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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.

Sylvie’s advice on under-recovery is still the gold standard for anyone heading to Thailand in 2026. The "don't prepay" rule is especially relevant now since trainer lineups at gyms change so fast you really want to test the vibe first. Starting with one solid session a day to build a streak is way smarter than burning out on doubles and hitting a wall by week two. Even if these tips have been around since last year, the reality of Thai training culture hasn't changed.

I'm more of a grappler too. It took me about three years to adjust my mind to Muay Thai. It's easier to feel swamped in something unfamiliar, plus large gloves feel all wrong when I parry or trap. I also found that I'd sink my weight when I should go light as an opponent gets close. Initially, I was only happy clinching or going for sweeps and trips. My style is still pretty unconventional but I can go a round with a smaller or less trained opponent and not get hit once now and then. Set up strikes with shovel kicks and low kicks, sweeps, and grabbing their guard. Glove blocks use your grappling skills too. Grabbing someones guard and using your knees is good too.

Sylvie's trained a lot with Namsaknoi over the last few months at Singmawin, and even sparred and clinched with Jongangdam a bit. It was very cool to watch Jongangdam's style in the fight, never having seen him fight. He fought with great timing, and managed distance in ways that Namsaknoi (who instructs at Singmawin) teaches, with rhythm and off-beats and lowish power accuracy, adding in teeps and jabs. It's a great fight because he's forced to adjust when Kom (red) smartly decided to refuse to fight in space where he's at a disadvantage. I love how Jongangdam does not trade bite-down combo for combo, against the Muay Maat attack, but is constantly using his eyes. I also kinda love his slurvy left hook in the first few rounds which looks like it has both quickness and hidden weight. link timestamped to 36:21

Welcome to the dark side. Honestly, the "blue belt" equivalent in Muay Thai is when you stop flinching during sparring and actually land a clean teep. If you're training 2-3 times a week, you'll probably reach that "competent" level in about 18 months. Striking is weird because a lucky punch from an untrained giant can still suck, but by then you'll have the footwork to make them look silly.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DNJE3xmsiks/ This is how far Entertainment has pervaded. Tapaokaew vs Nuenglanlek. Nuenglanlek losing the fight in the clinch asks Tapaokaew to go toe to toe for the end of the 5th round so fighters can get the bonus. This is basically...let's stop fighting a "real" fight, you know, one fighter out-skilling another, and instead let's "put on a show" for the Entertainment bonus. That RWS itself posts this, selling the action, just is a deeper dive into building a "content" generator sport. This is just the shaping of the sport by commerce and moving to online content and in-person tourism, away from in-person passionate, knowledgeable fandom...which I suspect isn't sustainable as a business model, and certainly won't develop the highest level skills (building the sport long term). It's also an interesting reversal of the supposedly "fake" dance offs in the 5th round, now there is a "show" of action. This likely will become a trend as fighters learn new ways to play the 5th round out. RWS has a tough line to ride, as the nexus space, the limnal space between pure Aggro ONE marketing and gambled traditional stadium Muay Thai. These are nuances and changes in that space.

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.

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.

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

Choosing a gym in Thailand is definitely overwhelming—there are so many world-class spots! I love that you’re focusing on the clinch and elbows; it’s such a technical part of the sport. I’ve heard great things about FA Group specifically for their 'clinch marathons.' For someone looking for that old-school feel, Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai has such a great reputation too.

