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Ok cool man I’ll check it out. Thanks

I love Muay Thai and i would love it if that became worldwide known sport, but at the same time i think if it would be known more rules would change 100%. Scoring would prob become same as in Kickboxing, balance wouldn't matter that much and i think overall Muay Thai would change...i mean even when you watch max muay thai, It's Muay Thai, but it's not the same . I wouldn't like Muay Thai to change even more and it def would , but i wouldn't want Muay Thai to disapear either... Plenty of things to think about to be honest.

I would suggest you move around. Pick out 3 prospective gyms from what you find online. Then go to each gym at least once, so you can feel the vibe, how comfortable you are. Compare them. Then pick the best of those 3, and revise your opinion several weeks in. Because you want the cost to be low, but lots of other bonuses, it's probably going to be hard to find Baby Bear on this.

Thanks to both of you for the discussion and background infos! Since I started with Muay Thai, I'm more and more interested in other martial arts out there and so I came across Lethwei, as well. Unfortunately I didn't have the chance to give it a try yet, but I'm looking forward to. And thank you @LengLeng for sharing your story and motivation! It always helps me to get levelled or modest again.

Pacquiao has been hit in the face a million times. Conversely, he was KOd by a body punch ONCE and completely revamped his abdominal training in order to avoid that ever happening again. Body strikes suck. I totally get the Thai focus on balance. Once I became aware of it, this awareness made it very hard for me to watch a lot of western fighting, across all disciplines. Fighters are terribly off-balance during, before and after strikes. Imagine a gymnast landing on her ass or a diver belly-flopping into the water. That's what it looks like. Our eyes aren't looking for it, so a lot of western fans don't see it. But once you see it, you can never "un-see" it. It's pretty bad.

There are a few things that are involved. The first may be that you have to keep in mind that Muay Thai evolved from rope bound fighting, where by report fights lasted very short periods of time, knock out or nothing, because they were basically barefisted. When hands were padded, this lengthened fights. I suspect that padding a part of the body devalued it. You are hitting someone with bare shin bones, or with padded hands. You can understand why the padded part might be devalued. Yes, if you rock someone, punches definitely count. But if you are just touching them stiffly, then nothing much. Punches need to have impact. Another element of this is that it is my theory that Thais and westerners map the body very differently. In the west we picture the head as the center of the self. Anything that strikes the head, even lightly, feels like it is hitting the very identity of a person. In Thailand you have a much more Old World conception of the body, something you see in traditional cultures, like those of Ancient Greece. In this view the "Gut" is a major center of self. In English we still have the vestigial belief in phrases like "gut check" or "I could feel it in my gut". For Thais, I believe, strikes to the gut, especially by kicks and knees, just FEEL like they are hitting the center of a person, more than they do in the west. Striking their vitality. In the traditional view of the body, the gut, the spleen, was a core of the self. Yes, the face also holds a symbolic sense of identity, but it is not the same as in the west. And lastly, I suspect that because so much of Muay Thai striking is geared toward kicks (and knees) to the body, and because this centerline is very well defended, there is a kind of "capture the flag" aspect to this. If you are able to penetrate defenses, and nail the mid-section, you are really showing skill and control over the fighting space, something that was quite appreciated in the Golden Age. Control over the fighting space was the art of Muay Thai. I suspect punching people in the face (or for that matter, low kicking them, which also ends fights) was considered low-hanging fruit. These are relatively easy strikes to be had. The Muay Thai of the age was really about pushing the technical limits of attack and defense.