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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.

On another level this kind of foreign influence on Thai culture is itself woven into Thai culture. A prime example is that the gendered particles that end sentences, "ka" and "crop" are a modern invention and not "traditionally" Thai, despite feeling VERY Thai. They were part of the gender edicts of the Thai dictator Plaek Phibunsongkhram who was attempting to pull Thai culture into line with Western gender values, edicts which also included legislating clothing differences between men and women. So, the very idea of "Thainess" itself is quite interwoven.

Here is a very small example of altered Muay Thai culture in Thailand that I sometimes think about...some gyms have "classes", in fact a LOT of gyms are starting to have "classes" and this just isn't a thing in Thailand's trad Muay Thai, and after the class participants all get in a line and "wai" to each other in different ways, sometimes like a soccer line. This is something I'd never seen or even heard about in a gym pre-COVID (I had seen it in Western gyms, if I recall). What is interesting is that if you've traveled thousands of miles and encountered this ritual you would really feel like you've come upon an authentic, perhaps old and common Thai gym custom...and would even perhaps bring it back to your home country. I'm not even completely sure of the recent origin of this. It seems to have come out of the new idea of "classes" in a gym. There may be antecedents of import from Westerners in gyms who have helped shape those classes, or perhaps this is something that happens in Thai schools with kids (?), or it may come from Thais increasingly going to China as trainers, training lots of non-fighters, and then returning to Thailand. There does seem to be a lot of cross-pollination going on.

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.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuuXPkmp-SK/?igsh=MW1wcW1oZDZtMzgybg%3D%3D A great little clip of legends Yodkhunpon and Samson clinching back in Roi Et where they were upcoming Isaan fighters. Notably, you see ZERO "pretzel" (the pretzel discussed here at some length: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130545342/ ); also Samson clearly the stronger clinch fighter technically, see how everything is wrists and hands and neck, whereas Yodkhunpon avoids any of those leverages, which Samson sews together somewhat relentlessly. Also, those two nice rips. Yodkhunpon a different sort of clincher, and Sylvie and I joke today that a reason why Yodkhunpon is so anti-clinch in their sparring is that he had to suffer through clinching with Samson on the comeup, a fighter here likely at least a weight class lower. Namkabuan used to talk about how having to train against his Muay Khao brother Namphon really shaped him.

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.

