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Hello, I have seen the list of recommended gyms that is pinned at the top of this forum but I had some further questions about training in Thailand. I will be able to get about 3 weeks off to come visit in January for my work and I was wondering what would be a good preferably smaller gym I could train/stay at in Bangkok. I am specifying bangkok because of the cheapness of the flights as compared to elsewhere but if there is another city nearby that is relatively easy to get to I would have no issue tacking on another travel day. I was also wondering if anyone had any thoughts on privates vs group classes and since I'm only gonna be there for 3 weeks if solely doing privates would be better or if I should just say fuck it and train twice a day with privates in between. I'm a 24 year old male that sucks at everything but am very interested in getting there to train hard and learn as much as I can. If someone has any other recommendations for specific privates that would also be great. I know Sagat and Chatchai have been recommended but just curious of other thoughts.

An interesting gym to look into is Yodwicha's gym. It's located a bit further out from the center, but it's small and you'd get good attention. We sent someone that way a few months ago and they seemed to be really enjoy their time: Sylvie's walk around: I'd just start with regular training and see how you can handle it physically and mentally, and then add in privates if it seemed like it is something you'd like, just playing it by ear. No need to plan that way in advance on this question.

Just some associative writing on the subject of poetry, brought on by @Tyler from Florida's thoughts on poetry and meter. Last week we were filming with Chatchainoi, a fighter called The Man of Stone in his day - you can see my photo essay on him here - and there were several moments when he would interrupt training and make corrections which really seemed musical. This in the sense, he objected to the rhythms and beats that Sylvie was making, and in fact at one point started making the fight music sounds, on a pretty quick tempo, to indicate what he was teaching. Get on this rhythm. Now, there are a lot of rhythms in Muay Thai, and many ways of fighting within them, off of them, but Chatchainoi has what I suspect is a very old rhythm. He was a very small fighter who pressed his opponents, had heavy hands and knees, and was always in the fight space. He had been with the Dejrat Gym since the 1990s, you can see him pointing to his photo here: His trainer was Arjan Surat who still is the owner of the gym, now at the age of 70, and they teach a very old Muay that they trace back to Arjan Surat's Arjan, a Muay Chaiya fighter. They don't "teach" Muay Chaiya (a Southern Style of Muay Boran), but somehow the dark root of their Muay, the Muay of the gym, goes down into that earth, still training very good stadium fighters. It's a hard, defensive, pressing style. All this is to say, Chatchainoi had a rhythm for fighting in his mind, unlike many other Thai trainers. You'll see this in the Muay Thai Library session if you watch it, but there is a point where Sylvie and he do a kind of leg kick battler in sparring, and he was very demonstrative in objecting to how Sylvie was "getting him back". She was getting the point back, but in completely the wrong way. I've been in all these MTL sessions, and around lots of high level Muay Thai, and even though I was there I couldn't quite feel what he was talking about. Sylvie felt it. What this brings back to my mind was back when I had a great passion for Greek Tragedy, and taught myself Ancient Greek, and begun translating the great tragetists. This is all metered poetry. And there are ostensibly 3 great authors. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. When you read Sophocles in the Greek you are just almost awestruck by the complexity of the writing. He makes full use of the twists and delays that are possible in Greek, and has an incredible dexterity in his language. It's really something. But, for me, when I read Aeschylus, thought to be less sophisticated, less evolved than Sophocles by many critics, his language was just earth-shaking. It has a stoniness, and oldness, a rigid power that Sophocles's flowing ribbons and wordplay just does not. It's closer to the earth. It feels like its of a time when a tragic play was also a rite, a power. This is what I felt when watching Chatchainoi's rhythm, the one in his heart that he insisted on. It was older. It did not have the dexterity or sophistication of perhaps another fighter, and I'm pretty sure he was criticized as "low IQ" for how many strikes he purposively took back in the day (a common thing to say about tough, derning fighters), but what I learned in filming that session was that his rhythm, his feeling for what is right and proper poetry as a fighter had structure, a structure of heart and sinew that you learned and conditioned. And, it was not the same as that Arjan Surat had, who trained him. It was his own. But the family of the techniques of that gym were Aeschylean.

Another very interesting fine art parallel, beyond poetry, is that of dance. In this hour conversation I talked with Thais about the ways in which Thailand's Muay Thai sheds light on dance, and even more the case, how dance helps us see into western pursuits of Muay Thai, the development of styles, the role of techniques, pedagogy, and projects of expression.

I kind of marvel at this paragraph, so much is in there. I love the references to the iambic beats, and the heartbeats. There is inner rhythm - its not just rocking back and forth, the rock sets the metronome so that every variation can ribbon off from that. Like thinking music is just a baseline. But, if you don't learn these rhythms, or even learn to look for the feet of a poem, its true, it just looks like stuff. Maybe cool stuff, oddly beautiful or styled, but its intricate, sophisticated manipulation of an opponent, a stage. You are right, so much as to be known to even be able to read what is going on. Not just technical facts, but cultural facts. The why of retreat. The why of taking an extra measure. Arts of course can always risk becoming too courtly, riding towards inefficacy, playing toward pure aesthetic, those who understand codes. But somehow - though BKK point fighting can be a thing - Muay Thai over the decades has avoided it, enriching itself from constant influx from the minor literatures of rural parlance, dialects of fighting styles far from any palace, and the fact fights are engaged in such full-contact brutality, that works to correct with consequence anything too stylized, too abstract. Muay Thai has always had this highly tensioned dialectic between BKK cosmopolitan sophistication and up-country / down-country labor and creation, which makes it unique as a historical document, and incredibly rich as a fighting knowledge. I think you are very right though about the anxiety of influence, because when you are touching Muay Thai proper, you are actually reaching across and touching a whole culture, or an array of subcultures. And when you change Muay Thai, you are changing the fabric of something more than a sport.