Many are curious or questioning why I’ve become so focused on fighters of the Golden Age, if it might be some form of nostalgia, or a romance of exoticism for what is not now. Truthfully, it is just that of the draw of a mystery, the abiding sense of: How did they do that?, something that built up in me over many years, a mystery increasing over the now hundreds of hours I’ve spent in the presence of Golden Age fighters - both major and minor. Originally it came from just standing in the ring with them, often filming close at hand, and getting that practically synaptic, embodied sense that this is just so different, the feeling you can only get first hand - especially in comparison. You can see it on video, and it is apparent, but when you feel it its just on another order, an order of true mystery. When something moves through the space in a new or alter way it reverberates in you. How is it that these men, really men from a generation or two, move like this. It’s acute in someone like Karuhat, or Wangchannoi, or Hippy, but it is also present in much lessor names you will never know. It’s in all of them, as if its in the water of their Time. I’ve interviewed and broken down all the possible sources of this. It seems pretty clear that it did not come to them out of some form of instruction. It was not dictated or explicitly shown, explained (so when coaches today do these today they are not touching on that vein). It does not seem sufficient to think that it came from just a very wide talent pool, the sheer number of young fighters that were dispersed throughout the country in the 1980s, as if sheer natural selection pulled those movements and skills out. It did not come from sheerly training hard - some notable greats did not train particularly hard, at least by reputation. It’s not coached, its not trained, its not numerical. A true mystery. Fighters would come from the provinces with a fairly substantial number of fights, but at a skill level which they would say isn’t very strong, and within only a few years be creating symphonies in the ring. Karuhat was 16 when he fought his first fight (with zero training) and by 19 was one of the best fighters who ever lived. Sirimongkol accidentally killed an opponent in the provinces (I would guess a medical issue for the opponent, a common strike) and was pulled down to Bangkok because of this sudden "killer" reputation, but he’d tell you that he was completely unskilled and of little experience. Within a few years he was among the very best of his generation. We asked him: Who trained you, who taught you?, expecting some insight into a lineage of knowledge and he told us “Nobody. I learned from watching others.” This runs so hard against the primary Western assumptions of how Knowledge is kept, recorded and passed, but it is a story we heard over and over. Somehow these men, both famous and not, developed keen, beautiful (very precise) movement and acute combat potency without direct transmission or even significant instructional training. The answer could be located nowhere…in no particular place or function. Sherlock Holmes said of a mystery: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.. All these things that we anticipate make great fighters, these really seem to be the impossible here. They were not the keys, it seems. Instead it appears that it was in the very weave of the culture, and the subcultures of Muay Thai, within the structures of the kaimuay experiences, in the richly embedded knowledges of everyone in the game, in the states of relaxation of the aesthetics of muay itself, in the practices of play, in the weft of festival fighting, the warp of equipmentless training, in endurance, in the quixotic powers of gambling, the Mother’s Milk of Muay Thai itself, which is a very odd but beautiful thing to conclude. It does pose something of a nostalgia, because many of these cultural and circumstantial elements have changed - some radically altered by a certain modernity, some shifted subtly - so there is a dimension of feeling that we want not to lose all of it, that we might still pull some substantial threads forward into our own future, some of that cultural DNA that made some of the greatest fighters ever what they were. It's not a hope to return to those past states, but a respect for what they (mysteriously) created. As we approximate techniques, copy movements, mechanize styles, coach harder and harder, these are all the things that make up a net through which everything slips out. Instead, this mystery, the how did they become so great, so proficient, so perceptive, so smooth, so electric, so knowing, stands before us, something of a challenge to our own age and time.

Some common sense thoughts. Leaving aside the obvious fantasy that somehow what people are doing in a commercial ring is anything close to martial combat on a field featuring a huge diversity of weapons, multiple lines of attack and various stratagems, there are some things about this image that not only gets things wrong, it gets them 180 degrees wrong. Balance First - One of the essential elements on traditional Muay Thai is the scoring of "balance", both physical balance, but also psychological balance. Are you in "control" of yourself. In a field conflict the last thing you would want is to fall off balance, or go to the ground. And you certainly don't want to be emotionally out of control. Balance is hard to develop, so moving onto other more easy to train skills (like combo-ing) becomes tempting, as Muay Thai becomes "modernized" for tourism. Throwing 100% power, off-balance combos over and over is not really "martial". Defense - On a SEA pre-modern complex "battlefield", unless you are just being Berserk, defense matters first. You do not expose yourself to even significant wounding (because deadly infection rates would be high). Instead, a priority would be defense-first. One of the aspects of traditional Muay Thai is that it largely emphasizes this A fighter who can defend and control the fight through defensive prowess was rewarded, scoring was biased along this slant for a substantial part of its history. These two core aspects of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, scored balance and scored defense, are really closer to "martial" principles than anything you'd find in a highlight reel. What hyper-aggressive, low-defense, high-risk Entertainment Muay Thai does is make us FEEL like its war, largely from how we've come to feel about combat in cinema, from Kung-Fu showdowns to WW1 trench charges. Its there for Entertainment, and often really just to produce highlight KOs that can go into social media streams and spread the brand, so people don't even really have to watch the fight. That's okay, part of sport is just "entertainment", and can be swapped with the John Wick 4, or even cute sqeeee kittens on the Gram. But, let's not fool ourselves that it is somehow journeying back into its warfare roots, in terms of how its actually fought. Non-star Thai fighters today are constantly urged to give up all semblance of defensive control, to "sped up" with the new combos they are training on, and take high level trading risks with often bigger foreign opponents who train the same. The core, deeper aspects of fight prowess, control over oneself and defensive priority, is being left behind and some really may be lost. Let's not even talk about the much deeper disparities between ring Muay Thai and much of the warfare in the 1700s in Siam. The battle field had European rifle regiments, elephants, cavalries and every fighter was armed with a blade (on the larger scale most were probably farmers who used their harvest blades), and great deal of it was siege warfare. People were not just giving up their bodies in swinging attacks over and over. There is also significant historical evidence that European warfare was very different than SEA warfare, in that killing the enemy was much less a goal than capturing and enslaving them, because captured "enemy", often full villages, meant wealth (labor). I believe I read an estimate that Burma took more than 10,000 Siamese back to Burma as labor, some for even high level artisan labor, when Ayutthaya fell. Warfare was often a game of capture, and it was fought seasonally - there was "war season" just as wild elephants were seasonally captured.