There is one small passage in Deng's article that really comes forward to me. It cracks open into a possible very powerful critique and analysis of what is occurring. It's this line, in the following context: "...this imagined Thai masculinity erases Indigenous conception of the man fighting body as a coarse ‘hunting dog’ tethered in communal ties" What stands out is the use of this term, course. The courseness of the Thai body as nak muay as presented by Pattana back in his famous "hunting dog" analogy in the early 2000s. What Deng is drawing forth is that the courseness of the Thai body, which importantly was tethered "in communal ties" (not just tethered, but also constructed by, composed of those ties), is being erased and replaced by an emulative body. This, I would argue, is a transmutation....and significantly, an enormous disruption in the gaze economy which made up the traditional kaimuay. Because I am most interested in locating and when possible preserving the form of traditional Muay Thai, I want to talk about it in those terms, and not really in terms of political or rightful judgement (at least at this point). I want to think about how the radical nature of this change points us in both directions, back towards the gaze economies of the traditional kaimuay, that of the "course" body, and towards the coming "emulative" body of the Thai nak muay in Western training contexts...and think how this relates to Muay Thai itself, in the ring, as well as a cultural form of expression. If we imagine the traditional Thai kaimuay (and, there are so numerous kinds of this we really have to idealize and even fantasize about it to bring this point), the Thai body especially as a youth is never looked at emulatively. In fact as early youth likely most of the work and effort is either unseen, or under control of judgement following the hierarchy of the gym. Thai fighters, especially as youth, but also through out are quite low socially, and the gaze economy would position them as such. They also would be judged just physically, in terms of their physiognomy, or their capacity to perform tasks, techniques, endurance. Noticing how young nak muay would often in photos pose in this (seemingly unfighterly) way, he told us: its so you can see their chest. Promoters and others want to see the state of physical development: above, Karuhat maybe at 16. We are not far from Pattana's notion of hunting dogs (by which he's attempting to draw a picture of huge social disparity with extreme comparison), or of racing horses, or of any other physical capacity driven contest. Leaving aside Pattana's likely ideological aims, point taken. The gaze to the young fighter in the economy of the kaimuay is largely not emulative. If we look at this clip of 1988 kaimuay shadowboxing and think about the gaze economy - who is looked at and why - we can see we are quite far from the gaze dynamics Deng is locating in traveling fighter gyms (though, what should be lost is that there IS a camera here, I believe the camera of a Westerner, so already we are not really looking at the gaze economy of the kaimuay uninterrupted...they would be shadowboxing different). Thai boys in a kaimuay, but also the maturing fighters are socially quite low, as are even the older padmen and krus, under the hierarchy of the gym, all of them stacked and ordered by a gaze economy. This is what Deng is referring to as the "course" body of the Nak Muay. All of them are de facto "workers", though not "laborers" in the theoretical sense. Workers in the cultural sense of meaning producers within the culture, structured in part by a stacked hierarchical gaze. I would put forth, the economy of this gaze is inseparable from the pedagogy of the nak muay as fighter, and this is especially so because Muay Thai itself is a performance of Thai hypermasculinity. It literally is a performance on a stage, and the development of the Thai nak muay cannot help but be centered on the economy of gaze. Who gets looked at, and why? I remember, we were at Lanna which at the time was a fairly "authentic" amalgam of adventure Thai tourism fighting and a real kaimuay. It had a kind of "secret" Thai kaimuay that was inside the gym, Thai fighters raised since kids, traditional training etc. Occasionally another kru outside the gym would come and bring his kid fighter for sparring or such. He became years later, sold to another gym, a powerful military gym, the Bangkok fighter Tanadet. At the time he was just "Poda". Sylvie and I watched with some amazement when his kru just put him on the bag and left, and Poda just went at knees on the bag endlessly. Nobody was looking at him (overtly). This wasn't this gym, he didn't train there. He was just put on the bag. It seemed that unseen by anyone (again, overtly) he would tirelessly go like this on the bag until he was stopped. He would never stop himself. He was very unlike the Thai boys, the fighters of the gym that we had come to know, who were in their own gaze economy (which involved serious Western traveling fighters). There was nothing of the emulative Body in what he was doing. It was the course Body. But, truthfully, it was not that he was unseen in doing this. Both Sylvie and I saw him, and we both will not forget it. His body, and he likely was not aware of it because this was not his space, and we were far on the other side of the gym, went from course Body to emulative Body. And, his example likely influenced Sylvie to train at even higher levels of commitment throughout the years. The above is just an anecdote of the tension between kinds of gaze economies in the Thai-Western gym training spaces, something that Deng uncovers in his article. Much can be made of who affluent Westerners are who travel across the globe to come and train and learn from Thais, many of whom could never afford such a trip in their lives, either financially or as an idea. There can be no doubt that the disparity of Western economies entering the low-economies of Muay Thai subclass feeds that economy, but also seriously distorts it, if even as a differential of power, a differential outside of the differentials of power which organize traditional Muay Thai, the wealth and status ladders which make Muay Thai happen, and develop nak muay. This is true. And, I have seen and even talked about how Western traveling fighters bring into Thai training spaces their own cultural habitus, their own conditioned management and performances of affects that are quite alien, and even counter to traditional affect habitus - for instance displays of fatigue, exaggerated signaling of effort, which in the West can be valorized signals of commitment, big sighs, or collapsing to the ground, etc - and that these affect signals can pervade and even overwrite traditional codes in hybrid spaces. This is another sort of incursion. I never really thought about who the very gaze of Western traveling fighters is itself a disruption of the traditional gaze economy of the kaimuay, and then the Thai "gym". The very vital distribution of "who gets looked at, and why" is what conditions the values of training, it is training. When Western eyes enter Thai training spaces, even if nothing is said, even if comportment follows customary values, the very distribution of gaze (and the intent in looking) creates an entirely different kind of "Body" (in the sense that Deng is talking about). And kinds of bodies are very important to Muay Thai, because ruup (posture, form, outline) is a significant scoring factor. The body matters. Bodies are constructed not only by effort and trained capacities, its constructed by gaze. Gaze socially rewards behaviors or comportment. It can also punish the same. And removing gaze can be a powerful feature of shaping capacities. In some substantive sense, entering the financial economy of a gym and spreading around $100s of dollars is disruptive, but also entering the gaze economy of a gym and spreading around gaze, especially in a restrictive gaze economy in a kaimuay, could be just as disruptive. And, as the number of Western eyes increase in a training space the gaze economy we become further and further skewed towards Western values. This is where Deng's observation of emulation because very significant. This, culturally, is the transmutation of the course Body into the emulative Body, especially along Western valuation. Who gets looked at, and why? There is an allure of the Thai nak muay Body for the Western traveling fighter not only because the sport is theirs (it is), or even because most of those in a training space have been training and fighting since childhood (many have). It comes also from the affect values