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Kevin — this is beautifully written and profoundly resonates with what we are trying to protect. At our gym in Pai, Thailand — led by Kru Sittiphong (Eminent Air, Bangkok) — we often find ourselves discussing this exact tension. The split you describe between aggression as war and tradition as festival maps directly onto the current shift happening in Muay Thai today, especially in the growing clash between Muay Farang and traditional Muay Femur. So many Westerners arrive here asking for two sessions a day, intense sparring, and "hard training" to burn through their fire. They believe output equals progress — but they miss that in Thai Muay Thai, form comes before fire. As Kru says, “If no one corrects your technique, you're just burning energy and money.” You can train for years and still lack timing, balance, and control if no one slows you down. He calls this rush-to-power style "Muay Farang." Not in judgment — but as a cultural observation. It’s mechanical. It’s linear. It seeks transformation through depletion, rather than refinement. It forgets the smile in the sparring ring. The mutual game. The moment when two fighters laugh and say, “You got me.” That ease is the solarity. That’s the festival. Lerdsilla, Saenchai — we show students how they move not to win but to shine. Their movement is gift, not dominance. We see this in our students too — that knife’s edge between aggression and release. Some say they want to spar to “let out the fire.” But this isn’t the Thai way. Not really. Not the artful way. Real Thai Muay Thai is not made in war. It’s made in play, in rhythm, in control, in beauty. Muay Thai was born out of community, not conquest. The rings were surrounded by farmers, not fighters. And even now, the countryside promotions like Pai Fight Night are pushing back against the gambling, the scoring controversies, the drift toward aggressive spectacle. They are preserving Muay Thai as cultural heritage — as festival, as you so eloquently say. Even the structure of Thai training reflects this longevity: one thoughtful session a day, not burnout. Recovery built in. Years spent mastering balance before layering in power. It's a slow art. A patient art. It cannot be "hacked." And it cannot be copied in systems that don't understand its roots. So yes — we’re witnessing a shift. And some, like Samart Payakaroon, are trying to protect the tradition. Others, like the Muay Femur stylist who left ONE Championship, are quietly walking away from the pressure to perform brutality over brilliance. We believe this conversation matters deeply — and must continue. Thank you for holding space for it, — Jennifer & Kru Sittiphong Sittiphong Muay Thai - Technical Muay Femur Training Pai, Thailand

I am 5’8 155 lbs. pk Saenchai seemed like a gym I would go to after years of training which I have not had. By the time I go to Thailand I will have 6 months of solid training. (About 13 hours a week soon to be 18.) I am visiting Thailand first, and then planning on finding where I want to make my home base after about 6 months. I have little experience in the clinch, but I know that I want to be a heavy clinch and elbow fighter, as watching yodkhunpon inspired me. I have never seen a fighter that made me want to copy them before. Thank you for the reply and all you guys do.

What many do not realize is that ONE has so thoroughly commandeered the social media ecosystem of Muay Thai in Thailand (quite consciously, as part of its marketing approach, absorbing trad social media accounts, controlling messaging across all platforms through various systematically means...and quite brilliantly I would say), that many, many New Gen Muay Thai fans in Thailand, who speak no English at all, now have bought 100% into the ONE Entertainment full power smash aesthetic. Demographically much of it is somewhat a new fan base for Muay Thai, but its very vocal in SoMe post comments, and has influenced the older online gen as well. What we in the West are drawn to in traditional Muay Thai is now is ardently being pushed against by a segment of Thai fandom now, even in the trad ruleset. There is a kind of tug-of-war now between the traditional values of superior fighting and the new International smash values, and hybrid promotions like RWS are kind of caught right in the middle, but seemingly for now siding with trad values for the most part. It does mean though that some trad fighters are just going to go in there and smash on trad cards, which is kind of amazing because this change has occurred in only a few short years.

A Battle of Affects I've argued that the highly Westernized (Globalized) affect expression in ONE and other Entertainment Muay Thai, typified in the Scream face you'll see in fight posters (which sometimes ironically looks like a yawn) and in post fight celebration, expressing aggro values that work against the traditional affects of Thailand's trad Muay Thai, a fighting art that comes out of Buddhistic culture largely organized around self-control...(that's a mouthful!) is attempting to invert Muay Thai's relationship to violence itself. It is interesting that spreading in the trad circuit is this mindfulness/meditative post-fight victory pose, an example of which is here, the young fighter with his trainer. This is no small thing because arguably culture is made up of prescriptions of "how you should feel", largely expressed in idealized body language and facial expression. When you change that prescription, in fact inverting, you are challenging the main messages of culture itself. One of the gifts of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, I have discussed, is that it provides a different affectual understanding of violence itself, which then cashes out in simply more effective fighting in the ring. Something of a gift to a world that is more and more oriented toward rage and outrage.