Speculatively, it seems likely that the real "warfare roots" of ring Muay Thai goes back to all the downtime during siege encampment, (and peacetime) Ayutthaya's across the river outer quarters. One of the earliest historical accounts of Siamese ring fighting is of the "Tiger King" disguising himself and participating in plebeian ring fighting. This is not "warfare fighting" and goes back several hundred years. One can imagine that such fighting would share some fighting principles with what occurred on the battlefield, but as it was unarmed and likely a gambling driven sport it - at least to me - likely seems like it has had its very own lineage of development. Less was the case that people were bringing battlefield lessons into the ring, and more that gambled on fighting skills developed ring-to-ring. In such cases of course, developing balance and defensive prowess would be important. Incidentally, any such Ayutthaya ring-to-ring developments hold the historical potential for lots of cross-pollination from other fighting arts, as Ayutthaya maintained huge mercenary forces, not only from Malaysia and the cusp of islands, but even an entire Japanese quarter, not to mention a strong commercially minded Chinese presence. These may have been years of truly "mixing" fighting arts in the gambling rings of the city (it is unknown just how separatist each culture was in this melting pot, perhaps each kept to their own in ring fighting).

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 an entirely separate dimension of gaze economy in mixed-culture gyms that I'd love to write about, but bookmarking here so to maybe pick it up another day, and that is the way in which visiting Westerners enter training spaces and do not even look so much at Thais in the space, for orientation (despite all that I wrote so far above on this), and really look horizontally at other, longer term farang in spaces. Writing even from our first experiences in Thailand, in mixed-culture gym spaces, visiting Thailand even in the most touristed areas can be a very intense experience of foreign-ness, and entering a Muay Thai gym, even the most commercial of these spaces (which are themselves quite scocially agonistic and competitive) can be an emotional experience without compass. One enters these spaces looking for "how to do it", and immediately one takes social cues from all the other Western traveling fighters. The at-first imitative, and oriented gaze is towards longer term Westerners who "know the ropes", eventually will become emulative, because part of training in Thailand is learning how to be a traveling fighter, involving many things other than simply the training. Everything from where and when to drink water, to where eat, to how to comport oneself, the sum total of "how to go about things" largely learned through imitating longer term traveling fighters. We remember - and this is just a small thing - that Sylvie at Lanna so many years ago (Lanna being one of the more established "authentic" mix-culture gyms in Thailand, with a lengthy history), had to mentally separate herself out from the 40 minute hand-wrapping beginning of training that had grown among Western traveling fighters, to begin every morning's training, where you not only wrap hands, quite slowly, coming back from your run (for those that ran, most did a pretty substantial run), but really just talking, shooting the breeze, or just being a part of that mini-habitus of training preparation, sitting on the bench with others, even if you kept by yourself. This was a sub-culture of "how to begin training" that had developed around longer term fighters, really a small thing, but it was its own reality, its own pace, an important part of the traveling culture of the gym at the time, quite apart from the Thai-led training. It was emulative. Our time at Lanna then, but also at several other gyms, made us quite aware of how gyms actually were in laminate layers of habitus, a Thai and non-Thai side, and that long term fighters, or adventure tourists played a very large part in creating and bearing the Western sub-culture, in part because it was constantly fed by new, fairly disoriented participants. ****** We are left with a mirroring hypermasculinity, between two cultures / sub-cultures. The Westerner engages in a Hard Body hypermasculinity, and probably a (pomo) Colonialist adventurist hypermasculinity, and the Thai Nak Muay is participating in a hypermasculinity which somewhat resides in his (her) past, that out of which the art and sport of Muay Thai has grown (Peter Vail cited above). The Nak Muay is encountering the project of developing and expressing the (somewhat classic, somewhat nostalgic) hypermasculinity of his (her) own culture, but also caught in the globalized commerce, the subjectivity of Internationalization, which brings these two cultures / sub-cultures together. The newly arrived traveling fighter from the West is thrown in between these two performances in really what can be a heady, transformative way, emulating well-grounded Westerners, weaving himself (herself) into that fabric, fashioning that hypermasculine identity and performance, that gaze economy, while that masculinity itself has been in the longer term developed in emulative fashion on the Thai Body, at least in terms of the transformation being attempted, to lean into Thai, classic hypermasculinity. In this several things map between the two hypermasculinities, but really many more do not. All this while, Thai Nak Muay in these spaces are also being swept up toward a new, globalized masculine, following the new gaze economies the body is exposed to, including those digital economies of gaze.