that are embodied in Thailand's Muay Thai, the way that it is an achievement of ruup (form) and importantly ease (ning) - as well as values like sanae (charm) and otton (endurance, showing no symptoms). It is especially the cherished quality of ning (being at ease, natural, undisturbed) which is in direct contrast with the Western affect trait of tensing up for both effort and also in the face of duress, which gives the Thai Body of the nak muay an "aura". When training with (and against) Thai nak muay, or even with Thai krus/pad men, there are "how did you do thats?" and "how do you move like thats", but also there can be that "aura" which as Deng points out can be racially, or at least ideologically charged, an exoticization of the Other. The gaze upon this Other is often the gaze of emulation. It transmutes the socially low "course" Thai Body into an emulative one. And...without too much irony Deng points out, Western traveling fighters are not only emulating the Thai Body, they are emulating it to attempt to defeat and dominate it...in the ring, as part of their own transmutation...an effort which certainly would yield to some Colonialist criticism. The power of the gaze as such is worth considering, especially as it featured in the kaimuay gaze economy. It is quite common to attribute the great grace and performative capacities of Thai fighters to how young they started training and fighting in the sport. There is a sense in which all that experience is already baked-in and become second nature by the time they reached Bangkok rings in the past. And we can regard this as true. But, I would offer with a focus on the gaze economy in the role of pedagogy, and the development of the very identities of fighters that it may be even less how young they started fighting (Karuhat, for instance started at 15, comparatively late), so much as how they have been shaped by the gaze economies of their culture and sub-cultures, the who and whys of getting looked at, and importantly, that by the time nak muay are becoming rising stars in the rings of Bangkok (at least in the Golden Age of the sport) they are passing through adolescence into young adulthood, exactly when gaze can matter most in identity formation. Because Thai nak muay were suddenly gaining cosmopolitan gaze attention, they also were hitting 16, 17, 18, notably after a rather restricted gaze economy of the kaimuay, and the gazes of local festival fighting. It is likely that the sequestering of gaze played a vital, formative role in the sudden bursting on the scenes of Bangkok, Thai fighters dramatically displaying hypermasculine performances under duress, in the aesthetics of the sport, as an expression of identity itself. It is enough to say, these economies of gaze are changed in our day, and in mixed cultural training circumstances with Westerners, radically changed. Different things get you looked at. A 14-15 year old Thai boy sparring a Westerner in a training ring while 3 Westerners look on at the rope is just a very different set of gaze criteria today than if sparring a gym mate in a corner of the gym rather unseen in 1988. (As just a sidenote: I have seen Thai fighters who have trained around Westerners, even in fairly traditional contexts, fight with a sort of early fight peacocking that seems new to the sport, a peacocking that could not be backed up, perhaps a product of the new gaze training economies.) This is also to leave out a completely separate and quite different gaze economy of the nak muay which certainly did not exist 35 years ago, the gaze economy of social media, being looked at through video and photographs by numerous, faceless others. Training kaimuay of the past were very cloistered environment, not only in terms of outside influence, but in terms of highly restrictive gaze dynamics. Now Thai nak muay gaze economies are spread throughout the world in social media channels, not only to Thais, but to Westerners and everyone else. It likely is unmeasurable how much of a change this has brought to the culture, let alone Muay Thai and the development of the fighter as hypermasculine performer. Deng brings in the very significant factor of the Western traveling gaze in the tourist gym, in tourist centers like Phuket or Chiangmai. Socially low Thai bodies of nak muay and ex-fighters are being looked at with emulation by social high (affluent) Westerners. Among the higher, cosmopolitan classes of first Siam, and then Thailand have held the Western gaze with great esteem (even if problematized, or mixed esteem). It should not be overlooked at that in these training spaces lower status Thais are receiving the emulative gaze of the Westerner. This cannot help but be a status transmutation, in even a historic sense, if even in part, of no small order. And the kinds of valorizations that occur at the level of gaze and imitation are of a very different value economy of those that traditionally produced Muay Thai (even if the things valued, like ning, or balance, or sanae are the same). Their production is different. And, there is the power differential that these are larger bodied, economically affluent (often) men who are looking through emulation to defeat and dominate the Thai Body in the ring. The cross-signs of power, especially at the ideological level, are contradictory and complex. Deng also eludes to but does not state outright that in adventure fight tourism there is another alluring Thai Body in tourist destinations, that of the bar girl and prostitute. In a strange pair, there is a male and female counterpart (leaving aside trans-gender, and queerness for a moment) both forming a Thai Body Other, often both partaken from by Western fight tourism. The homosocial fighter and the emulative nak muay, and the alluring, receptive Thai bar girl. I do not have another perspective on this because I know these mostly just through stereotypes because I haven't spent time in these kinds of more tourism-oriented training spaces or around bar culture, but it cannot be without comparison at least in terms of critique. What is interesting is that if the Thai kaimuay gaze economies are radically and utterly undermined - I remember filming at a Bangkok kaimuay that still is almost entirely Thai and regularly provides fighters for all the stadium shows, and we asked if they are interested in Westerners training there, and at first they said "no", and then a short time later came back and said "They can, but if they train here they can never leave", meaning, you are on lockdown at the camp, you don't leave its walls, the gaze economy is in tact - and certainly they are undermined if only at the level of social media, what is to become of the Thai nak muay and the magical fighter camps would produce? Long now have we said this fighter no longer exists, Saenchai being the last of them. We see them in videos, and we have documented them as a generation or two, in the Muay Thai Library project. Could it be that the training capacities are falling not only because the talent pool is diminishing, or that the small kaimuay is being lost to Thailand, or that the camera and video have changed what is wanted from a fighter, but also that the gaze economy of instruction and development has been broken open. Who is looked at, and what for? I was wrong, or at least incomplete to say that in the kaimuay the lower-status nak muay did not have a emulative body. I delayed this because I didn't want to complexify the contrast too much in the above. Indeed there is an emulative body of the nak muay that develops in the very maturation within the kaimuay, as younger boys become stronger, more accomplished fighters, and start receiving more of the gaze economy. Older fighters, even by one year, just as in any school or family, are emulative to the younger, but as Deng points out, this emulation is quite personal. It is tied to the "community", in really in a much smaller community than that, the family of the kaimuay. Status is increased with age, and younger fighters emulate older fighters in their own small gym. This is one of the destructive elements of big Bangkok gyms when they take fighters of any success from smaller kaimuay. They are removing the emulative body from the de facto "family" of the gym, the practice and identity which draws the lower status fighters up. This emulation and status change though happens within closed, traditional gaze economy of the kaimuay. It develops. It is quite different than the allure of the Thai Body nak muay or trainers may be assigned by a Western traveling fighter. The distribution of the gaze and the values of that distribution are radically different and altering.

