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Today the General took me over to a sport Muay Thai gym in Bangkok. This gym belong to one of his friends, a former Lumpini champion. The General was looking for two things: One to show me and discuss how other gyms teach compared to him. And two, to have me hit pads to check my technique and feel what it’s like to try and use Lertrit in a sporting setting. Full disclaimer, I was told this wasn’t a hard Muay Thai training camp, but placed emphasis the conditioning and health aspects of boxing. I still thought the pad holders here were very nice and did their jobs well. There was give and take with tonights session. On one hand, it was super fun to hit pads! It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to hit pads; as a coach, I spend most of my time holding pads for everyone else. To get to sit back and just do the strikes called for, was an extremely enjoyable experience. On the other hand however, I really wanted to display the General’s techniques. The main problem I was having, and the General was seeing, was my inability to consistently demonstrate the Lertrit basics we’ve been practicing. I’ve only been with the General for three weeks, this has not been enough time to get my body to absorb his teachings. In my head I’m thinking about all the things he wants me to do, and sometimes I think I’m doing them. But overall, I just wasn’t consistently able to show all the things I wanted to be able to show the General. The General was admit that I try and defend kicks with his signature elbow block. You can see the General demonstrates this to Sylvie in the video she did with him. After missing and not seeing the opportunity to do this technique, I was able to put it into use in later rounds. Mostly due to the limited time I have been practicing, I’m not able to properly turn my waist when I do this block. The waist turn in vital. Turning the waist while blocking this way is the element which adds power, dispersing the power in your opponents kick and damages their leg; rather than you damaging your elbow or arm. There is also a variation were I kick while blocking this way. I manage to do this relatively well, once. The General can be heard/ seen clapping and smiling. Overall, I am very happy with how tonights training went. I was slightly disappointed in not being able to show the General everything he wanted to see. But by no means do I think he was upset. It’s all learning and he is a very understanding man.

More brain liquifying from the General as we ended the weekend. However, today was special because the General had us padded up from head to toe and throwing (more or less) live punches at one another. We started off slow enough, with one of the General’s assistant trainers holding pads, and every now and then coming back at us with some simple strikes. Soon enough, the General gave us the go-ahead to start throwing punches at each other. He didn’t so much use the phrase, “spare”, as much as he said “combine, combine”. Meaning, the General wanted to see what ideas, concepts and/ or lessons we could piece together in the moment. Both Tyler and I really enjoyed how the sessions progressed. What would happen, is the General or his assistant trainer would notice something Tyler or I would do in a situation. We then would get the appropriate corrections in the form of an impromptu drill(-ish, thing). The idea was to rep the concept out in a functional manner. We moved through a lot of technique, and once again it proved to be much more mentally straining than physical. Although after a few hours of this kind of work, the physical did catch up with us. The afternoon ended with Tyler and I doing a small demo for the community class - made up of mostly retired age people. The General was looking to accomplish two things from what I could tell: to show is students what they were working up to. And the test Tyler and I bit and see what we could recall in the moment. The community class is mostly structured in a way which teaches the class fundamental forms - similar to Karate Kata. Most of the student are retirement aged and mostly do the class for their physical health. Seeing the form in a practice sense is something they have only seen the General do in short reenactments; let alone in a function sense. The General also wanted to see what Tyler and I could recall in a more fast past setting. The recall being the difficult part here. For me, the recall would happen in three phases: I would miss the first opportunity to use a technique, not recalling at all; then I would miss the second opportunity, because of a late recall; and then MAYBE on the third opportunity I might make an attempt at a specific technique. The part that made me feel accomplished about today though, was even just thinking about using a technique. Often the first encouraging break through when I teach a student something new is just the fact the realized they could have done a technique or they realize in the moment where they went wrong. I felt this break through today. Super fun.

Thanks @Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu @Tyler Byers for all these pointers and advice. I'm in absorption mode here hehe. And the low kick destroyer is brilliant how could I have forgotten about it? Much appreciated.

Good luck, man!

Tim's Vlog Day 14

Ooooh I may have actually seen it in one of the Namsaknoi videos from when he was at the gym in Koh Samui. It's a fairly common technique though, shouldn't be too difficult to find an example.

If you can count on low kicks, especially early, the Low Kick Destroyer that Sylvie talks about here, can be a fight changer: There are not many things that you can just learn quickly, but this kind of check of the low kick can feel pretty natural to do. Any fighter who has low kick in their arsenal has a good chance of starting out the early rounds with low kicks. It's an intimidation technique. A single check like this can really change the fight. It will not only discourage low kicks, it might even alter how they kick and even check for the rest of the fight.

They're all autistic. I'm just gonna go with the first name option. Just like any normal class.