As a side thought to the above, this short article talks a little about the history of Red Sonja's vow of chastity and her powers. One of the things that is brought up in this discussion is that for a woman to succeed in a men's space she often has to perform the kind of split personality contradiction of Red Sonja, either being visibly appealing, or de-sexualzing herself, and sometimes both at the same time (ie, the vow of chastity). She has talked about having to de-sexualize herself in Thai traditional gym spaces, and how that has negatively impacted her Muay.

I realized something watching Chatchai with Sylvie yesterday, that the order of action is quite important to unlocking Thai style. The foot moves, the weight transfers, and then the strike comes. The mind, the watching eyes, are only there to stop the strike from coming. It is like the archer who just draws the bow and lets it fly. String, arrow, string, arrow. But then the mind could hold the string and deny the shot if the timing isn't right. This is how Thais develop incredible speed in their retreating counting kicks for instance. The mind is only there to hold or delay the release, but the release comes from the feet, from that very moment the feet feel the weight. In this way, one is actually thinking with one's feet because every time your feet move and there is weight transfer the thought, a sort of itch, comes. The mind, decision-making, in this dynamic only acts as a retardant. The difficulty is that many, especially Westerners to the sport, have a different cycle of action. They instead look with their eyes, and use their Mind as trigger man. The Mind begins the propelling action, which then goes to the feet which are not properly ordered (and very often not all the way down to the feet at all, at the shoulder, or thigh, and then starts the strike. It is too late. The thought cannot begin there. Not only is it slow and behind the action, but duress from using the Mind in this way, as the trigger finger, produces tenseness in the body, and squeezes all the channels. The strike cannot come, and then its slowness produces further mental stress. And more, the Mind itself, that is the decisioning, trigger-mind, is not fast enough to follow action and threat. It can be pressured by an opponent and the unexpected. It can be overwhelmed. This Westernized problem of the mind is sort of "hacked" by the combination, which is a memorized pattern of strikes which take the Mind as decisioning trigger out of their execution...but, they are in their relationship to each other "mindless" in that they are committed-to in their series, and they do not come from thinking feet. Combinations of this sort suffer from many of the same weaknesses, because the are triggered by the decisioning Mind. Not only are they late, they are easily overwhelmed, because their cycle is slow, and the feet are often unorganized. Key, instead, is thinking with the feet, and if thoughts arise from the feet they can also operate in combinations, with the mind delaying timing or shifting strike choice. But the thought, the itch, comes from the feet...which is why moving feet, the shifting of weight, even subtly, is essential for the flow of thoughts. This is likely one of the purposes of the Thai rock, the rhythm. This is a basic tindering of thoughts. There is another lay of this, which any soccer/football player knows. If you are thinking with your feet and weight transfer springs forth thoughts, then the timing of foot movement becomes central. Steps or shifts or thoughts. In this way for instance a Thai will time the backstep in a retreat and counter such that the foot falls precisely at the opportune time of interception of an advancing fighter. This means the Mind as decision-maker has almost no role at all. The foot retreats, with dance-like sensitivity, and the strike comes. The fighter is tantalizingly close, but yet too far for the opponent, and the strike is almost unseeable. But the same is the case for weight transfers in the pocket, the art of boxing is made of this. The speed of this is mimicked in "combos", but memorizing combos are not thinking with the feet. They are just trying to cut the Mind out in their succession. Because thinking with the feet is so important, things like constant shadowboxing such that the feet develop the capacity to think, create and improvise, and light, equipmentless sparring, which is like shadboxing, both are central to building the classic Thai style which is marked by ease of movement and its speed of perception. Below, Yodkhunpon on shadowboxing: These are related thoughts on stress and delay producing "Precision" training Precision – A Basic Motivation Mistake in Some Western Training - In that article the decision cycle is talked about in different terms, tracing the rise of tension in the cycle, which is really linked to the decision-making Mind.