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

An older legend getting lined up for a seminar visit to America, something we are not connected with...but honestly I wouldn't send anyone to America now and over the next few years, even with absolutely pristine paperwork. The government is just too focused on absurdity being the point. But it feels weird to even say anything. But, don't want to see one of these men imprisoned, that would be a nightmare. This is just a small issue, there is a great deal more important suffering and struggle going on, but as I journal about Muay Thai, this is a difficult shadow concern. If anyone is bringing Thai legends to the US now please be extra careful, extra vigilant.

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.

The crazy thing about Namkabuan's 130 lb run at Lumpinee is that he told us that he was forced out of the 126 lb class because of his brother Namphon, so he went undefeated at 130 lbs instead (5 defenses). At 126 he would have been unfightable. In those years he was undefeated by Matee, Therdikiat and Jongsanan and Chatchai. Therdkiat himself was adopted into his gym. by the end of his run at 130 lbs he was giving up 10 lbs to Sakmongkol he was so unbeatable fighting up. The Lumpinee belts going off at 126 lbs during Namkabuan's 130 lb run.

Some Deep Black Portraiture in Action of Lakhin

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.

I also didn't realize how much of Yodsanklai's career, his fame, came from fighting at those much larger weight classes vs farang, and of course Contender. He really is one of those strong Thais that in the stadia had mixed success at the highest stadia level, but then grew into the world of international fighters where he established an immense reputation.

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:

In all this time, I never realized that Muangchai's WBC Championship belt was the belt that Chatchai Sasakul won, passed through Yuri. Basically Chatchai resumed the Thai Champion legacy. The more you study, the more you see how embedded Western Boxing has been in Thailand's Muay Thai history. Filmed with Muangchai yesterday, documenting his Muay Thai.

"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.

Two Points of Contact I'm excited about this coming piece in the MTL. Something we discovered in Karuhat's frame control. His use of two points of contact, opened up by the turn of the hand.

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.

If you love clinch watch rounds 3-5 of Petchboonchu vs Yodwicha. It's three rounds of glory. It's amazing that in 10 short years this kind of performance and even fighting has been removed from the sport. Pure human art.

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

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.