above, festival fight in Pattaya Just some thoughts and observations on the overall state of Thailand's Muay Thai. Not an expert opinion, just an informed perspective. The title of this piece may sound absurd, or maybe for some just an exaggeration, but there is among some long time fans who have watched a lot of Muay Thai in Thailand the sense that the only Muay Thai worth watching in Thailand now, in terms of actual skill, is Muay Dek, the Muay Thai of Thai youth. This piece about why that may be so. There is a sense that Muay Thai has been stretched now in two directions. You have Bangkok stadia, gambling driven traditional Muay Thai, supposedly the acme of the country's traditional talent, and you have Entertainment Muay Thai (with various versions of itself), a Muay Thai that is bent towards - and in many cases just FOR - the foreigner. If I was to really generalize between the two, one line of Muay Thai heads toward more "technical" point fighting and fight management (trad stadium Muay Thai), fights where fighters and corners are always responding to shifting gambling odds, and on the other hand a Muay Thai (in the extreme case of ONE) which is all about combos, aggression and offensive risk taking, emphasizing trades in the pocket and knockouts. The problem is, neither trajectory is very skilled (at least in the historical sense of Thailand's greatly skilled fighters). Muay Thai has become increasingly deskilled, along these two trending branches. And, if you mostly watch one of the two, you might not have noticed the deskilled aspects, because this is just the "new normal", and competition always produces winners who seem in comparison to others, quite skilled. It's only when you take the wider view, not only of the history and greatness of the sport, but also of the present state of Muay Thai itself, importantly including Muay Dek, do you see the drop in skill in adult fighting...as each promotional style squeezes out certain qualities from their fighters, cutting off their full, expressive development. Even with big sidebets on fights (gambling), and seemingly lots of pressure, Muay Dek fighters fight with great freedom. Some of this is a mystery why this is lost, but what follows is a sketch of how Muay Dek fighters change and become limited once they reach a certain age. Why Are the Muay Dek Fighters the Best Muay Thai Fighters in Thailand? If you just watch a few fights, and you have an eye for it, you'll see it. In a word, freedom. In another word, expressiveness. And still an third, sanae (charm, charisma, a key component in Thai traditional scoring). The Muay Thai of the Golden Age (1980s-1997) was filled with highly skilled, very well-rounded, but importantly very expressive fighters, fighters who fought with experimentation who were constantly adjusting to their opponent, drawing on styles and tactics that could in shifts change the outcomes of fights. And in fighting in that way that exuded personality, uniqueness and charm...aura. Much of this quality, and flexibility is gone from Thailand's Muay Thai, but in today's Muay Dek some of it is really still there. Its only when these fighters get to a certain age...maybe 15-16, that it starts to become squeezed out. In the Muay Dek even of today you get fighters who are regulating their energies with great subtitle, not swinging between overt passivity or over-aggression, fighters engage more continuously in the classic style, with fewer ref breaks, less stalling, fighters drawing out extended phrasing and highly technical defensive stretches that endure. A greater variety of weapons, and even transitions between fighting styles or a shifting of tactics, to solve what is happening in the fight, a kind of cerebral aesthetic that older fighters seem to have lost the capacity for. At the highest levels of Muay Dek youth fighting you see dimensionality...and personality. There is much less nibbling at leads. Instead one sees that leads are vied for more or less continually, and expanded when achieved, without devolving into hyper-aggressive mashing. I'm going to leave Entertainment Muay Thai to the side for now, especially ONE which is its own particular excessive exaggeration, mostly because its kind of obvious how promotional hype, booking dynamics, rule-sets and bonuses shape fighters to fight in a certain more limited way. What many may not realize is that trad Muay Thai in the stadia also forces fighters to fight in a certain way, in many cases simplifying or pairing down what they had been capable of when developing as youths. I'm going to say "gambling" here, but gambling is not the boogieman monster that a lot of online commentary makes it out to be. Gambling in Muay Thai is essential to its form, in fact I don't think Thailand's Muay Thai would have reached the complexity of its art without ubiquitous gambling, all the way down to the 1,000s and 1,000s of villages and provincial fight cards, its ecosystem of fighting, which have gone on for maybe centuries. Some of the discussion of the importance of gambling I discuss speculatively here: above, festival fight in Buriram The problem isn't "gambling" per se, but rather that in the larger venues in Bangkok because of the changing (eroding) demographics of Muay Thai the shift of economic power to big gyms, and the dwindling talent pool, the powerful forces of gambling interests have lost proportion, and now have outsized impact. There are not enough counter-balancing forces to keep gambling's historically important role in Muay Thai's creativity, in check. These have worn away, leaving gambling as too prominent. But, I'm not talking about corruption here (which everyone loves to turn to with an infinite finger of blame). I'm actually talking about the way in which Muay Thai is traditionally fought with fighters responding in a live sense to the shifting odds of the audience. Online gambling has complicated this more human, social dimension of the sport, abstracting it to 1,000s or 10,000s of people of varying interests and even knowledge, on their mobile phones. The demographic of "who" gambles has changed, and increasingly people are gambling who have less knowledge about the sport. They'll place a bet on Muay Thai just as they'll place a bet on a football game. Again, let's bracket, let's put the online nature of gambling to the side, and just talk about the traditional relationship between live fighting and live in-person gambling in the stadia. The fighters are fighting TO the odds. The odds are the "score" of the fight, just like in basketball you could look up to a scoreboard and see the score of the game, in Muay Thai you can look to the odds and (roughly!) know the score of the fight. There may be distortion in the odds, whales and their factions of one sort of another may be putting their thumb on the scale, but there is a symbiotic discourse happening between live gambling and the fighters (and their corners). Some of this traditionally has produced great complexity of skills, the ability of fighters to not just "win" the fight in terms of points, but also manage the fight, in stretches, shaping narratives. But today, the exact opposite is happening. Gambling is deskilling traditional Muay Thai, in large part because the small gyms of Thailand - the gyms that actually grow all the fighters, feeding the talent of Bangkok - have been eroding. Not only have they been disappearing (there are far, far fewer of them), those that exist still have no political power in the socio-economics of the sport. When fighters of small gyms enter the gambling rings of Bangkok, not only are they doing so on a very fragile line of income, often losing money to even bring their fighters down, they can no longer bet big on their fighters to supplement fight pay. Betting on your own fighter was once an entire secondary economy which grew small gyms and encouraged them to create superior talents. If you had a top fighter he could be a big earner not only for the gym, but also all the padmen krus in it, aside from fight pay. Because small gyms have lost power overall, political power, they have to live at the margins, which means their fighters have to fight extremely conservatively so as to not be blamed if their fighter loses. They need the backing of the social circles of gamblers. If you lost, it can't be because you took a risk. And because big gyms are going to win (force through political weight) close fights, small gyms have to practically walk on egg-shells in the way that their fighters fight. Generally: get a small lead...and once you have that lead protect it at all costs. Don't do anything risky to expand the lead. And, because small leads are easily lost, fights often turn into a series of nibblings, with both fighters protecting their tiny leads, back and forth. They aren't trying to win, they are trying not to lose. This form of fighting has transmitted itself to big gyms, is the new traditional form of fighting. Don't risk blame. This aspect of "not my fault", "defend a small lead, take it to the end of the fight if you can (5th round), make it close enough and then blame politics or corruption if you lose" has become a normalized style of traditional fighting, across venues among adults. Some of this is because the current state is an out of proportion exaggeration of the truth that traditional Muay Thai fighting always has been expressive of political powers and social capital struggle in hierarchies outside of the ring. Fighters ARE part of and in the ring express social networks. This is part of Muay Thai's social dimension and cultural anchoring. It's just that with the erosion of the powers of small gyms, the dilution of the talent pool, the hoarding of limited talent, has pushed this aspect too hard, and distorted the sport, draining it of skills and its renown complexity. To give a small anecdotal example of how this deskilling works, I remember when a smallish gym was training a fighter, and in padwork the fighter switched to southpaw, just experimentally. No! The answer came back from the kru, and they related a story from the past when one of the gym's fighters had switched to southpaw in a fight and lost. The gamblers who bet on him were furious. He had "blown" the fight. The gym had lost face. From this single event, probably a fight not of much consequence, the gym now forbade switching. It could cost you a fight. An entire branch of Muay Thai (that of switching) was cut off from that gym's fighters...forever. Not only in terms of that technical branch of development, the whole spirit of experimentation and creativity was closed off. The goal was: get a lead...keep it. Don't develop a style that is complex, or varied. Don't do anything in a fight that IF you lose, the gamblers who backed you will blame you and the gym for. This is deskilling. one reason why Thai fighters have been the best in the world isn't just that they have trained and fought young. It's also that they have been at the apron of fights, watched the shape of the traditional aesthetic, socially absorbing a great deal of fight knowledge. At the rope, even as cornermen or impromtu coaches. Its not just the doing, its the participation in the Form of Life that is traditional Muay Thai, bringing a depth of IQ. As small gyms and kaimuay across the country lose power in Bangkok, social power, they have to exist in very narrow economic margins, which means that technique wise their fighters have to fight in very narrow lanes. The spontaneous and the creative is too risky, because gyms don't want to be blamed. Fighters cannot explore or develop new ways of winning fights. There is a secondary dimension in this, as the downfall of the Thai kaimuay is told, which is IF a small gym does produce a particularly strong talent, this talent will not become a resource for the gym, adding honors to the gym (championship belts, etc), growing the gym through his presence. Instead, if you produce a talent this talent will be ostensibly stolen from you. Not outright stolen, but you will be pressured to "sell" their contract to a big Bangkok gym. This pressure will usually come from the fighter's parents, who want success and fame for their son, and the esteem of a bigger name, and it will come from within the hierarchies of the sport. The sale will happen. Instead of a developed talent adding to the richness of a gym's culture and growing their talent own pool of younger fighters who want to share in the glow of gym success, instead you'll be financially compensated with a contract sale. Some money in the pocket, to the gym owner, but not the kind of verdant growth a talent would have brought in the past, something that would shine across all the krus and padmen, and younger fighters in the kaimuay. And, fighters now are being extracted from small gyms younger and younger. The comparison is fruit being picked from trees more and more less ripe. Not only are fighters in general entering the Bangkok stadia with far less experience and development in the past, fighters are also being swept up by big gyms at a much higher rate, at an earlier state of their development. The ecosystem of the small gym, 100,000s of them, is being starved out. And its that ecosystem that historically had produced so much of the foundational complexity that gave Bangkok fighting so much of its renown diversity. Fighters that entered Bangkok stadia used to be much more complex and experienced, and then once they got there the complexity and experience of that scene increased and amplified them, spurred them to greater growth. Now, its the opposite. Arriving in a Bangkok stable may very well nullify your potential. We might add to this that the large big name gym stables of Bangkok today, that have swept up much of Thailand's diminishing promising talent, concentrating it, have become more like holding houses of that talent, and fighter factories for promotions, and less like developmental houses as old Bangkok gyms like Muangsurin, Thanikul, Pinsinchai, Dejrat, Sor Ploenjit had been, promotion favorites which maintained not only a kaimuay developmental creativity, but also more lasting connection with provincial sources. Muay Dek and Facing Power So, the good news is, despite all these forces against creativity, against small gym development, Thailand is still producing very high level Thai fighters from youth. These fighters fight with complexity and freedom, full of sanae, technical excellence, narrative control, quite different than their older counterparts who have learned to strip away their individuality attempting to preserve leads in gambling's stadium Muay Thai. I'm not sure what to account for this other than to believe that Thailand in its heart still maintains the aesthetics and richness that created the acme of the sport in the Golden Age, these qualities haven't been stamped out yet...it is only when fighters get to a certain maturity, when they are fighting for gamblers without a lot of social power themselves, protecting tiny leads, that they lose these qualities. They become deskilled. There is another element to the mystery of why these Muay Dek fighters lose their skills when they age. Kru Gai at Silk tells Sylvie: It's easier to be femeu when everyone is low weight, and nobody has power. Muay Dek fighters develop all this complexity because there is no "power" consequence for their experimentation at low weights. And one can see how this makes a serious amount of intuitional sense. Gamblers today favor more "power" in Muay Thai, so femeu fighters enter contexts where suddenly there are consequences that limit what you can do. But, if you take a moment to think about it, femeu fighting youth of the Golden Age also once they hit a certain age encountered "power" in opponents. But, instead of losing their skill sets at maturity, they actually grew as fighters, became more complex, more creative, more effective...against power. Someone like Karuhat was fighting up two weight classes in the 1990s, a very femeu fighter, against very powerful opponents. It's can't be that encountering the maturation of "power" is the thing that is shutting down the development of the youth, who have already developed so much prior. In fact, there seems a rough parallel between artful youth fighters of the Golden Age and now. Both of them hit this "wall" at a certain age. But in the Golden Age this accelerated their growth, today it stunts it, and even regresses it. I suspect it has to do with the overall conservative form of stadium gambling Muay Thai, the entire incentive and punishment system that produces a lot of tiny-lead chasing...and this goes back to the dis-empowerment and erosion of the small gyms that feed the sport, developing the fighters. The best fighters in all of Thailand are the Muay Dek fighters. It is the closest thing to a natural lineage with the greatness of the past. But right now...there is no way forward for them. No way for them to allow their expressiveness of character and technique to expand and not be disciplined into submission, dulled. They have to face the trad conservative ecosystem, or have to turn to the hyper-aggression of entertainment promotions, each of which robs them of a vocabulary of control and expression.

A lot of these thoughts of several years came together for me in side conversation with Arm of Muay Thai Testament Instagram who is looking to perhaps put together a project around Muay Dek fighters of today. I asked him if he could link some present Muay Dek fighters on the rise. This is what he wrote, posted with permission, posted in a series of replies: Strong Muay Dek Fighters Today 1. I was rewatching one kid this morning, as I do with all the kid fights that gets good reception, and this kid from some gym I've never heard of is so good femue. I think the gym is a new addition to Petchyindee's roster now. His name is Kaona Jor. Nopparat The part about Femue being easier to execute at lower weight is so true. Regarding the examples, I only really know the Petchyindee ones but here goes. In no particular order: 1. I was rewatching one kid this morning, as I do with all the kid fights that gets good reception, and this kid from some gym I've never heard of is so good femue. I think the gym is a new addition to Petchyindee's roster now. His name is Kaona Jor. Nopparat

This perspective is related to our manifesto of values and a priority on provincial fighting in Thailand.