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.

In the introduction this is just a great set up. It frames so many dyads and polarities that it really captures just how (potentially) transformative the training and fight performance is, litoral to these so many binaries. This idealization of the Thai nakmuay body, which in Thai culture is (generally) socially low, but idealized by Western masculinity (which is socially high - in many registers), is a very complex tension, as often the Western body is seeking its own idealization (the Hard Body). And then that these two bodies come in actual contact, in physical conflict, after a period of where the Thai Body is emulated. This is a very important kernel in sought-for authenticity, at least in traveling fighter tourism.

Enshittification, Here's How Platforms Die, Cory Doctorow https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?feature=shared&t=130 "First it is good to its users. Then it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers. Then it abuses those business customers to claw back the value that was once with the users, and then with the business customers, allocates it to themselves, then there is no value left. It turns into a pile of shit and then it dies." We should look at who are the "users" of Muay Thai (fans? consumers?), who are the business customers (the promoters? the gyms?), and who is the platform? There definitely is an abuse of Thai fighters going on in the altering of their sport. ...looking into the concept of Capitalist enshittification to understand what is happening to trad Muay Thai. The argument above is that enshitification ensues when anti-competition laws or barrier fail. We can see how, for instance, a certain very well funded Entertainment fighting brand came in and tried to corner the market on big names, lock down messaging across all social media platforms, and (probably quite sensibly for this sort of aggressive move) monopolize as much of the sport as could be, up and down the production and consumption chain. It was likely quite fortunate that competition indeed did arise, and push back across the board, up and down that same chain.

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.

Some Deep Black Portraiture in Action of Lakhin

Arjan Gimyu Rerkchai Lakhin Wassantasit Two more Deep Black Portraits, the legendary trainer Arjan Gimyu and the legend Lakhin. Arjan Gimyu was Lakhin's trainer when he made his run for the 1992 FOTY.

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.

The three legends of Hapalang gym, 3 photos:

Hi, i have a general question concerning Muay-Thai training camps, are there any serious ones in Europe at all? I know there are some for kickboxing in the Netherlands, but that's not interesting to me or what i aim for. I have found some regarding Muay-Thai in google searches, but what iv'e found seem to be only "retreats" with Muay-Thai on a level compareable to fitness-boxing, yoga or mindfullness.. So what i look for, but can't seem to find anywhere, are camps similar to those in Thailand. Grueling, high-intensity workouts with trainers who have actually fought and don't just do this as a hobby/fitness regime. A place where you can actually grow, improve technique and build strength and gas-tank with high intensity, not a vacation... No hate whatsoever to those who do fitness-boxing and attend retreats like these, i just find it VERY ODD that there ain't any training camps like those in Thailand out there, or perhaps i haven't looked good enough?.. Appericiate all responses, thank you!

You won't find thai style camps in Europe, because very few people can actually fight full time, especially in muay thai. As a pro you just train at a regular gym, mornings and evenings, sometimes daytime if you don't have a job or one that allows it. Best you can hope for is a gym with pro fighters in it and maybe some structured invite-only fighters classes. Even that is a big ask, most of Europe is gonna be k1 rather than muay thai. A lot of gyms claim to offer muay thai, but in reality only teach kickboxing. I think Sweden has some muay thai gyms and shows, but it seems to be an exception. I'm interested in finding a high-level muay thai gym in Europe myself, I want to go back, but it seems to me that for as long as I want to fight I'm stuck in the UK, unless I switch to k1 or MMA which I don't want to do.

One of the effects of deteriorating defense in Muay Thai is that sub-optimal offenses will become more effective. Which is to say, they will no longer appear sub-optimal (based on flawed principles). The lack of eyes, or distance control, or sound principles on defense will elevate certain offensive trends which would never fly in the past...one of the subtle ways deskilling is happening. Basic combo-ing sudden is proven effective. Blind pocket trading, effective. Spamming elbows, effective. And with that effectiveness the loss of skill.