Was thinking about a commenter telling another redittor that they were "elitist" for not liking ONE FC, and preferring trad Muay Thai, the absolute irony of them thinking that a new globalized version of the traditional form of the sport (a sport which has been practiced and fought by the working poor throughout Thailand for at least a century, in some ways MADE by the rural nakmuay), a new commodity version which has been invented by hi-so wealthy, "elite" Thais, wealthy sons who went to school in very expensive schools in the United States, a new sport modeled in the Thai high-brow love of MMA (MMA is a Thai hi-so taste in Thailand, because originally you needed a satellite dish to watch it, so only rich young people watched it back in the day), so completely born of Thai elite taste making, and then funded massively, to the tune of more than a Half a BILLION dollars, by wealthy Arab investment and other very elite Venture Capital investment groups, some of the most powerful investment sources in the world...all of that, absolutely about as elitist as you can get, reinventing the traditional sport, inverting pretty much all of its values, in the image of wealth itself, so that affluent tourists and consumers will buy it...but, if you don't like it...you are elitist. The whole thing is about as posh as you can get.

I think people don't even understand what it was that ONE did. It had almost nothing to do with small gloves, or rulesets or aggression or any of that. It bought up the most developed Thai talent (which was quite cheap, and many past prime) and then poured massive amounts of marketing dollars into taking over comms, and absolutely controlling messaging in very small information ecosystems, squeezing out almost all other content...and used this to create a constant "commercial" of how massive a success it was. They could have done comm control with a totally different combat sport product and have had the very same, if not even better success. It was about manufactured digital footprint. So when Entertainment Muay Thai tries to model itself on ONE promotional rulesets and styles its actually copying the wrong thing. There is some benefit to mirroring the style and ethos that ONE already seeded the ecosystems with, because all that groundwork has been done, and it changed consumption...but it actually wasn't all the aggression, or the scoring kind or even the knockouts. It was much much more about the sizzle and not much to do about the steak. Its actually the systematic control over messaging, from SEO link farming and story planting, to buying up social media sharing circles and influencers, all the narrative shaping. Traditional Muay Thai as a product is probably even MORE amenable as a product than the made up sport that ONE created. It has massive valuation in terms of depth of complexity (deeper retention investment), historical material (narratives to be driven), and overall skill level. Trad Muay Thai as it bent toward Entertainment versions has copied the wrong thing.

Thank you for these insights, I did not know any of the information you provided! Seemingly similar to these commercial gyms buying out fighters from smaller gyms, ONE has bought out the social media representation and global perspective of Muay Thai in a way. RWS is interesting in that aspect of observance, its kinda like the doomsday clock

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.

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.

