Leaderboard

I’m a Muay khao fighter and have been sometimes struggling with sparring. As a fighter I heavily rely on power and aggression to win fights. This is usually because I feel it’s what I have to do in order to win against fighters who are more technical or proficient than me. Almost all the fights I have won were because I was more aggressive than my opponent. Sometimes I have trouble translating that to sparring. You have to be careful with straight knees during sparring, take away the power, etc. Sparring is for timing and technique. I’ve never been the most technical fighter and so sometimes sparring can be frustrating. I’ve seen videos of certain aggressive fighters sparring (Youssef Boughanem for example) and their sparring almost looks totally different than how they would normally fight. I would have loved to see footage of Dieselnoi sparring just because I consider him the greatest. There’s so little footage of him unfortunately online and I always wanted to know what his sparring sessions were like. Would love to know if anyone has received advice before on this kind of struggle. Thank you.

Right now I have the opportunity to work clinch everyday albeit with somebody considerably bigger. I have some experience doing standup grappling but always in the context of takedowns for submission grappling. Does anyone have any advice or insight regarding the difference in these two paradigms? I want to improve my ability to clinch and strike while maintaining a safe and beautiful ruup

Stay super playful durring sparring sessions. Work on integrating defence moves that get you inside and in positions where (if you were in a fight) your muay kao style would benefit, and then smile at your partner and reset (thus your muscles are learning without finalizing the action). Another great sparring goal is to find yourself back at center and cutting off partners movements. This helps when you start going too hard.

One thing that I find its important to remember is that sparring is all about learning not winning as much as it sucks to feel that your opponent got the better of you. Sounds like you are already good at being aggressive so its worth working on the the things you are worse at during sparring. I find the best thing I can do when sparring is have a goal. I want to work on my Teep/Headmovment/range and make that my primary goal. Don't only do that but it allows you to have something you can focus on even if you are outhit. "Yeah the other person hit me more but I can feel my teep improving" is a good feeling and very worthwhile.

I am 230lbs and 6'4" and I've been ragdolled by thais who where at most 165 and like 5'9". And I would always be the first to be tired. If you get exhausted it's because you're not relaxing enough and you're not framing enough. When you frame, meaning, you use your bones instead of your muscle to control the space between you and your partner, you should be able to relax. Now, throws and sweep will be very hard against someone with that type of size on you. Thais are never able to sweep or throw me in clinch, which is frustrating to them because Thais LOVE to sweep falangs. But they can crank my neck, bring me to the floor and ragdoll me accross the ring enough to make me cry. I guess you're partner is taller than you, if that's the case. Work on getting very close to him, getting to neck and cranking the shit out of it. Remember to hold the head high, not the neck, basically where the jewish yamulka is. And work on locking this position and the kind of triangle lock that Sylvie shows in some clips, this is hell for a tall guy. Now, if your parnet is a short, stocky, hyper muscular guy, I don't really have any advice.

Maybe I didn’t communicate this properly. I’m only doing 10 minutes of clinch and I’m totally exhausted. I’m trying to use the principles I’ve seen in the library and on Sylvie’s clinch for beginners seminar on YouTube. The guy I’m clinching with out weighs me by about 75-80 lbs, is it just that weight difference that’s causing such rapid fatigue? I can successfully move him with the collar tie elbow jamming into his chest. I do pretty good winning dominant clinches. But my turns feel very strength based. Same for my sweeps, they aren’t beautiful timing based sweeps, they’re pulling with muscle sweeps. Is there a better way of going about this? I’ve heard drilling clinch is pointless so we’re pretty much going full on and I feel like I am getting better at it but in a fight I know I couldn’t keep this up, I’d get wrecked.

Dont worry about speed man. Keep focus on the technique - the speed comes with fluidity. The kick comes straight up like a knee and the hips turn over. Its a big hip rotation and the arm swing is needed to help bring the leg over and keep balance. Work within your flexibility range too. If youre trying to kick out of your range the tightness will slow the kick down. Focus on bringing your foot back to the ground so that its a big arc rather than just going up and striking. The body will be hesitant to commit to speed if its not sure where the foot is going to end up and leave you off balance. Practice in shadow a lot. Use the bag to try out what you've practiced in shadow and keep that cycle going. And what andy said previously, imagine your leg is just a giant slab of meat, and the rest of your body is the only thing that will tense to propel the leg.