The first fight between Poot Lorlek and Posai Sittiboonlert was recently uploaded to youtube. Posai is one of the earliest great Muay Khao fighters and influential to Dieselnoi, but there's very little footage of him. Poot is one of the GOATs and one of Posai's best wins, it's really cool to see how Posai's style looked against another elite fighter.

There can be no doubt that Thailand's culture is a hybriding culture, a synthesizing culture that has grown from the root weaving diversity from influences around the world, reaching well back to when the Ayuthaya Kingdom was the commercial hub for the entire mercantile region, major influences stretching in trade all the way to China and all the way to Europe, if not further, while - and this is important - still maintaining its own Siamese (then Thai) character, a character that was both in great sympathy towards these integrative powers, but also in tension or contest with them. This being said, I think there is a rather profound misunderstanding of the nature of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai and the meaning and value of its underpinnings in the culture, when seen from the West, and this is the (at times) assumed majority of thinking of fighting as "labor", and the rewards or marking of that labor as some kind of "wage". This is often the conceptual starting place from which Westerners think about the value and possible injustices of Thailand's Muay Thai, often boiled down to the question: Is the fighter getting a "fair wage"? I do think there are strong and important wage oriented justice scales that can be applied, but mostly these are best done in the contemporary circumstances of Thailand's new commodification of Muay Thai itself...that is to say, to turn traditional commitments and performances INTO labor, that is to say, to capitalize it. It is then that the question of labor and wage holds the best ground. But, the question of wage or payment fairness really is doing another operation, often without intent, which is by reframing traditional Muay Thai in terms of labor and wage, along with the strong normative, Capitalist sense that such labor should exist freely in a labor market of some kind, one is already deforming traditional Muay Thai itself, and in a certain sense perhaps...adding to its colonization, or at least its transmutation into a globalized, commodified humanity, something I would suggest the core values of traditional Muay Thai (values that actually draw so many Western adventure-tourists to its homeland), stand in anchored opposition to. To be sure, Capitalism is deeply interwoven into the fabric of Thai culture, and has been for much of the 20th century, but this weave is perhaps best understood terms of how Siam/Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is of the threads of greatest resistance to Capitalism itself (along with its atomizing, individualizing, labor/wage concept of human beings). When we think of the values that not only motivate fighters, but also structure and give meaning to their fighting, at least across the board of the Muay Thai subculture, we really are not in the realm of individualizied workers who sell their labor within a labor market. (This mischaracterization is perhaps most egregious when discussing Child and Youth fighting from a Western perspective, where it is very commonly repictured as "child labor" (ignoring the degree to which such terminology completely recasts the entire question of the meaning and value of fighting itself, within Thai culture). We are instead within a realm of traditional pre-Capitalist values (which themselves have morphed with tension with Capitalizing forces), a world of craft (not "work"), composed of strong social hierarchies that are in constant agonism with each other, where fighting is probably best understood as struggle over Symbolic Capital (with some modification to Bourdieu's concept). The traditional Muay Thai world is primarily not a world of labor and wage - anymore than, to use an even more traditional example, novice monks should be considered to be doing "labor" in wats and monestariess, for the (some would regard as false) "wage" of spiritual merit. Instead, the meaning and value of such commitments and performances are embedded within the traditional frame itself (a frame which can be examined or challenged for ethical failures, to be sure), and to extract them from that embedded value system and its attendant, inculcating motivations, is to subvert the very nature of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai. It doesn't mean that Thai Muay Thai fighters don't fight "for" money, or that money's paid or won do not matter, in fact in a gambling-driven sport - gambling driven at its very first roots, both in terms of history and in terms of apprenticeship - money amounted indeed matter a great deal. It's just that the labor / wage framework is a significantly inadequate, and in fact destructively transformative in its inaccuracy (even when well-motivated). This conceptual misunderstanding from the West is even made more complicated in that today's traditional Muay Thai is fast adapting to new "labor" style economic pressures, in the sense that fighters are increasingly working more - in a hybrid sense - in the tourism economy, both in gyms were they have to train and partner Westerners, and in the ring where they have to fight in a transformed way in Entertainment tourism vs Western tourists (tourist who may be viewed as both customers purchasing Thai services and also as discounted laborers), all with the economic view that the Western visitor holds a certain degree of economic priority. Traditional Thais are pressed now in towards becoming something more like laborers, while still maintaining many if not most of the customary motivations and the embedded values of Muay Thai, kaimuay subculture, leaving analysis perhaps best to a case by case basis.

Also i really looked into a load of rural gyms i may even have a post about it on here.. There are quite a few cons you think like you'll be eating at the same place every day. your place of sleep might not have simple things like mircowaves etc. you'll miss just going to a 7/11 within 5 mins motorbike drive , simple things like that man. Maybe just go 30 mins from town you'll get that im in the middle of nowhere feeling trust me.

Hi mate, I was going to head to look nungubon a while back as it looked really isolated and i could just purely disconnect however I decided to dot around which i prefered more. That look gym did look rly good tho. A few hidden gems i can reccomend that are more in a town / some form of life are i think yotharak is the one you'd be looking for. good spot with local food. Kamala Muay Thai 8/10 trainer is good and fun to work with on pads 1 hour sessions plenty of bags if classes are kept small. 20 sit ups between rounds, tiring 600 baht more of a passing through gym it seems with no local regulars that I saw but trainer makes you feel very welcome if you turn up a few times Pasakthong Muay Thai Bang Tao 8/10 Pad work is good and trainer simulated a real fight with pad work throwing kicks and punches back 1 hour 1-1 session only no group sessions Small gym on main road into bang tao only around 6 ish bags old school vibes fighter gym broken english 600 baht once again didn’t really see any consistent thai’s training at this gym besides one who was also a trainer/fighter. Yotharak Muay Thai 9/10 small gym with only 6 bags but a heavy focus on sparring with a old school vibe 700 baht per session (group) if you do not run with group you will do extra 3-4 rounds on the pads but running is for fighters good crowd of thai fighters who know what level and power to go with your experience and will teach you new things during the spar offers a place to stay including meals training etc for around £450 a month i was told. best gym i’ve been to so far as the trainers and other members of the gym make you feel very welcome and like a family. trainers english isn’t great but a few thai fighters who pass the messages along with better english - some high level fighters in gym (one championship) & stadium belt holders for reference i was doing about 1k gbp a month on airbnb brekky lunch dinner snacks and weed a month. and x1 session a day 1-1's 90% of the time.

For anyone who follows my writings I do not argue for any sense of a "pure" Muay Thai, or even Siamese fighting art history. Quite different than such I take one of Siam and Thai strengths is just how integrative they have been over centuries of development (while, importantly, preserving its core identity). For instance Western Boxing has had a powerful influence upon the form and development of Muay Thai for well over 100 years, and helped make it perhaps the premiere ring fighting art in the world, but Western Boxing itself was a very deep, complexly developed art which mapped quite well upon traditional Muay Thai in many areas, allowing it to flourish. This is quite different than the de-skilling that is happening in the sport right now, where instead the sport is being turned towards a less-skilled development, for really commercial reasons. The story of whether the influx of attention, branding, not to mention the very important monetary investment that Entertainment Muay Thai has brought will actually help "save" traditional Muay Thai is yet to be written. It very well might, as the sport was reaching some important demographic and cultural dead-ends, and it needed an infusion. But, let's not have it be lost, what itself is being lost, which is the actual very high level of skill Thailand had produced...and how it had developed it. Let's keep our eye on the de-skilling.

One of the more slippery aspects of this change is that in its more extreme versions Entertainment Muay Thai was a redesign to actually produce Western (and other non-Thai) winners. It involved de-skilling the Thai sport simply because Thais were just too good at the more complex things. Yes, it was meant to appeal to International eyes, both in the crowd (tourist shows) and on streams, but the satisfying international element was actually Western (often White) winners of fights, and ultimately championship belts. The de-skilling of the sport and art was about tipping the playing field hard (involving also weigh-in changes that would favor larger bodied international fighters). Thais had to learn - and still have to learn - how to fight like the less skilled Westerners (and others). In some sense its a crazy, upside-down presentation of foreign "superiority", yes driven by hyper Capitalism and digital entertainment, but also one which harkens back to Colonialism where the Western power teaches the "native" "how its really done", and is assumed to just be superior in Nature. The point of fact is that Thais have been arguably the best combat sport fighters in the world over the last 50 years, and it is not without irony that the form of their skill degradation is sometimes framed as a return to Siam/Thai warfare roots. It's not. Its a simplification of ring fighting for the purpose of international appeal.

I'm creating a separate thread post for the pdf of this article and bookmarking its discussion. The pdf is attached, but you can currently find it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2523893#abstract I beat a Thai performing white masculinity in Thailand s Muay Thai fighting tourism.pdf << There have been a fair amount of ethnographic papers on Muay Thai, often organized around an academic or student's lengthy stay in Thailand, training and sometimes fighting, and honestly this it by far the best I've read. It's kind of two papers in one. There is the philosophical framework of the introduction and the conclusion, that is absolute excellent and a bit conceptually ground breaking, and then there is the "field study" which for those of us who have been around Thailand's Muay Thai for a long time may read less interestingly, even if they make up much the substance of the study. The views of traveling fighters compose the mixed-culture subject matter. But this is my personal sense, and is just the manner of this kind of paper and follows with this kind of field work observation. For me the paper really soars when its at its most philosophical. screen caps like this are great: and and When the author brings together race and gender together with Colonialism it is really driving hard on the right line of inquiry (I would say). An important thing that is missing is that Thailand's Muay Thai is itself a hypermasculinity performance, which you can find in this section of Peter Vail's dissertation, so really what we have is the differential of at least TWO hypermasculinities coming into contact. The author is great at pointing out how emulation is the process of becoming, as well as the process of sought for (racial) domination. A very slippery Colonialist slope indeed. The author's instincts are so strong here I really wish they had teased out their intuited arguments further (maybe there is another paper for this), because this is a much needed discourse in Thailand's tourism Muay Thai, and in fact traditional Muay Thai itself. But I'm dropping this article here because I hope to return to its framing philosophical picture and perhaps write deeper into it.