This story is about mastering energy, and focus on the few techniques that will bring it forward. The Unexpected. Sylvie put together her commentary on Fight 285. The fight is a beautiful example of two huge things that determine a fair number of fights: Energy and technique. One of the things that had a shaping impact on this fight was that when we travel like this, Ronin style, just quite far into rings that are on the outer edge of Thailand, far from the tourism Muay Thai, there is a wonderful kind of freedom from the politics of expectation, and by that I mean the sort of self-judgement that a fighter can bring in fear of disappointing others. In this fight it felt like we were traveling all the way to the Moon, ready to fight all renegade style (Sylvie in fact was booked to fight a Boxing fight back in Bangkok the next day, we would have to get in the car and drive all night to just make the Boxing fight with a few hours to spare, so just a tremendous old style adventure). But Yodkhunpon, who had never been to any of Sylvie's fights before, but had sparred with her pretty much daily for 5+ years, just shows up at the venue as we are ready to lay our mat down, unannounced. He's perfect and wonderful, but it was a huge deflation in that fight freedom and mission, with almost a depressive effect, at least as much as I could feel. It's like you went and climbed a far off mountain nobody climbs, and your best buddy is sitting there at the summit "Hey!" - totally unexpected, and even though great, completely antithetical to what you had mentally prepared for. We were ready for a marathon run of two fights, the greatest challenge of which wasn't the fights themselves - it was the tons and tons of driving, and lots of exhaustion - but suddenly it was a Pop Quiz on a single fight late in the night - Yodkhunpon had no idea Sylvie was fighting back in Bangkok the next afternoon. She wasn't running a 10K, she was running an Ultra that nobody knew about. The mission was: drive 8 hours into the night, sit several of hours on a mat, fight, drive 8 hours through the night back to Bangkok and get to a hotel maybe around 10 am, fight the Boxing fight around 2 pm, two fights in 26 hours 1000+ km of driving (it was an off coincidence that she had been double booked, and decided to honor it). She can fight like that back to back because she carries very little mental baggage with her when she does. It's just like a machine, a runner that gets into her cadence. She just puts her head down and fights free. So, it was a very difficult mental test record scratch. Suddenly the mind is not on the fight, or really more the long term mission, its on this unexpected change, a new focus. I could feel her deflation. I'm very sure that Yodkhunpon was just offering huge support, because fighting without entourage is a definite cultural no-no in Thailand, nobody does it, and it signals only weakness. But, this is the beauty of fighting so much. You discover these mental challenges that arise out of nothing. (Yodkhunpon also showed up unexpected on the mat laydown 2 fights later in Buriram at Fight 287, to every different effect, as Sylvie was already fighting under Therdkiat and was geared for that kind of relation.) Secondly, Sylvie's outside grabs just killed any momentum and intensity should could muster (fighting that unexpected deflation). Outside position means that you have to work immediately to try and get to a positive position, so you are never imposing yourself upon entry. This means running up hill to start every engagement in the clinch, a serious energy/momentum drain. The combination of the two of these, the emotional energy, the weaker technical entries (and the skill of the opponent) just made this a very steep grade to climb. Add in the cuts (which swung the score) and its an near impossible elevation. And in fact Sylvie's grit and experience gave her a great performance under those conditions. She pulled enough together that if there wasn't the cuts and the score swing she still was right there. On the other hand the cuts of course were a technical focus and achievement by her opponent, lifting her out of a battle into a open lane. So props. I do think that a different mindset, without the unexpected reversal of the mental landscape, would have made the difference here. Sylvie's an extremely experienced fighter who can ride through pretty much anything unexpected, and she rode through this, but it was an incredibly unusual event, two very rare things coming together. Your long time legend sparring partner shows up to corner you 500 km from where you expect he is, no word that's he's coming, for the first time ever appearing at a fight of yours...just as you are attempting a fight ultra that needs to be extremely streamlined emotionally. She did kind of fantastic in this equation, but took 7 stitches for it. But, the main focus of my commentary here more is the way that individual techniques and broad scale "energy" shapes connect up together to determine fights. The energy and tempo of a fighter can be undermined or amplified by small technical things. Inside grabs can become accelerants just when you need them to lift you. I also thought that Sylvie fought great in the 5th round. She minimized it because of fight context and that she had refused to chase the win, but she actually was out timing a timing fighter, and seemed to find some special internal rhythms that got her clicking...not for this fight, but for layers of future fights, something to tap into. Sometimes in a fight - especially in a career of hundreds of fights - where you have to explore a space, even if it doesn't serve victory just then and there. There is no replicating the ring, even in sparring.

This was all in answer to someone asking if learning Boxing would improve one's Muay Thai, my thoughts on that: Thailand's traditional Muay Thai was developed through a century-long dialogue with Western boxing - first through the influence of the British in the early 20th century, then the influence of American boxing in the mid-century. A great deal of this simply never "got into" Westernized versions of Muay Thai, mostly because it was exporting specific techniques, and was focused on all the ways Muay Thai was NOT like boxing. It has, historically, a lot of boxing reference and influence, at least in strains. This if further complicated by the fact that Boxing's influence on TODAY's Muay Thai in Thailand has dramatically dropped off. Arguably the deep fall in skill level (eyes, timing, defense, improvisation, variety of techniques, etc) across the board in Muay Thai among Thais can in part be laid at the loss of this past relationship. So yes, I would say training and maybe even more importantly fighting in Boxing probably gets you closer to the highest levels of Thailand's Muay Thai as it was in the its past (for instance the Golden Age 1980s-1990s). Aside from countless insight into technical aspects of the sport, footwork, a feeling for the control of distance and continuity, just being able to become comfortable in the pocket and defend yourself there will keep you from having to defend yourself by taking distance, a common "hack" of defense itself. But also..."training combos" isn't really what I would mean by "Boxing"...something some people mistake. It's almost the opposite of Boxing proper. [edit in for context: a look at the two top Muay Thai fighters in Thailand in the 1930s who also were top boxers in the SEA boxing circuit: What Was Early Modern Muay Thai Like? New Film Evidence (1936): Samarn Dilokvilas vs Somphong Vejasidh

Honestly, I'm watching Karuhat reconstruct his movement heritage as he is gaining more capacity in his ACL'd up knee (3 weeks now maybe), and sometime shadows just the gesture of his right kick, lancing forward on his left, recovering knee, and he laughs,, because he knows that this little movement, this little lance, is like nobody else in the world. It's incredible. This micro movement, not even healthy, and he's already expressing in himself something nobody else can reach. and...he's standing in my livingroom.

