brain is currently made of french toast and soup. What did he do to us tonight lol? I want to play with that spinning elbow more, I felt like I was starting to get the weight transfer of that one towards the end. Once I have that down I want to try and start mixing in other elbows. I actually like that step in elbow to the floating rib too. I didn't get a chance to try that one, but I think I understand how it works. On an unrelated note, that ninja jump foot work is going to be the death of me. I am terrible jumping off my left side. Those jumping kicks made me feel like I need to go do single leg squats for the next 3 months to get more than a 2 inch vertical. Good stuff, but I'm brain dead.

Kai Ting Chuang vs. Janet Todd (ONE Championship: Masters of Destiny) - (2019.07.12) https://ok.ru/video/1739912188187

That's like... thinking about it / over analysing it way too much for me to comprehend. Isn't life hard enough without deliberately making it harder, and bringing it that level of negativity into your brain when you're doing what you love? But to be fair, that's fairly shocking that white people will come into your gym and preach to her after over 200 fights. Surely you just have to see somebody shadowbox or do 1 body kick to know if they're better than you..? Maybe our gyms are quite different, yeah. Like, not only did none of my trainers speak English, but neither did the other farang really. Only had my 1 Brazilian friend to talk to in almost a year in Bangkok, which was awesome tbh. It lets you off the hook if you're a quiet person who doesn't talk much anyway.

farang, for sure. I guess we go to different gyms. It's definitely a type we have run into again and again. I'm not sure if @LengLeng is talking about this type, but I just wanted to throw it out there that this does occur in Thailand, as people have been mentioning western gym contexts. Hmmm. No, mansplaining is just an air of authority men are raised to take on and feel comfortable with (especially online, where social cues are minimal). It's a pattern of talk that, very broadly speaking, women are much less comfortable with. It's the assumption "I know more than you likely know" as a way of entering communication. Happens all the time. Raised as a man I definitely have been cursed/blessed with it. You don't have to really look for it, like a rare rabbit in the woods, it is pretty much everywhere. Sylvie gets it all the time when people first come to the gym and imagine that they are super experienced when compared to her.

Not sure I understand - this older person doing the sensei-sim thing, is this a Thai or a farang? Only met a couple of white dudes over there who would chat shit to you constantly, & usually they wanted you to invest in their pyramid scheme or something after bestowing their great boxing knowledge. But like, sketchy characters who left fairly quick. As for the mansplaining thing... often what you're looking for you will find, whether it's there or not.

Men "Mansplain" to other men all the time. In fact that is how they develop the habit. In fact, I just did it. To offer the other side of it, this is really common in Thailand, and not because there are 40 people in a class. Sylvie calls it "Sensei-ism". Usually or often older, or long term people in the gym who themselves don't work very hard, maybe they've been coming for many years, off and on, and one of the biggest pleasures is trying to convey how much "knowledge" they have. Happens all the time.

For sure this happens way more in Western gyms than in Thailand. What country did this happen to you in, just out of interest? Not a trainer, but out of pure guesswork? Might be the lack of training time & resources that makes this happen. 1 trainer and 40 people on the mat for a mere 1 hour session, basically means you get hardly any input from the teacher, so the 3 or 4 most experienced people in the room will - out of honest to God good intentions - try and help the new people in their first few weeks / months. Because somebody did it for them once. Which is nice of them - and to be fair, helped me out a tonne on my first day. But you also get it from people who suck and have douchebag attitudes, so yeah that's the frustrating part. Training in different European countries makes you realise that half the job is remembering who to never partner with again, who to never spar with again, and regularly position yourself on the far side of the mat from them so as not to be paired up. Sounds bitchy, but there it is. You guys often think this is 'mansplaining' but.... like...genuinely.... guys do this to each other more than they do it to girls. It's also a question of different people being wired to learn in totally different ways. Dunno how to prove it, just an instinct. But personally, always been totally incapable of learning anything by reading or listening to teachers give long winded speeches. The way a musician learns has always made more sense, you watch your teacher's movements, his finger mechanics, listen to the sound produced, then try to do it yourself. No reason for it to be more complicated than that.