Red Sonja, Female Badassery and Liberty Just finished Red Sonja: Consumed by Gail Simone and was pretty blown away by it, much of it probably because I didn't know the character and was just looking for some light adventure reading somewhere near "pulp". I need to relax my mind, and have had a hard time finding the right language for it all, so I thought this would be a vacation and a chance to just enjoy a hardcover book after all the pdfs I plough through. And well, it surprised me a great deal, and in fact it seriously impacted me. Some of this is likely because I have a warrior wife who in real life overcame some pretty serious childhood trauma and violence, and just became an insanely voracious fighter, fighting more pro fights than any woman on documented record, so already I have lived as an intimate witness of the very subject that is being taken on fictitiously, mythographically...and for that reason it cut to the core of many things I feel and even sense from all these years with Sylvie. And, I happened also to be reading Simone Weil's essay on the Iliad in overlap at one point, you can read that here "Poem of Force". The Iliad is one of my favorite works of all literature and Simone Weil cuts the core of what makes it like no other work. Reading the two at the same time, Red Sonja and Simone Weil's essay, actually allowed me to see a great deal of parallel between the novel and the ancient poem of war, and it just took the novel to another level for me. You can see some of my thought on Red Sonja as novel in this Reddit post and in comments. But now I'm reading back into her character (following the line of fan complaints that rejected Gail Simone's Red Sonja which had removed her chastity vow and her rape origin), and find myself thinking again about the Badass Female Fighter archetype, as it plays within (patriarchial, commercialized) society, something the female professional fighter is always dialogue with. I ran into these feminist objections to the Classic Red Sonja, who was rape and vow defined, in a very good counter argument essay on female Badassery: What is also interesting is that Gail Simone's Red Sonja: Consumed addresses and resolves each of the feminist objections to the Class Sonja, placing her within a different (likely feminist?) response to patriarchial desire. Classic Sonja seems born of First Wave feminism with at Paladin like knightly quality of fighting capacity and the renouncing, at some level, sexual desire - the supernatural key to her martial power. Simone's Sonja, at least in the novel, seems more a 3rd wave resolution where liberty consists of being able to follow desire without judgement. The novel also critiques social "masking", and in its materiality seems to lean into a liberty of action close to what Simone Weil describes of the Iliadic world, a world of dehumanizing forces.

Khaosai Galaxy told us he had over 100 Muay Thai fights before going into boxing, not a lot of them in Bangkok, but I've never seen any images of his Muay Thai. from Reddit our conversation with him

Red Gloves Meant over 126 lbs Karuhat let out this little piece of knowledge today at lunch. If you fought in red gloves at Luminee in the Golden Age it meant that the fight was over 126 lbs. Hence, red gloves in Samart's fight vs Jaroentong:

Photos from the more solemn moments of Wai Kru at the legend Namkabuan's funeral ceremony, two of the greatest who fought Dieselnoi and Pudpadnoi. The spar itself can mix the solemn, the spectacle of respect and conflict, and even humor, but the weight of the moment is always there, with everyone. In this way all of Life is embodied in the display of the art and sport.

a short piece I wrote in my hand-written diary The art of running in Muay Thai is mostly misunderstood. The probably child of military training, first of the influence of the British in the early 20th century and then from the United States in the mid-century, as it filtered through the Civil Service education, the standing armed forces and then the Police, the development of the long-running Thai fighter likely is akin to the combat solider on the march. Historically, Siamese warfare indeed involved long marches, often followed by siege. But this would not explain its persistent form as it relates to the 5 round ring. As military and police practices cycled through the provinces - brought home after and between service - and men trained and fighting in Bangkok rings in both Muay Thai and prevalent sponsored Western Boxing, the Long Run likely came to pervade the Muay Thai form throughout Thailand. But this regime of training came to match something more important and inimitable to Thailand's fighting art, and that is the long wave of attack. Perhaps this length-of-wave comes from Siam's own full martial history where engagement were pronounced and lengthy, or it comes from Thailand's Buddhistic core which prescribes equanimity in all things, and active encirclement of punctuated affects of every kind. In a sport of violence the Buddhistic prescription expresses itself vitally, flattening peaks and valleys. This is to say that in the art of 5 round ring fights the long run, likely of military and field training, also drew upon the very fabric of Buddhist culture as it played out pragmatically in more than a century of ring experiments. What many mistake when questioning the optimality of long running, is that first and foremost it is not a physical conditioning. Yes, it creates a firm foundation upon which explosive training may rest, an anchorage of recovery which can be vital in fights - the recovery of wind. But it is foremost a training of energy management, lengthening the wave, and the Mind, in particular to an engagement which most pointedly steers toward escalatory peaks and their troughs. It is about extending the Mind (and the energy) in the love wave, the wave that ultimately beats punctuated forms, breaking them down.

If I was answering this question today I think I'd expand the picture of Western Boxing's lasting influence, coming up through the decades, intensifying from the 1960s on, the Army and Police Boxing leagues and I'd also write about how television was just starting to Nationalize Thai consciousness, and the built out local television networks in the Provinces, local stadium hubs, the published rankings from the provinces and the wide-scale small kaimuay ecosystem (which has been almost completely eroded) which developed so many fighters for the stadia. Here you can see how deep the provincial rankings went in published Golden Age Muay Thai magazines, layers of talent outside of the Capital (originally posted to Reddit Here are some Golden Age related Muay Thai economics, as well:

Watched this fight today. Kongtoranee with a valiant effort attempting to solve very similar spatial problems that Wichannoi struggled with for much of his fighting-up career, as a short armed, hands heavy fighter. And using the low kick and body shots in similar ways to chop into the pocket bubble, before he really has to fight in there. Petchdam just too big, his knees under punches just to massive. But same calculus. you can see my Wichannoi notes:

"People think who you work with doesn't matter, if you just do the work. Utter bullshit. You absorb the qualities of who and what you work with." Proven again.

Hi, I just started Muay Thai and I want a pair of gloves that will last me more than a year and I could use as a all around glove for training and also sparring for when I like rank up. I am 250 lb, 6'1 so I am a bigger guy and I was thinking getting the Twins Special BGVL3 16 oz gloves? Are these good for what I want or are there better options for a similar/cheaper price?

The way the power is generated, the relationship of the shin to the arc, the point of the knee in sympathy to the overall movement, the hip drive. I've been meaning to write a short entry on Kerner and the Golden Age knees of the Hapalang gym. As we've documented in the Muay Thai Library project, and in our conversations in doing that documentation, Thailand today has pretty much LOST the Hapalang knee technique. The greatest Muay Khao gym in the history of Thailand featuring 3 absolute legends of the Knee Dieselnoi, Chamuakpet and Panomtuanlek, had an expertise of kneeing that has largely gone extinct. I've mentioned it several times, watching Dieselnoi knee Kru Gai with his belly pad on, at the age of near 60 then, and blasting the pad so hard it actually stunned Kru Gai, an experienced stadium fighter kru. They were like shotgun blasts. The legends of the Golden Age and other fighters of that age have told us that today Thais knee without damage, they knee largely to score, or set up another knee, which is fine, but they have largely lost the power and precision of the Hapalang knee (and likely of many other less famous gyms of the Silver Age and Golden Age era). It's very cool that we have documented these techniques for coming generations, but the video above is also a wonderful piece of history. The French fighter Guillaume Kerner, whose original Thai teacher was the legendary Pudpadnoi, spent a year at Hapalang gym in 1985 when he was 17 years old. Dieselnoi was already retired and a said (pi) trainer, but Chamuakpet and Panomtuanlek were there ascending, peaking into their FOTY performances. He was in the middle of the greatest Muay Khao space in Thailand, right in the heart of the Golden Age, and if you watch his highlights above it shows. No farang I've ever seen knees like Kerner because he was tapped into the source, and Thais today really don't knee how he did, because so far removed from the training conditions and pedagogy that develops this kind of technique. And, his case is a beautiful one because sometimes in "convert" coming to a technique can kind of over-sharpen it, which causes aspects of it to become even more clear, and I think that's the case with Kerner's kneeing. I assume his foundations were developed with Pudpadnoi, but the art of the power, sharpness and freedom of the knee in space bears the Hapalang mark. He also trained at other notable gyms in the Golden Age, (read up on his bio here) for us like a time traveler deposited where we imagined no farang were. As someone who has studied the knee styles of the 3 Hapalang legends, and other kneeing techniques of Thailand, and watched Sylvie develop her own versions of these, in her journey as a prolific, undersized Muay Khao fighter, its actually quite beautiful to see this video. Each time I watch it I'm amazed at how much of Hapalang got transferred to him, the traces and arcs and ethic of kneeing that even Thailand today no longer really has. You can study the Hapalang 3 legends in the MTL here: Dieselnoi (1982): #48 Dieselnoi Chor. Thanasukarn - Jam Session (80 min) watch it here AND #30 Dieselnoi Chor Thanasukarn 2 - Muay Khao Craft (42 min) watch it here AND #3 Dieselnoi Chor Thanasukarn - The King of Knees (54 min) - watch it here #76 Dieselnoi Chor Thanasukarn 4 - How to Fight Tall (69 min) watch it here Chamuakphet (1985): #49 Chamuakpet Hapalang - Devastating Knee in Combination (66 min) watch it here #81 Chamuakpet Hapalang 2 - Muay Khao Internal Attacks (65 min) watch it here Panomtuanlek (1986): #131 Panomtuanlek Hapalang - The Secret of Tidal Knees (100 min) watch it here Of course there still remain in Thailand many beautiful knee styles, many of them quite effective in their own right, there have been legends and great fighters who have carried the art of the knee fighter on. But, as knee fighting has been downgraded in the sport, and in some versions outright suppressed, there is reason to fear that even more branches of the rich pedagogic tree of knowledge will be severed, as legends and great krus start to age out.