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

The race for cheaper "grassroots" labor to fill Entertainment Muay Thai cards is on. Rajadamnern vs Lumpinee, trad Muay Thai vs Entertainment Muay Thai. This is the next economic challenge for the sport. Who can tap the rural fighter labor source better, as the trad festival fight culture that has feed the sport for over a century is quickly eroding.

Heard backstage at a trad promotion in Bangkok, Dieselnoi loudly complaining that Thais don't know how to knee anymore, nobody even knees to hurt. Just kneeing for show and points. *This isn't a question of intensity (how hard), its one of technique, and continuity. The knee techniques of Hapalang gym have just been largely lost.

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

Some of my comments in reply to The Pretzel clinch position that is increasingly common in Muay Thai. You can see this discussion the comment section of Yodkhunpon's Fast, Trapping Anti-Clinch Reversal from Outside Position - (8 min, public) The proliferation of inside elbows in today's Muay Thai is part of the erosion of soundness. Against skilled opponents you really don't want to be approaching them and grabbing double wide as a habit. You are cleanly open. It's much more sound to regularly control the middle in principle if you are worried about inside attacks. Once you have the elbow from the inside part of that technique is leveraging it so doesn't get high (you can see that in the photo with Karuhat), and using your weight to steer. Additionally, if that elbow does get high this opens them up very easily to a quick pass under the arm to the edge and a very strong side control position if not just taking their back. A lot of the time you actually WANT that elbow high, and you even force it high (Sylvie does this pass a lot). But hey, I'm sure that people teach the pretzel now, its extremely common in Thailand among Thais. It just my view is that clinch is highly degraded in Thailand, among Thais, and not really as complex or technically sound as it once was in the Golden Age. Even fighters like Karuhat, who seldom clinched in his fights today are pretty profound clinchers, even decades removed from their fighting days. They just understood the grappling element at a higher level. A lot of the Muay Thai Library is about documenting the disappearing Golden Age techniques and principles, and this is one of those. and... (Kevin commenting) Yes, if I'm reading you right, I think the theory is in agreement with what you are saying. The point being, when you see habitually double outside position...this is born out of a gym with poor clinch training habits...it starts with poor inside control by one partner (high up on the bicep, near the shoulder, and not down by the elbow). This is just a weak inside position. Given that position in a partner it is perfectly reasonable to fold your arm(s) down over that over that arm to control the intside elbow, but the deeper point is that this produces in real terms bad habits between BOTH training partners, especially when two partners train together a lot as they often do in Thailand. The first partner shouldn't be automatically slapping their hands down at the shoulder, they should be controlling the frame on first move (generally), and the second partner shouldn't really just take an inferior position as a default response...the receving fighter honestly shouldn't be just giving up inside position on a default either. What happens in real life, is that two partners end up just "taking" these relatively poor positions, neither of which are fighting for inside control, for long periods of time, just to waste away chunks of training time, just so they can look like they are clinching - these are teen to young teen boys. Neither fighter is actually trying to control and dominate the frame in these instances, because it's tiring. In the Rambaa video too, he is not at the elbow, and honestly this isn't ideal (small inches or angles can made a big difference), but it is part of a swim he is teaching and constant fighting for inside position. This struggle over position and the frame is the essential part of clinch dominance. You take the outside position in order to GET back to the inside. What I'm speaking to is a kind of weakness in Thai clinch training over all, which involves kids learning how to burn hours NOT fighting for inside position. I'm not saying you should never braid your arm over, I'm speaking particularly to the lasting double outside pretzel, as a "default" start position. When I see Thai fighters in the ring default to this double outside position in fights the first thing I think is "This person doesn't really know how to clinch", and even some by reputation high level Thai clinch fighters do this a lot. The reason why I say this to myself isn't because they are making a technical mistake. It's that