I remember - I've probably written it somewhere else - driving to Phetjeejaa's family gym, which was up a few lanes and a dirt road, when she was the best female Muay Thai fighter in the world, at only 13 years of age, something we did everyday so Sylvie could train with her. And to get there we motorbiked up Khao Talo road, a pretty active road, and would pass by a Taekwondo studio with a large plate glass window showing the training mat inside, where numerous kids around Phetjeejaa's age all glowed in their starched white Gis, Ha-ai-ing in their moves. And I thought to myself...we are driving to where the best female fighter in the world trains and all these kids, the parents of these kids, don't even know she's there...up the road. And even if they did, they wouldn't train with her at her gym, because Muay Thai is low class, its dirty, nothing like the promise of a clean white Gi. The story of Muay Thai cannot be told without this strong division of class.

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.

Imagine there is a guitar school, where boys come to live at a pre-teen age, that has something of a feel of a family. None of them know how to play a guitar. They are given guitars and given very basic drills to practice each day. They may be taught how to basically hold the guitar, or hold strings, but there isn't much technical instruction. They can see from older boys who have been at the school how it is done, and there is a lot of imitation. The drilling is fatiguing. Everyone drills together, playing scales or basic chord series over and over, and everyone is doing it together. They can see each other, and even the most experienced players in the school are sitting with the most inexperienced. Some may struggle, they push through. There is a strong sense of obligation, and the dynamics of the group hold everything together. Sometimes this drilling is grueling. Experienced student players are so adept at the drills they can do them in a very lazy fashion, or they can do them with flair and personal small variation. Sometimes they can find themselves "competing" with others in the group, just in a sort of expressiveness, because the drills are so boring. The fatigue units everyone. Younger boys watch the older boys add small qualities to their drills. Aside from drilling like this, there battling. This is almost always quite playful...though there is always a dimension of dominance, of agonism. In pairs students "battle each other" in back and forth exchanges of aspects of music, much of it drawn from the skills in the drills, but the battles are musical, and expressive. Communally there develops an aesthetic where one knows if they are losing a battle at any point, mostly from watching the playful battles of older guitar students. The younger students battle in a rather simplistic way. There is a kind of metronome of music as everyone is battling at the same time. There is almost no "instruction" given in these battles, no correction. In the drills there may be some correction, but the correction is toward the intensity and focus given. Most of the correction comes organically from the group, and the lead examples of developed players. Because fatigue is involved in these sessions, playful guitar battles, which last in rounds everyone follows, may by quite lowkey. Students that know each other well may just used them to rest, in only a gentle back and forth, together "mock" battling. And then other playful battles may really escalate, because social hierarchy in the school, where everyone lives together, is always contested. Winning at any one time feels substantive. So, in these sessions of fatiguing drilling together (drills which develop personally expressiveness, and extraordinary endurance) and playful battles (which vary in intensity from sleepwalking imitative back and forth, to outright contests of superiority, and sometimes passing between the two intensities in alternation), make up the conditions for skill development, not only at the technical level, but also the level of styles. At a fairly young age the students of the school also participate in public guitar battles versus other guitar students of their own approximate skill...as do the more experienced students. Everyone attends these, and guitarists in these battles win money, some of it for themselves, some for the families they don't live with, some for the school. Gambling abounds in these public battles, so guitarists on stage can always tell if the battle is close, who is winning, from audience bets and their shouts and energies. The battles have a strong aesthetic shape, composed of 5 rounds. In the aesthetics of music, as the battle builds the most intense back and forths occur in rounds 3 and 4, when the music is really building. Wins and losses in these public battles raise or lower the social standing of the students when they go back to the home school. And the display of creative skills in play is fed back into their play battles and drilling back in school. Sometimes they are corrected, often they are urged to be more of a certain way, a way they would have won, but there is a cycling dynamic between the public battles, and the playful battles back in the school. Everyone in the school is watching everyone. Student learn from imitating the better, older, more developed students, but also from others that are their own peers. Because everyone of a certain age and experience is sharing the fatigue, and the struggle, how others your age are doing things affects and inspires you. The environment is incredibly mimetic. Identities and skills are developed in the context of others. The host of schools in a region, and their 100s of local public battles, collectively create the styles of the music of that region. Certain techniques or tempos fall out of favor, others rise, according to the gambling values. Much of this is shaped by the underlying culture, and the cumulative history of the music, generations of public battles, and even famous musicians that grew out of these battles. It is an agonistic aesthetics of music, full of styles and localized techniques that have developed in diversity, but it holds together as a single "music". If you hear this music being played, you recognize it right away.