Note to self...want to write of the female fighter as axis mundi, the christological (in Simone Weil sense of bridging sacrifice) pinning of the body down the in the turpitude of struggle, eliciting the sparks of the divine. Soliciting the female as artist, who builds the ladder to Heaven of oneself. see Possession (1981). What do I mean by this? Some of it is in relationship to my overall theory of ring fighting in Thailand as a rite, and I think my short film was tapping into this intuition:

Just published a rough copy of my watching notes for all 11 of Wichannoi's fights:

One of the great ethical difficulties to the above is: Do you want to make visible what is currently invisible to the cartographic appropriations of colonial capital? Or, just let them sit safely out of range, in their unseen character? On one hand it feels like you must make them visible so to marshall forces to protect and safeguard, and even possibly restore; on the other hand by mapping the invisible then you just set the conditions for appropriation and distortion, and eventual elimination. One of the aspects which I believe kept Thailand's Muay Thai so resilient, despite so many international influences (probably for 500 years even), is a certain kind of hermetic quality to provincial Siam/Thailand, the way that there are cultural dividing lines, which provincial ways of life and culture exist in their own right, than you are passing into another "land".

ONE didn't invent giving bonuses on top of fight pay in Thailand. In fact it took a long tradition of gamblers providing injections during fights to inspire fighters. When you hear about traditional fight pay you are missing out on the "injection" bonuses which can be substantial. Here today a fighter winning 500,000 injection bonus ($15,000+ USD) and being guided into the stands to thank the gamblers (who are often portrayed in simplistic caricatured ways). It's an ecosystem out of balance, but its still an ecosystem, in which parts support parts. Instead in ONE this bonus tradition has been transferred to only ONE big boss, being handed out on the preference of a single man, who is attempting to steer the aesthetic of Muay Thai itself...away from tradition. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=791304983340912&rdid=mUWvMklDzJ4i3xa6

I thing that many people miss in assessing ONE's future, or even capacity to do anything, is that almost everything you know about ONE (aside from financial declartive documents, and the few voices that escape NDAs and non-disparagement agreements), has been told to you by ONE. So every concept of "reach" or success that is measurable or on a scale comes from the ONE picture building. And...its a bit like asking Trump how his Casinos and buildings are doing. A good, if small, example of this is how RWS is far exceeding ONE Thailand in revenue, by a factor of about 6. source It just shows a very different concept of business. RWS actually wants to generate revenue at the gate, ONE much rather would pack houses with loads of given away tickets and project massive success through its social media agreements and message control. ONE is trying to generate (one might even say "fake") the feeling of a massive moment...because everything is basically a commercial for the next investor round. They much less want actual fans, so much as the vast impression of fans, and spending everything they can to create the impression is a priority...because the "real" revenue" is a massive investment round, unfortunately something that seems to be drying up. They aren't selling the sport to fans, they are selling it to investors. Sizzle, not steak. So any kind of picture we draw from is already part of this enormous Image creation, which it was hoped would bootstrap itself through dramatic gestures of largess. Flaunting huge payment numbers, etc. A form of "Mystery"... Which isn't to say that none of this is good. The world, and especially the "good" of Capitalism, is made from ostentatious pretension. There is in the world the whole "escape velocity" theory, the fake it until you make it, and when fueled by more than half a billion dollars there is a lot one can fake, in fact the faking becomes quite real, affects real lives, turns into power, creating new capacities and opportunities. So, one of the most compelling questions about what comes now is that the actual question of revenue and profit making, peeled away from the presentation of profit-making, gets put up against other forms of Thailand Muay Thai that are pulling revenue. And, because so much of what has come to us has come through the filter of ONE's image making its very hard to know where anything is at all. Everything is bigger, better, about to break through. It's the Golden Rule of Trump-like positive image driving, which when looking at the world does lead to power itself. Invest now! Buy now! You don't want to miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity! A certain kind of power. We of course should not be lead astray into thinking that Thailand's Muay Thai does not develop and express itself through all kinds of power relations, many of them institutional, many strongly divided by class differences and entrenched hierarchies, There is no "innocent" Muay Thai in the sense of a Muay Thai without efforts of domination and control, in fact the art and sport arguably is the ritualized performance of such. It's more though that maybe this form of economic magical portrayal, as it is so globalized, so hyperstated, so flowing from that which is outside and beyond Thailand, feels like it could be destructive. Too much sizzle...too little steak?

This is my wild guess about the possible future of ONE with the rumored loss of both big investors and Amazon Prime: My take...I suspect it will morph into a significantly contracted phase that is something the Thai gov will support as part of its Soft Power commitments which will somewhat balance out the loss of big investors. There may even be rule changes to bend a bit closer to trad elements (maybe glove changes? maybe a touch more clinch?); guessing there will be a significant downgrade of top end pay and bonus rates, and probably significant cuts into the all-important marketing budget too. It will fall more in line with Entertainment offerings like Thai Fight and RWS. The challenge is the struggle over the shrinking Thai talent pool, which is also no longer producing transcendent talents like Superlek and Nong-O, and how it will compete against other Entertainment promotions without big top end pay and bonuses (I believe RWS revenues were reported as much as 6x ONE's in Thailand). It may have difficulty continuing to snipe the high level names produced by other promotions. It still has a well-built-out, massive digital media footprint in a very small info ecosystem and that proven strategy, and has secured a place in the Thai combat sport imagination, two very big assets.

Sylvie faced an undersized opponent yesterday in a Boxing match, beyond her control, so on the way home we counted up the number of times in her 280 plus times she's faced someone smaller than her, and it is now 6. And each time it was a no contest bad match. Size differences do really matter. Firstly, it is absolute remarkable that Sylvie's only faced 6 opponents smaller than her, this is a just a very common and in fact pretty pursued advantage for Westerners. Some Westerners are in fact hard to match because they are big, but also gyms that represent Westerners also leverage for size advantage as well. This is something Sylvie just never has engaged in, its an advantage she NEVER wants...in part because she knows what its like to be the smaller fighter, having fought vastly up for most of her career. (This is one reason, among many, that Sylvie has never hooked herself up to a powerful gym or promoter trying to advance her, its the form of the sport to try and find and push for as many advantages as possible in Thailand, this is just how its done...this is often done with the aim of just declaring your fighter unfightable, and retiring, a career arc Sylvie has wanted nothing to do with. The other thing is that size f-in matters. Give Sylvie a few pounds and its an incredible problem. Which means her victories fighting way, way up, often multiple weight classes, just shows how unique and incredible fighter she really is. She overcomes the single most determinative factor in fighting, weight, regularly. Be that as it may, it also was a good opportunity to fight with some size, even a little bit, because fighting up so much really constricts what you are even able to do, or build confidence in. She was able to bring her power down and increase accuracy, hold more relaxation in her ruup, free up her feet instead of having to brace for large bodied strikes.

