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Informal Intro: I've been reading Agamben's The Highest Poverty, an incredibly dry but also quite fruitful study of Early Christian monastic orders used to gain insight into how cultures - and perhaps more importantly sub-cultures - organize and express themselves. He's examining Wittgenstein's prescriptions regarding rule-following and Forms of Life when thinking about Language and problems of philosophy, but tracing these concepts down to their historical exemplification in monasteries in say the 12th century. It's pointedly obscure, but these details open up into flowers of realization, like seeds, especially as I draw them into the sub-culture of Thailand's Muay Thai, and more properly kaimuay (camp) Muay Thai. I've written along this grain on the Forms of Life, using Bourdieu's concept of habitus in Thailand's kaimuay Muay Thai in "Trans-Freedoms Through Authentic Muay Thai Training in Thailand Understood Through Bourdieu's Habitus, Doxa and Hexis", where the hidden, or at least non-obvious, forms of doing something carry secret formative principles which are expressed in the techniques of fighting. But here, below, I want to bring out a very small thought, that aligns with the concept of rule-following and shaped communal ways of doing. Do not pull your strikes. Sorry for the sprawly introduction. Sometimes I feel like I have to really sketch out where I'm coming from because I sense that my frames of reference are potentially quite alien to the topics I'm putting my thoughts to. In any case, do not pull your strikes when sparring. This is why. Strikes Are Like Words Body of Thought: We've probably spoken about this in our lengthy Muay Thai Bones podcasts, but there are many analogies to the Muay Thai of Thailand and language. You seek a certain fluency and ultimately an expression of a grammar and vocabulary that is not your own. There are many points which map in an illuminating way from one to the other, and I think this analogy sheds light onto areas of learning (and performance) that are lost in more mechanistic views of Thailand's strike armory. In some respects this seems ridiculous. "Of course I should pull my strikes, this is sparring! Do you want an all out war!" But, this is the point. A strike in Thailand's Muay Thai is like a word with syllables. It unfolds in time, like a word. And in pronouncing a word which syllable you place the accent on, the stress, is quite important. BE-gone is a mispronunciation of be-GONE. EN-gin-eer is a mispronunciation of en-gi-NEER. When fighters pull strikes very, very commonly what they are doing is radically altering the pronunciation of the strike...they are softening the final syllable. They are pulling it back. This distorts the entire energy dynamic of how a strike is supposed to follow, which involves the communication of mechanical energy through the body parts into the final syllable, which ultimately comes about through a feeling about that strike, in the very same way you would have a feeling about a word, and how it is supposed to be pronounced. What happens is that you feel that in actual fighting you'll just put the emphasis on the final syllable, after habitually placing it much further up the word. Your strikes will have been trained/pronounced with accents often on the FIRST syllable, coming out fast, and then abruptly slowed down and softened. What will happen is that you very well might SAY your strikes louder, even shouting them in fights, but the actual pronunciation of them will be first syllable. You'll be shouting EN-gin-neer!!! Instead of en-gin-NEER. This is because the flow dynamics of how strikes unfold contain a feeling in time, and of emphasis. And sparring is the closest affective training you can have of actual fight circumstances. Sylvie and I have talked about this in the discussion of the Golden Kick: The Golden Kick – How To Improve Your Thai Kick which compares the shape of the Westernized "round" kick, with the more traditional kick of Thailand's Golden Age. Patterns of acceleration become embedded into the very shape of strikes, just as words become pronounced differently: You can take a deeper dive into these patterns of acceleration if you examine Karuhat's particular chest-rising Golden Kick, which is absolutely unique on it is own, but comprises these final-syllable principles to a great degree: #111 The Karuhat Rosetta Stone 7 - The Secrets of the Matador (83 min) watch it here The idea is that in sparring you say your words softly, but when the emphasis on the end...on the final syllable. They come out relaxed and slowly, and have a bite at the end. This actually folds into very high level striking that you'll find in legendary fighters like Karuhat or Namkabuan, who will begin a strike and as it unfold decide if a different strike is in order, mid-strike...because they are looking with their eyes. Elite fighters have matrix-like perceptions of the time unfolding as a strike a delivered, and I think that some of this comes from the feeling that the emphasis, in terms of feeling, but also bio-mechanically, comes at the end. Ultimately you want the affective shape of a strike, and its reality, to express a confluence of body parts all the way up from the ground, through the torso, into the ends of where the strike makes contact. This is a practiced release of energy. The energy does not have to be "hard". It can be quite soft, just as you can whisper a word with emphasis on the end, almost inaudibly. There is something Sylvie's experienced many times when training with legends of the past. Men in their 60s, even 70s. You can feel how hard they are. Some of this is just their "bones", hardened from so much training and fighting as well, but some of it comes through the dynamics of how power flows through their strikes. Sylvie's commented about this for instance with Sagat or General Tunwakom, both in the Library. Even at very slow motion demonstrations of a technique there is a tremendous, or at least unexpected transfer of energy, at the final syllable. It's not that it hurts, it just has a certain kind of weight. This is because they are pronoucing the "word" properly, even in slow motion. The energy is not stalling, or getting suppressed. It's just that very little energy is being sent through the line in the first place. It still has a zing, because these are the shapes of the words. You do not want to lose the shape of words. Especially the old words. If you've been pulling your strikes, and pronouncing them with emphasis on the first syllables it might very hard to change that pronunciation. It could lead to sparring too hard for a while, or unpredictably. Key would be learning to say your words more softly, with lower energy on the first syllable, and learning to feel how they can accelerate at the end. This would collaborate with what you are or can do on the bag or on pads. You want to feel that ascension in sparring, and the control over just how much electricity you are sending down the line. Another Note about the Shapes of Words and Muay Thai in Thailand This comes to a larger concept about the proper techniques one might learn in Thailand. Just because techniques are being communicated in Thai gyms does not necessarily make them purely "Thai", or connected to lineages that are the most effective. This is because the shapes of techniques are like words, and words are effected by the innumerable practices that make up a gym's social space. A kru very well might be teaching the form of a strike as he learned it as a boy and teen in a kaimuay very different than the one he is in at a kru (the social space, the behaviors of fighters and authorities, etc), but the gym itself is a sponge of Forms of Life, and as we, as Westerners (and others) enter these spaces we are also communicating our Forms of Life. How we through punches on the pads can change the way punches are thrown in the gym, how those words are pronounced. How we come OFF the pads and hold our dispositions, how we recover, might very well change the shape of how Thai fighters recover and express themselves. If definitely seen Western-friendly gyms absorb many unscripted but powerful Forms of Life from the non-Thai fighters they train. It becomes a cross-pollination. This is not necessarily even a dilution. There can be benefits of cross-pollination. But insofar as we come to Thailand to find how words - and even sentences, or full paragraphs - are pronounced in their language, in the language of their efficacy, there are many ways in which we can be communicating and impacting against what we are looking for. We come to Thailand and we find what we already are, because others like us have already been carving rivulets into the rock, changing the habitus. This is one of the reasons behind the Muay Thai Library project. We are filming the techniques and affective expression of Forms of Life one cannot really find any longer, because the kaimuay and the promotional muay that produced them largely no longer exist. It's the way words were pronounced, and a great deal of that is a mixture of technical proficiency, the feeling of a transfer of energy, and end of syllable emphasis that holds it own character, a character of a time and place. When Dieselnoi teaches how to knee, he is teaching a feeling of kneeing, as well as a technical unfolding of parts. These feelings are embedded in a realm of Muay Thai that is no-longer. At best what we can do is reach for these feelings, as we scribe the bio-mechanical guidance of what they are.