taking this position somewhat by habit tells me that when they clinch in the gym this is a common default between partners. It means that regularly BOTH partners are taking weaker positions repeatedly (there is no correction). It means that the training itself is not about the struggle over positional dominance. It's the signature of a lack of rigor, and kind of a baked in laziness. Clinch is actually a very fragile art, and bad habits can creep in quickly even in experienced fighters, and lack of clinch in training can erode even spectacular clinch fighters over a very short period of time. Honestly though, gyms now are no longer kaimuay in the general sense, and Thais have changing motivations for training. And the authority or rigor of a gym has shifted in how it is exercized. Some of the study of traditional Muay Thai is about tracing these changes in training (and even socio-economics) and how it is altering, or even eroding, techniques. I do also think that there is a tendency to just feel that if Thais are doing something a lot this is automatically high level, especially in something like clinch which has been their specialty, but often there is degradation in technique as training changes, and with clinch being less and less emphasized in Thailand rings there is likely to be even further erosion of Thai clinch habits and techniques. --- I was really struck when I watch Karuhat (one of the least clinch oriented fighters of the Golden Age) clinch up with Samson (one of the great clinch fighters of the Golden Age)...I believe its in the most recent Karuhat MTL session. Karuhat completely neutralized Samson in the clinch...through inside control. It was kind of amazing to see. He just was technically superior. Small things matter. Samson's relentless swims and Muay Khao assault maybe wins the day given enough time, Samson said as much, but on grab or just after Karuhat won the position, because he is VERY sound. Maybe he had to be sound like that because he was small and fought up against strong clinch fighters, I don't know, but it was and is a little startling. It opened my eyes even more to these kinds of principles that are buried in training habits. A lot of Thai fighters on entry do not take dominant, or fight for dominant position these days. They often take weak positions...and THEN fight for dominance...or not, sometimes they just take neutral positions and wait for trips, or attempt knees. (That's where Yodkhunpon's reversal is helpful, its a move like that from a weak position.) --- sorry to on about this, but your comments allowed me room to go at length on something I find really intersting, and in terms of clinch success really imporant. To share a little about our process and thinking: Sylvie is an amazing clinch fighter, perhaps the best clinch female clinch fighter in Muay Thai history, if only in terms of the size of fighters she's been able to beat almost entirely through Muay Khao clinch styles, but we are constantly aware that training conditions (wrong sized partners, lack of correction) can produce serious degradation of techniques, and honestly bad habits. And one of those bad habits can be just flopping down over in a pretzel. As a smaller, physically weaker training partner (Sylvie for years has trained against partners with 10 kg or more on her) this becomes really easy to become accustom to doing, because you are just trying to neutralize greater strength and size, like you say, control that elbow from the outside, but this leads to some serious problems in actual fights. It develops a habit of taking outside control and resting in it, or kind of "losing" the initial grab because you are used to giving up inside position vs bigger training partners. This has consequences in fights where refs are making quick clinch breaks (sometimes because of the promotion, sometimes because of the ref). If you are taking outside, weaker positions on entry, this means you spend the first movements just trying to improve your position. By the time you have struggled to swim inside and frame up the ref is breaking the clinch. This is a huge problem in todays Muay Thai if you are Muay Khao fighter. You have to get to the dominant position quickly because they won't give you time to work the position and develop it. In clinch training you have long stretches, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes...but in a fight you have 3-7 seconds to get to a dominant position before the ref comes. If you aren't used to taking a dominant position quickly, and you rely on clinch as a major part of your game, you lose. You simply will lose the fight. Clinch training for you has to be about fighting for the inside more or less continually, and winning inside position on entry, so you can keep the ref off of you, and part of that is making sure that you take the right angles on grab, you get at and dig in at that elbow.