Muay Thai, Colonialism and "Techniques" not a competition, its a celebration There is a lot that is culturally complex in how the West (and others) interact with the traditional Muay Thai of Thailand, and honestly it is worth of analysis and thinking about. It's likely full of contradictions, and doesn't present only a single picture of motivations, but...there is one thing that is pretty common place and intense, and that is the way that fighters, coaches and various purveyors of information on Muay Thai to the West, usually in the form of demo'd techniques, simply present themselves as "experts", as if their knowledge, what they came to is simply something OF them. It becomes the signature of their authority and value, especially in social media contexts where a lot of platform reach comes from "demos" of one kind or another. This is just a serious trend, a pattern. But really it is almost inexcusable when sharing or teaching others not to share where and even more importantly WHO learned something you are demoing from. Almost uniformly, it wasn't something you learned from yourself. This means, with every share you are actively erasing the past, the actual lineage of that knowledge, you are erasing the people who actually knew something more than you, and you are removing their importance for anyone who might be interested in what you are sharing. This is pretty extreme, in that it is quite widespread. One of the biggest problems Muay Thai has right now is that as it internationizes, as it reaches for more commercial markets, so many of its roots are being erased...it has less and less concrete rootedness. And while this may help it spread quickly, charged up by the popularity of influencers and such, soil without roots will just wash away when there is a change in season. The roots are what holds everything together. Further of course, if you aren't naming teachers, krus, padmen and coaches that gave you that bit of information you are undermining the entire hope of Thailand in sharing Muay Thai in the world. You are erasing the very thought that you have to go to Thailand to learn specific things (or, in other countries well educated krus and gyms), the notion that to learn something better or more completely you should go further down the coaching tree, further into the roots. This was a huge motivation for pretty much everything Sylvie has done. Her path started learning kind of psuedo-Muay Thai from a strip mall gym that had a lot of TDK in the mix, but there was the photo of a guy on the wall who had taught the head coach of the gym his Muay Thai. This was "Master K", Sylvie's first Thai teacher. What do we do? We go to the teacher of the teacher. And this is exactly what lead us to Thailand, eventually to the Muay Thai Library documentary project itself. It's been an instinct from the beginning, but also a motivating value. Shine the light backwards. The teacher always will know some things the student will not. Because the teacher's knowledge comes from something very complex, a lived experience that is full of details and reasons and contexts that don't get filtered down into the particular technique. The teacher is full of richness and intensity...and its our job to raise up and preserve the teacher, to pull them into the present, and thus into the future. And this should be done with every share of technique possible. It should be just regular, not only etiquette, but also passion to bring the sources of what you know forward with you, and build a picture of knowledge that immediately causes people to look past you, before you, when they learn something. The krus, coaches and padmen need to be known. If you've been to Thailand and trained seriously you already know that many Thai padmen in gyms in some ways know more much more about Muay Thai than you'll ever know, even if you are a very experienced fighter. Muay Thai needs for us not to erase its own past, it needs to stop cutting off the vines below the flower. It is just amazing to me that so many shares of technique do not automatically tell of where it came from...who it came from. This doesn't mean you have to authorize your knowledge, because you got it from someone more famous, or more esteemed than someone else. As I said, there are so, so many in Thailand who are just brimming with knowledge who are almost completely unknown to but a few. Common padmen just walking experts of Muay Thai, padmen who don't have even much social standing in their own gym. Lift these names. Inspire people to connect to your own knowledge tree. It's not a competition, its a celebration. There are many krus that we've documented in the Muay Thai Library who are not or were not social important krus or padmen, but they are full incredible knowledge and wisdom. Raising their names, and sharing their muay is absolutely vital, and can change their lives as well. There are so many example of this, even very famous names now. Sharing can be something as simple as: "Point your toes up on checked kicks, this is something learned from Kru Big at Sinbi [made up name] and a few other places as well" or, "Hook-lowkick is a great go-to combo, this is a mainstay of the Sitmonchai style started with Kru Dam" or, "Kru Toi always told me to use the teep more in fights, and its something I've had success in when I did it". It's just a way of talking about advice or demonstrated knowledge. Also, if this became more regular it would undercut just people cribbing demo advice from other content sharers, other influencers or breakdownists of varying quality, something that thins out the knowledge base. There isn't much wrong with learning from other sharers, but maybe just mention that you have? Create and build lineages, and inspire others to do the same. Muay Thai itself needs this.

Golden Age styles and techniques are only going to survive and surface in fragmented, incomplete ways, but it is worth noting that as a tall fighter Mongkutpet deploys an advance that is very close to that used by Dieselnoi at times, with the bouncing lead league, and a long guard. She teeps out of this extended denial of the "middle", as Dieselnoi sometimes did, and she's mixed in a little jabbing action, or sometimes just phantom jabbing high, to keep the eye passing between low and high. This is honestly probably the most "Dieselnoi" a fighter has approached a fight of today, as I've seen, which is really cool. She is missing some of Dieselnoi's spider web pressure of corralling footwork, which he was really good at, as well as his trademark devastating knees when he got you on the ropes, which really just finished fights, but she is very much in the style of advancing long that Dieselnoi employed. Again, very cool to see it survive and be forwarded. The whole fight below. I believe Mongkutpet won every single round, from every single judge (but 1) in what really felt like a much closer fight. The reason for this is that her long guard, Dieselnoi march controlled the middle zone of fighting, neutralizing the zone where Entertainment trends are trying to produce most of the "action". In fact it neutralized both the mid- and the far zones. Duangdawnoi has modified her style a bit to really amp up that middle zone action, in an Entertainment style, put a lot of visible "power" into her striking, but Mongkutpet's Old School leg-bounce just took away two zones, and her height and comfort in the close zone allowed her to manage the scoring there. It produced a lop-sided scorecard in an energetically contested fight. Mostly once Mongkhutpet had eliminated the middle zone the only jeopardy remaining was Duangdaonoi's left elbow on entry (the transition between the middle and the close zone), which she's very good at...but ended up having to throw at volume because it was the only path the swing the fight. If it had cut maybe the fight changes a little bit? A few landed, but I'm not sure it could even have done that. Mongkutpet just had to keep discipline and her right hand up. All in all a strategically very sound employ of style by Mongkutpet, with a great call back to some of Dieselnoi's characteristic march technique. the graphic of the 3 zones: If there was a path to victory for Duangdaonoi, in my opinion, it would be to throw off the Entertainment style and go back to her strong history of deft footwork, light-footed pivots and quick scoring counter kicking. Forget the full power punching and instead become a drifting, flexible defense fighter controlling space with backwards movement. In such an approach she would score lightly, but she would deny scoring to Mongkutpet, and even more importantly expose her very linear style. By going back to the rope and waiting she basically allowed Mongkutpet a straight line to her space of dominance. Instead, you'd want to expose, or produce the feeling of something robotic in Mongkutpet's Dieselnoi's long attack, make it look like it was only on one track. But, this would require moving back into the traditional style of the femeu fighter, of which Duangdaonoi is quite developed. The femeu fighter tries to create a visual contrast which caricatures the opponent, classically. Deft femeu retreat open up the middle and long range zones of fighting, and denies the closest one...but, I'm not sure how Raja refs would judge such an approach. You would have to dominate with it to overcome any potential bias...but, I think she's kind of skilled and experienced enough to do so.

In the aftermath of the Muangkutpet vs Duangdaonoi belt fight interestingly on a page that feeds a lot of ONE viewership comment, you get a negative comment on Duangdaonoi for continuously retreating back to the rope: This is one of the subtle sadnesses of the ONE influence on trad Muay Thai. Duangdaonoi actually was a pretty high level fast-twitch femeu female trad fighter (Sylvie fought her many years ago and got bloodied quite badly). Her skill set trended towards accurate, fast femeu counters and the management of distance. One of the telling changes in her style is the attempt to visually sell-out on every single strike, to throw it as hard as possible, even with some dramatic "umph" to it. One suspects the reason behind this really is likely the entire aggro affect change that ONE has brought to the sport that has rung out across the rings and promotions of Thailand. You want this kind of aesthetic "violence" being expressed (which is really quite contrary to the trad rhythmed expression of control and SOME punctuated violence or explosion at the right time). She seems to have changed her muay to fit the aesthetic (and in throwing with so much intensity over and over, probably lost a lot of accuracy). But...this is the thing...its not enough for the Thai ONE fandom crowd. They want not only fulltime 120% striking, they want you to continuously coming forward. They want trade, trade, trade. It's actually amazing how much Duangdaonoi has modified her style to fit into the new highlight-driven versions of the sport, and least to my eye. She used to feature a few explosive reverse elbows in a fight, but the majority of her style was distance control and fight management, a careful art of space, coupled with a very difficult to defend lead (openside) kick, which she would double or even triple up on. Now we get a fighter who could possibly throw 20 elbows. She seems to be trying to give the new fans what they want. She was in the lowest weight class so she wasn't going to be a "power" fighter in style, but clearly she's made herself physically much stronger. Big, full-bodied clinch throws. But its never enough for Thai ONE-inspired fans. They want that red meat. Mongkutpet on the other hand had brilliant, old school approach that was distinctly ANTI trade. Don't trade at any cost. She basically fought with the old Dieselnoi approach, in long guard and bouncing, teeping lead leg. Long I've argued that the way that Thais can beat "Entertainment" ONE style fighters, especially foreign ones, is to just refuse to trade. Mongkutpet just marched Duangdaonoi to the ropes...and then ground out a win with her height and some knees. This is the perfect anti-trading approach to opponents. Fight the fight where you have your advantages. But really I'm posting here about how its never enough for the new Muay Thai fan. It wasn't enough that Duangdaonoi threw everything with all her might. She has to march forward and trade. She has to fight "like a foreigner". This is just more combo-itis that is spreading like an invasive species. Duangdaonoi fought with tremendous heart, and to the best of her abilities threw with as much Entertainment style as she could. She put all of it out there. Back To the Ropes Art I should of course also add, retreating back to the rope is the Hallmark of Thai combat sport superiority. The greatest fighters in Thai history did much of their work back at the rope. If you want a prime example, check my notes on Somrak vs Boonlai:

One of the most interesting illusions about ONE and Muay Thai was that it somehow had discovered or created a "successful" business model for Muay Thai. It was "giving customers what they want" and marketing it in such a way that then the "market" was decided and rewarding their version of the sport...but, notably, ONE has never turned a profit. The illusion was that this was a successful business plan OF Muay Thai. Reportedly ONE in general has lost 350 million dollars before they hid their books a few years ago...so maybe 500 million overall? That's a lot (much of it not Muay Thai oriented, as the promotion really was an MMA aimed promotion for much of its orientation, and Muay Thai was really a tertiary concern in the beginning). It has been a very successful business model, but not in the "for profit" sense of creating a great product that customers want and then selling it to them, to make money. It's been successful as an investment raising entity, which is a very different thing. In these terms every fight, ever highlight, every article that has been seeded, every Instagram share its generated through careful circle construction is a commercial, a commercial TO potential investors...much less to potential customers. It created the impression of a very successful business, but a business that continually has to pump itself. This on it own has actually had a lot of positive impact on the sport, even though it has eroded so much of what makes Thailand's Muay Thai an actually unique potential product to the world, likely damaging its long term economic viability. It has introduced advanced marketing techniques that make large digital footprints in very niche digital ecosystems, which alone speaks to a certain potential viability that was not tapped...but, it also likely has taught that Thailand's Muay Thai has to be a supplemented, likely government sustained sport as well. Amazon is exiting the ONE Deal, reported, because the Asian UFC dream (nothing really to do with Muay Thai) is now a dead end. And the net losses in Thailand (2023) show up as: Revenue - THB 95M (USD 2.9M) Expenses - THB 366M (USD 11.3M) Net Loss - THB 288M (USD 8.9M) The above numbers aren't really a disappointment, its just that this is the business model. You have to put negative money into generating the image, and in pumping the pay and bonuses. The question is though, if one is going to take very substantial losses, are there better, more efficient ways of taking losses to foster the health of the art and sport. I suspect that the secret recipe of ONE's Muay Thai has almost nothing to with turning Muay Thai into an aggro form of Kickboxing (Kickboxing itself never proven a profit making product on the International level, I don't know why people think its this is the "it" factor), it is the way it poured negative money into a very advanced marketing and comms control image creation project. This is actually the lesson. One could have done all the same marketing stuff, made all the message control and bonus pumping around traditional Muay Thai, and kept all the stars of trad Muay Thai in the sport and had even a BETTER impact on the sport. It wasn't the product being sold, it was the selling of the selling. And in its way ONE then by putting pressure on Rajadamnern and Thai promoters trying to stay afloat to modernize their approach, much of it to good effect. But, still, the confusion is that it was the "product" (the deskilled, aggression-jacked version of a product) that was driving the whole thing. It's not the product. It was generating the image of success and enthusiasm around the product. Trad Muay Thai is filled with uniqueness - and if you keep the skill level increasing, instead of lowering it so farang can win - that is ripe for these kinds of marketing amplifications. Traditional Muay Thai has so many qualities that can drive international interest and eventual passion. You don't have to deskill it. You don't have to erase - and in fact in the long term you shouldn't erase - those qualities. That's the true Golden Goose. The advanced skills and the cultural inheritance and meaning withing the traditional form of the sport.