While I was listening to a MTB podcast an idea came up that I thought was very interesting and that I thought warranted further discussion. Sylvie was talking about ways to implement something into her game and she spoke about how her brother said she should pick 3 things to work at developing during fighting and training. Sylvie and Kevin then said that she just couldn't do this, this wasn't her style. Eventually there was this moment where Kevin mentioned Dieselnoi and how he would train super hard and at the very end when he was tired he would then practice standing tall and smiling (ruup I believe) so he could better ingrain that into his system creating what Kevin called a "deep groove". Of course this got me thinking about records and while I'm not from that era I've seen one, heard one, and to some degree understand how they work lol (just barely though haha). So the idea is generally that the more something is played, or in the case of Muay Thai, the more a technique is practiced the more ingrained it will become thus creating this "deep groove" which you're more likely to fall back to in the times of stress or pressure like in a fight for instance. So I guess I'm just curious as to how aside from repetition alone can we develop these "deep grooves"? Also how do you work on something you're interested in working on in sparring or fighting when you're like Sylvie in that you kind of just forget the 3 things you were going to try/work on? Sorry if this sounds crazy and honestly I don't totally know where I was going with this, it just feels like there are some nuggets of wisdom that could be mined from this particular topic and I'd like a deeper dive into it. So even if you can't answer the questions that I've posed (because they're not the best questions lol) I'd still be curious to hear everyone's feedback regarding this topic and would maybe like to follow you down the rabbit hole with whatever you come up with. Thanks.

Quite right I stand corrected

Yeah I think you're right about him not have any mma fights, I think I might have misspoken about him having fights in a earlier reply, so that's my bad. I'm pretty sure he has amateur experience but I'm not totally sure, if you can find out that would be cool, but for now I'll just say he has no competition experience of any kind just for arguments sake. The next bit "his shit sounds like bro science. " Okay fair enough, it sure can, but just because something sounds like bro science doesn't make it so. As it is though I don't have all the answers and neither does any one else. Like I said in a earlier reply though the man's been around this game a long time, and in that time I'm sure he picked up a few things. As for the "classy words and sciencey language", the man's a philosophy major and I'm sure this is just how he talks. Personally I'm pretty dumb but I feel like I can follow along reasonably well. But okay, I can still follow you here, and believe you can have your opinion to dislike him. Just understand that disliking him because how he talks doesn't mean he doesn't have valuable fight advice lol. "beliefs about fighting and training aren't rooted in any real fight experience." Okay fair enough as I've said before I concede the fact he doesn't have any real competition experience. One thing though, I know that the man sparred regularly with GSP during his career. This might be a bit of a stretch but I'm betting that during some of these rounds the sparring ramped up to say 70/80% if not more at times. Now we will probably disagree here but in my opinion sparring GSP regularly during his prime world champ years at 70/80% is probably very similar to low or maybe even mid level pros going 100%, which is a fight. Personally I'd call this fight experience. This is generally why in my opinion dutch style fighters with fewer pro fights can still do well against thais with hundreds of fights, take Jonathan Haggerty for instance with 20 fights or so under his belt he beat Sam A who has more that 400 hundred and been in the game like 30 years. Why because Jon more than likely has 400 really hard spars that are like fights and I think Firas has had the same during his tenure. Like I said though this could be wrong but it's my opinion and I'll continue to have it until I'm proven wrong. In conclusion, you don't have to like this man, and as I've said earlier he's not the end all be all in my opinion but to act like this man has nothing to offer in terms of fight advice is just silly ( "Silly" in Joe Rogan's voice lol). You ever heard the saying you are the five people you surround yourself with, well this man surrounds himself with some pretty high level talent. What about this one, the best fighters don't always make the best coaches and the best coaches aren't always the best fighters. I didn't want this discussion to turn into a defense of Firas Zahabi but whatever, I like him (admittedly bias), and I think he has something to offer the fight world. As always thanks for the input.

I think this is more a rule of thumb thing than a fact. Learning new things while fatigued might help. When you tired you also expose your weaknesses. Fifth round on pads will tell you more about yourself than first round. I think you can create systems for better learning, but I don't think there are any bulletproof ways that will always work. I don't believe physical movements can be taught by over-intellectualizing them which I see a lot of in this forum. You want fluidity? Stop thinking go dancing.

One of the things we think about is the idea that when you train something when you are fatigued, you wear a deeper groove than if you trained it over and over again when relaxed and fresh. This is only an intuition, and could be totally wrong (Science!), but the sense is that when you are fatigued it's like heating up a metal that is to be re-worked. All the constituent parts are floating more freely, subject to change. The things you do in fatigue seem to get locked in more, more associated with stuff you'll do when stressed in a fight or in life. Some of these thinking comes from an analogy of annealing, and simulated annealing, for me. But, there is definitely a sense of deeper grooves being hard to change. When you begin creating habits you have to respect that you ALREADY have habits, even if they are just instinctual responses.