This one way kid got screwed over a bit

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

3. Yodteepop Tongsaipriw only started Muay Thai because he was fat and his dad's a former fighter. They say he had like 15 fights (I don't buy it) but because he's so talented at it it became a full career

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

Some beautiful examples from the Contax 645, from Rambaa's festival card this week, where you can feel both the space AND the details, more than I even intuited. This to my eye is very close to a "natural" view, with just a little artifice to give it that oneiric feeling, which is related to my larger Noir sensibilities.

We were up in Khorat last night, 9 hours of driving round trip, just to see two quick fights (maybe 20 minutes), and it was totally worth it. After watching Rambaa's festival fight card the night before. #muayThai There was something about spending the hours standing in the crowds til 11 pm in Pattaya, to watch the temple fights, and then the next day to drive out to Khorat to see these little daughters fight, the overall keeping of the flame of the birth of Muay Thai, attending to that, that filled us with meaning. It's like you are watching Muay Thai's heartbeat, when you watch the Muay that isn't made for export, and you see it living and breathing in families, in heritage...in this case from Khaosai Galaxy (famed as a boxer) now in his 60s, now in his little daughters.

escriures - etchings, strokes, inscriptions, grooves & sweeps, impressions, trace, arcings, adumbration, articulation. Above is a photo of a fighter from Chatchai's shadowboxing with his hands on the hip bones, the most extensive writing strokes taken out. The body itself becomes a gesture of gestures, the feet and torso moves toward the visual language, developing the sense of the roots of writing.

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.

I've written before about my theory that Phra Pirap arguably is the god of Muay Thai. There is no such officially designated god, but there is no doubt to me that this deity figure powerfully combines the elements that distinguish Muay Thai from many contemporary forms of combat sport fighting, and is in that way a protector for a call to preserve those precious elements that may very well be lost to globalizing modernity. What I wrote a few years ago: "There is a small holy statuette that sits on a mantel in our apartment. It is a bronze-looking figure of a man, a warrior, posed with a spear pointed upward at a diagonal across his body, and with the other hand near the spearpoint he holds a bouquet of green. His face is that of a demon. His body that of an athlete. He is a little known god, much debated in niche circles, Phra Pirap. He as I understand it is a kind of god of war and battle, but mostly is known as the god of dance, the one that leads the arts. At his left hand come together both the spear point and the bouquet. This the unfathomable combination of what makes up Muay Thai in Thailand. For us in the west there is a fundamental division in how we parse the world. There is the "real" and the "unreal". In Thailand these two things come together to braid into something else. People looking at fights want to say "that's a fake fight!" or "that's a 'real' fight!". What makes them real or unreal are supposedly the intention of the actors. But because Muay Thai is an art, and not only a sport, these things come together. It is ultimately both dance and violence. The reason for this is timing. Phra Pirap happens also to be the god of timing. Of finding the perfect moment. Nietzche made a big deal of this in Beyond Good and Evil. In Greek there are two important fundamental kinds of Time. Chronos is circular time, the time of the seasons. Kairos is the time of the moment, the perfect moment to act. Kairos makes an incision in Chronos. Phra Pirap is the god of Kairos. This is why he is god of the dance. This is why the Muay Thai of Thailand is both real and unreal. It carries the power of artifice into the world of the "real" of violence, to steer it. It recognizes the moment of change, and therefore may spend much of its time in the realm of the fake, the performed. It is steering the cooling schedule of the steel, when all the molecules are afloat and changing their positions. In the west we only think of linear time. For us the "real" of fighting is merely the degree of "heat" in a fight, and the application of force of one body against other bodies. In Muay Thai, for Phra Pirap, it is the point in the circle when real change can happen, it is the art of taking hold of that change and shaping it to a valued outcome. It is where the spearpoint and the bouquet come together." - original context here Some years on I reflect back upon how much I've come to believe this. It's why Muay Thai krus will urge you over and over "timing", "timing", "timing". Or, why legends will praise Samart's genius as found in his "eyes". The god itself appears to be a syncretic fusion of two gods, one related to the destructive powers of Shiva (hence the spear, perhaps), an emanation of Shiva, the other is the presiding god of Dance and Music, of performance. One of the conundrums that westerners face when trying to really delve into the intensity of Thai Muay Thai is how much the aesthetics of scoring in face relate to performing postures, senses of timing, playing narrative themes in a round or across rounds. These are the art of the sport. We in the west, especially the era of MMA's demystification of Kung-Fu and Karate bullshido, versions, experience the term "art" much in the vain of artifice. Something unreal. Something just surface. What traditional ring Muay Thai embodied though, I believe, are the affective potentials of performance, the unconscious fathoms of what a fighter can draw out far, far beyond "perfect" technique, or practices patterns. This, I sense, is the power of where Phra Pirap reigns.

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.