A little bit more on the gentrification of American Basketball, with the emphasis on drilling and trainers, and not on expressive play-based development. Muay Thai as well is going through a gentrification, both internally and externally.

In making this graphic I place the silhouette of a boxer in the middle zone to illustrate how Boxing's fully developed "in pocket" fighting relates to the other zones of trad Muay Thai (and was integrated into it through 4 decades of influence from the 1950s-1980s), but the graphic is much more about thinking about Muay Thai in terms of these three zones, and how not only length of weapon, but also techniques of defense shape control over these 3 zones. In its contemporary trad versions Muay Thai has someone split into exaggerations, Muay Femeu vs Muay Khao, leaving the middle zone much less developed. I believe this is in part due to Boxing's eroding influence upon trad Muay Thai. (Importantly, "Boxing" here is not represented by combo training, which largely consists in biting down and throwing strikes that have been memorized. Boxing is a very defensive, position oriented high-level art which is about controlling middle zone...not just chopping through it, as combo fighting would have it.) Because the higher level control over the middle Blue Zone has eroded, more and more Thai fighters either defend with distance in a femeu manner, or crash through into the close proximity Red Zone, where stand up grappling can take over. This is not to say that there is no Blue Zone skills of entry, defense and attack, its just that they have eroded, there are far less "eyes" in the Blue Zone now. In the Golden Age fighters, even fighters that really favored either extreme of these zones, were also quite capable in the Blue Zone, in both defense and offense, which made the fights between shifting zones complex and compelling. Now, instead, combo-ing is filling in the Blue Zone, really antithetical to the higher level of trad Muay Thai which was founded on defense, vision and improvisational attack. When watching a trad fight now, but really any fight, I mostly watch how fighters handle these three zones, which is to say fights are about the control of space to me. The graphic isn't meant to be exhaustive of course, but just to draw attention to these zones, and thinking about how the borders between them are managed. The emphasis though is on defense in these zones, because defense is a scoring priority in trad Muay Thai (as much as we love to look at the striking), in part because defense is much more difficult to develop, and often reflects the much more complete fighter. Keep in mind, clinch in Muay Thai is heavily a defensive sub-art. What is beautiful about Muay Thai, especially in its Golden Age versions, but also elsewhere, is that it is about the control of all 3 Zones, especially with a defensive emphasis. We look at the striking, for which trad Muay Thai is renown, but the striking is made possible because paths are already conditioned by defensive shaping of the zone, and the borders of the zone. It's a high art of control, and therefore dominance, and not of aggression, though aggression at select times plays a role. I should also add, because of the nature of the 3 Zones how you move through zones becomes really important. This means your tempo, your footwork, and your defensive composition all have a hidden impact on one's success in a fight...and it means that if you can prevent your opponent from moving through the zones with control - one reason why the teep is so powerful in trad Muay Thai - this can overcome all kinds of other disadvantages you might have. Zone transition is at times more important than you "techniques" even though lots of non-Thais train "techniques" endlessly, trying to perfect them. Very good padwork, in the Thai style, is actually about transitioning between zones, managing zones in terms of control, and attack. It's not about the strikes, though it seems to be. This is why it is sometimes hard for non-Thais to achieve as padholders what the best Thais are doing. Because Thai padmen are often ex-fighters who have absorbed sensitivity to the 3 zones, they instinctively are working training fighters through each of these zones, its within the nature of their footwork, even as padmen. When non-Thais approximate Thai padwork everyone's eyes on the strikes. It should be on the feet, and on the spatial changes...when the padman is engaged. This is a kind of internal secret to some of Thai style padholding. Because zones matter, where you "set up" can also be extremely important and have a hidden impact on the shape of a fight. Are you setting up "in a zone" (that you prefer)? Are you setting up on the edge of a zone that your opponent does not prefer? Watching where a fighter sets up, at what distance, and even seeing how it changes over the course of a fight can be an barometer of how the fight may go.

To the above I would add, this is the enormous difference between transmitting the form of the ring sport, that is the living practices of (actual) training and (actual) fighting, including so much of its embedded social context...and simply trying to transmit its "techniques", as if a dead script of a forgotten language. The more we move towards the transmission of "techniques", the more we are heading towards the ossification (and likely ideologically, and unrealistically imbued "construction") of an art. Not "techniques".

Wow, just watched an old Thai Fight replay of top tier female matchup that featured Kero's opponent in her last fight, someone she pretty much overwhelmed right away (with probably a 4 kg advantage). It was amazing to see the difference in performance on Thai Fight. Very skilled, very game, sharp. I came away realizing just how HARD it is to fight up. It changes everything. Sylvie takes 4 kg disadvantages all the time, and honestly overcomes them more often than not. What she does is so unappreciated, not only by others, but by Sylvie herself. Giving up significant weight and winning doesn't just take toughness, it takes an incredible amount of skill to keep that fighter away from what they want to do, to nullify all that size, strength and the angles. It's a complete art. You see this in female fighting all the time, big weight advantages REALLY matter.

This one way kid got screwed over a bit

For just individual fights, number 2 and 7 were close ones with bug side-bet This one the loser's stock went up in the matchmaker's eyes

5. I think you'd figure out why they named him "Robert" Panniwat Muay Thai

2. The star boy right now for Petchyindee's Muay Dek is Petch25 T.N.DiamondHome. Khunsueklek is his idol, as he's Khon Kaen as well

I'm not sure where Fani Peloumpi trains nowadays - might be that she still gives privates at MTA academy which is quite central. I would contact her on facebook, as we did. We enjoyed our privates with her. Luckily, in my experience in Thailand, the pads are held by Thai trainers who have control and no need to use strength to show off, so my main worry would be rather to avoid touristy gyms near where half the people training there are mainly concerned with getting the right shots for their social media. If you stay for one month, i would try out different gyms and see which fits best. Getting different experiences and approaches would be a plus, in my opinion, and Bangkok is like a candy store in that regard. Add to that a few privates e.g. with Namsaknoi, or any trainers at established gyms such as Sasiprapa, Petchyindee, Kaewsamrit, Eminent Air, Luktupfah.

That makes two, slowly stalking dominant clinch victories in two weight classes for the women at Rajadamnern, Barabara and Mongkutpetch. Beautiful to see the classic Muay Khao style embraced by Rajdamnern for the women.

I've been exploring ultrawides for a while, though basically drawn to them since I started shooting Muay Thai though I didn't know how to use them. There was always the sense that I wanted to weave together very different focal lengths. Since shooting with the Contax which I really love, on a bigger sensor format I've been drawn further in. So here is an experiment, using keyframes, big contrast video and telephoto images, to capture the mood and energy of a training session with Chatchai. This is was just a sketch from a single very quick shoot (I think 3 very short videos, maybe 100 still frames shot), maybe 5 minutes of photography altogether. I wanted it to be very bare bones to see if I could whip up an energy and feeling that I could maybe use on a larger project. The short is much aided by the music by Anand who I'm working with on a big, experimental writing project. wh

I think there is way too much emphasis on technique in most commercial gyms. You just don't see that in trad Muay Thai gyms. Most of it is: here are the basics, work on getting comfortable, be aware of defense, relaxation. Spar and clinch. Technique focus can do the opposite. Make you really tense, overly critical. Combos encourage you to use your eyes much less, and just bite down on offense. Just some thoughts.

He Returned To The Mongkol A bit of historical context, Somphong who lost vs Samarn above would return to the Muay Thai ring in 1948 to face the feared "Giant Ghost" Suk (grandfather to Sagat), a former imprisoned murderer, who attacked and knocked down Somphong so violently that his corner threw in towel, and it was reported that Suk was boo'd by the crowd for how brutal he was. Suk was a figure of terror in the Muay Thai scene in his day. Historians have pointed out that he was in direct contrast to the more gentlemanly matinee idol starts of Muay Thai and boxing of the 1930-1940s (images of masculine charm and handsomeness persisted through the Golden Age), and was in part promoted by the Fascist regime to move away from reflected composed Royalty, and Royal political power. His transgressive, violent image was a nakleng symbolic of a politics of The People ("Das Volk") as the Phibun dictatorship represented them (it had been aligned philosophically and militarily with Hitler & Japan in WW2). Somphong was nicknamed "atomic fist" (it seems), after the American power that ended the war with Japan. Suk Prasarthinpimai was about 36 years old here, said to have fought into his 40 or even 50s. from this Facebook Post here "ยักษ์ผีโขมด ดวลโหด ซ้ายปรมาณู" วันนี้เมื่อ 76ปีก่อน... วันที่ 16 พ.ค.2491(1948) ศึกชิงยอดมวยไทย ณ สนามกีฬากีฑาสถานแห่งชาติ กรุงเทพมหานคร .."ยักษ์ผีโขมด" สุข ปราสาทหินพิมาย ตำนานยอดมวยไทยผู้ยิ่งใหญ่จากโคราช โชว์โหดถล่มแหลกไล่ถลุง เอาชนะน็อคยก3 "ซ้ายปรมาณู" สมพงษ์ เวชสิทธิ์ นักชกกำปั้นหนักจากเพชรบุรี ดีกรีอดีตแชมป์มวยสากลรุ่นเวลเตอร์เวทและมิดเดิลเวทของประเทศสิงคโปร์ ผู้กลับมาสวมแองเกิลชกมวยไทยอีกครั้ง ...โดยก่อนเกมส์การชกใครๆก็มองว่าสุขจะสู้พลังกำปั้นซ้ายอันหนักหน่วงรุนแรง และความเจนจัดบนสังเวียนของ สมพงษ์ เวชสิทธิ์ ไม่ได้ แต่พอเอาเข้าจริงปรากฎว่า สุข ถล่ม สมพงษ์ อย่างเหี้ยมเกรียม เอาเป็นเอาตาย ไม่มีคำว่าปราณี จนพี่เลี้ยงของสมพงษ์ต้องโยนผ้ายอมแพ้ในยกที่3 ...สุขถึงกับโดนแฟนมวยโห่ หาว่าชกโหดร้ายทารุณเกินไป คิดฆ่าเพื่อนร่วมอาชีพ (ดราม่าเลยว่างั้น) ทำให้ไม่ค่อยมีใครอยากขึ้นชกกับสุข และสุขจึงหาคู่ชกที่เหมาะสมยากมากยิ่งขึ้น ..สุข เผยว่าที่ตนต้องชกแบบนั้นเพราะว่ากลัว ซ้ายปรมาณูของสมพงษ์เหมือนกัน จึงต้องการรีบเผด็จศึกเร็ว ไม่อยากให้ยืดเยื้อ อนึ่งการชกครั้งนี้.. "สุข ปราสาทหินพิมาย" ได้เงินรางวัล 30,00บาท นับว่ามากที่สุดเป็นประวัติการณ์ ในสมัยนั้น พักยก24 : ระบบใหม่ เล่นง่าย ราคาสนาม ออกตัวได้ มีครบทุกความมันส์ (poor) Google Trans: "Giant Ghost, Brutal Duel, Left Atom" Today 76 years ago... Date: 16 May 1948 (1948) Muay Thai Champion At the National Athletic Stadium Bangkok .."Yak Phi Khom" happy at Prasat Hin Phimai The great Muay Thai legend from Korat. Brutal show of destruction and destruction. Defeated by knockout in round 3 "Left Atomic" Sompong Wechasit, a heavy puncher from Phetchaburi. Defeated by knockout in round 3 "Left Atomic" Sompong Wechasit, a heavy puncher from Phetchaburi. แพ้น็อกยกที่ 3 “อะตอมซ้าย” สมปอง เวชสิทธิ์ นักชกหนักจากเพชรบุรี Defeated by knockout in round 3 "Left Atomic" Sompong Wechasit, a hard-fisted fighter from Phetchaburi. แพ้น็อกยกที่ 3 “อะตอมซ้าย” สมปอง เวชสิทธิ์ นักชกหมัดเด็ดจากเพชรบุรี Former welterweight and middleweight boxing champion of Singapore. Who returns to wear the mongkol in Muay Thai again. ...Before the fight game, everyone thought that Suk would fight with the power of his heavy left fist. and Sompong Wechasit's expertise in the ring is not But when it came to reality, it turned out that Suk brutally attacked Sompong. Seriously There is no word of kindness. Until Sompong's mentor had to throw in the towel and surrender in the third round. ...Suk even got booed by boxing fans He said that the punch was too cruel and brutal. Thinking about killing a professional colleague (Drama, that's all) causing not many people to want to fight with Suk. And Suk found it even more difficult to find a suitable fight partner. ..Suk revealed that he had to fight like that because he was afraid. Somphong's atomic left is the same. therefore wanted to quickly put an end to the war I don't want it to drag on. Incidentally, this fight.. "Suk Prasat Hin Phimai" Receive a prize of 30,000 baht It was considered the highest in history at that time. Rest round 24: New system, easy to play, field prices, easy to start, has all the fun.

Hi, this might be out of the normal topic, but I thought you all might be interested in a book-- Children of the Neon Bamboo-- that has a really cool Martial Arts instructor character who set up an early Muy Thai gym south of Miami in the 1980s. He's a really cool character who drives the plot, and there historically accurate allusions to 1980s martial arts culture. However, the main thrust is more about nostalgia and friendships. Can we do links? Childrenoftheneonbamboo.com Children of the Neon Bamboo: B. Glynn Kimmey: 9798988054115: Amazon.com: Movies & TV

Gyms that I have heard positive things about, or which I visited and have qualities that might appeal to a certain kind of traveler/student/fighter. These are not gym reviews, just quick impressions. Sitjaopho (Hua Hin) - This is a gym in Hua Hin that is quiet popular with those looking for "technical" instruction. It has a strong Swedish connection, as well as a following with some from the East Coast (USA). I've have experienced one afternoon session here and was really impressed by the organization and work put in by everyone. Kru F is the captain of the ship and works directly with his students, sparring and padwork and clinching, and he seems to set the tone that is carried on by everyone in the space. There is a LOT of sparring (very light, very technical), padwork, shadowboxing, some students hit the bag but most didn't, and about 30 minutes of clinch (many participating, but not all), followed by group conditioning. Friendly space, dedicated students, Thai trainers and on this day all non-Thai students, but everyone on the same program from beginners to definitely-experienced fighters. Their fighters mostly appear on local shows, but there have been some high-profile fights among students preparing through Sitjaopho (not sure if they booked through the gym or just used it as their "fight camp".) Chatchai Sasakul Gym (BKK) - the former WBC world champion boxer Chatchai is highly recommended if you want to work on your boxing. Precise technician, great instructor. Probably the best boxing gym in Thailand, home of several current world champions. Private sessions are best. You can see a full private session with him here. In 2025 a larger gym was constructed out in Lam Luk Ka (north of Bangkok) called Thai Payak Gym, and accommodates both Boxing and Muay Thai. The gym puts on fight cards, both in Boxing and Muay Thai, although the Muay Thai tends to be kids with maybe 1-2 beginner adult fighters from Samart's Gym. Dejrat Gym (BKK) - This is a hidden gem in Bangkok run by the coach of the Thai National Team, Arjan Surat. Watch our session together. It just is a very "Thai" gym, so I couldn't recommend it in a broad way, either in a cultural or instruction sense. It's no-nonsense Muay Thai that is focused on its serious Thai fighters. They have had experience with female fighters. Go here only if you want some sort of immersion, are prepared to work very hard, and be positioned in a traditional hierarchy. Not a lot of English spoken. My session with Arjan Surat: Arjan Surat 2 - His Old School Tough & Defensive Style (94 min) Burklerk's Gym (Lampang, contact here) - outstanding instruction from a Legend in sleepy and beautiful Lampang. He and his wife have opened up a brand new resort style gym in Lampang. I wrote about his original home gym here: Burklerk's Family Run Gym in Lampang. Burklerk has a beautiful, powerful style and each time I visit I learn things. Even 5 minutes with him is gold. Go there for the time with Burklerk, but there won't be much sparring or clinching. My session with Arjan Burklerk in his original home location: Burklerk PInsinchai - Dynamic Symmetry (82 min) Keatkhamtorn Gym (Bangkok) - This gym is an authentic kai muay gym in Bangkok in that it is still very focused on growing Muay Thai stadium champions from an early age. This means that it is a great gym for small bodied westerners especially those interested in immersive clinch. Immersive clinch the way Thais learned, but be warned it takes a while.They have tons of young male fighters between 45-52 kg, and are a Muay Khao gym, which means that you'll be encouraged to develop proper clinch fighting habits. I will definitely make this my clinch gym when in Bangkok. The owner, Teerawat Chukorn is a Police Captain and very kind, and speaks English. You can contact them through their Facebook page which will respond in English. PK Saenchai Gym (Bangkok) I have never been to this gym during regular training at all, but it is a favorite of Westerners both who are seeking to train under a big name and those who have been in Thailand for a long while and decide to move over there for the fight opportunities and training alongside contemporary stars of Muay Thai. A head trainer is Detduang Pongsawang, who was a great fighter in the Golden Age. From what I understand it's a kind of "build a bear" method for training, so you can decide how much or how little you want to do by speaking with the manager and he works it all out for you. He sounds very personable and his English is very good. NungUbon: (Ubon) this is a lovely little gym just 10 minutes from the Ubon airport. There are fighter rooms, local fights, and NungUbon's son is a stadium fighter in Bangkok so trips down occur when he is fighting. It's mostly westerners, who for whatever reason tend to be tall, so if you are a larger person and looking for a more rural experience but want similarly sized clinch/sparring partners, this is an option.