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.

1. how you work lifts others - its not about you 2. respect = energy 3. train even when you aren't training 4. the nakmuay are a part of history

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.

Here is some private discussion traditional Muay Thai description which helped develop this parable of the Guitar. The challenge, from a philosphical sense, but also from an ethnographic sense, is to explain the diversity and sophistication of technique and style that arises in the Thai kaimuay, without much Top Down instruction. Here appealing to Simondon's theory of Individuation. But...in the Muay Thai (traditional) example, you actually are learning through a communal resonance with your peers, everyone else in the camp. Through a group memesis. It's not a direct relationship to the "music" per se, between you as an individual and an "experience" It's horizontal... how the person next to you is experiencing/expressing the music and relating to the authority and the work. I've compared it to syncing metronomes. youtu.be/Aaxw4zbULMs?... the communal form of the kaimuay (camp) brings together a communication of aesthetic, technical excellence, in which there is very little or NO top down direct control or shaping. young fighters sync up with the communal form, which actually also involves an incredible amount of diversity. Everyone kicking on a bag in a traditional setting has a DIFFERENT kick, because they haven't been "corrected" from the top down... But all the kicks in the gym have a kind of sync'd up quality, something that goes beyond a biomechanical consistency. There is a tremendous Virtual / Actual individuation dynamic that I think you would vibe on. This is what gives trad Muay Thai so much of its diversity. So much of its expression. It's because of its horizontal, communal learning through mimesis and a kind of perspective-ism If you go into a Western Muay Thai gym all the kicks on the bag, from all the students/fighters will be the SAME kick. With some doing it better or worse, with more "error" or less than others. In a trad Thai gym all the kicks are different. ...but, its hard to describe...because they all express some "inner" thing that holds them together. Maybe the same thing can be seen in other sports, like inner city basketball or favela football/soccer, things that have a kind of "organic" lineage. They hold together because they are a cultural form that is developed in horizontal context and comparisons with peers (not Top Down), but everyone has their own "game". It is very diverse. When people try to "export" knowledge from these, let's call them "organic", contexts, processes, not only are things "abstracted" (often biomechanically, traced into fixed patterns), but they are also exported with Top Down authority which channels and exacts "faithfullness" to some isolate quality. I think this is Deleuze's main issue with Platonism. The idea that there is a "form" and then "copies" which are more or less faithful. This, I'd argue, is actually something that prevails in "export" (outside of a developmental milieu), under conditions of abstraction (and perhaps exploitation). This is the "cut". 6:29 PM Here is a video where we slow motion filmed the kick of Karuhat, one of the greatest kickers in Thai history. We not only filmed him, but also Sylvie trying to learn through imitation. He is the only person who has this kick, in all its individuation. You cannot get this kick by just imitating it...(in person, Sylvie) or as a user practicing it from the video. It was developed in a virtuality of the kaimuay, by him. But, in documenting it...some (SOME!) aspects of it are transmitted forward. ...its a kick that is very different than many Western versions of the "Thai Kick" The keys to it are about a feeling, an affect array perhaps, and its uniqueness came out of the shared "metronome" of the traditional gym, the horizontal community of training, which also produced other kicks of the same "family of resemblance" (as Wittgenstein would say) Ultimately, its preservation is about returning to the instruction of a "feeling"...but also highlighting that the kick itself came out of a mutuality of feeling, and not a Top Down instruction. It's much closer to something like all the diversity of qualities of different pro surfers, who learned to surf not only one-to-one on individual waves, but in communities of surfers who would all go to one spot, and kind of cross-pollinate, compete in a mutuality (non-formally), steal and borrow from each other, a milieu. Not because there was some kind of Top Down authority of "how to surf" or "what exact techniques to use", or because there was an ideal "form" and a lot of error'd versions of it copying it. Almost everything that Sylvie produces is Sylvie learning through imitation and FAILING before the living example, because what we are actually documenting is not the Ideal vs the bad copy...but rather the actual, embodied, lived relationship that integrates oneself with another, converging in communication. She is "copying", but that's not really it. It's about syncing up, and the material/psychological relationship between two people, which smooths over the biomechanical "copy", and fills in some of the affects. But...this mutuality is really also artificial, because its one-to-one, and this isn't how Muay Thai technique is transmitted. It's developed in community. One-to-many. Many-to-one.

This kid was on like a 17 fight winning streak after winning this fight from behind. Lost the streak now though

This one way kid got screwed over a bit

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

7. One from Kiatpetch, my kid got destroyed by this one once and I never forgot the name. Probably the best Muay Dek Kiatpetch got right now. Vellfire Rotsuayjajetsaipriw

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

Zooming out my kind of rough-sketch evolutionary dynamics of Siam/Thai Muay Thai, over the last maybe 500 years. One of the factors of Siam/Thailand is that land worked something like "sea". There was a LOT of it (much more than population which was sparse) and it was hard to traverse (other than waterways). This set up Galapagos-like islandings of local market dynamics, around festival fight rings. But, through seasonal population capture and relocation, and then corvee labor cycles, these festival islands were continually churned back toward city (trade) centers, and martial service (structuring)...which in turn was exposed to quite vast international influence/cross-pollination. You had flows of trade from across the civilized world, cosmopolitanism, martial service, and then constant cyclical return to village micro market ring dynamics, a return to Galapagos variability and selection creation.

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.

Just throwing this out there: an interesting thing would be to build a criteria list for judging/recommending gyms, maybe something like: Active Young Thai Fighters - young, developing Thai fighters are a sign that the gym is a living Thai-focused gym that does not only prioritize western tourist, commercial interests Active of Top Stadia Thai Fighters - some people find this to be important. It's great to have high level examples to look at and imitate. Convenience of Location - how hard is it to get to? Surrounding Location - what is the surrounding location like? Is it hospitable? Enjoyable to live around? Gym Atmosphere - what does the gym feel like, it's tone? Food - If food is served (or local food options) what is it like? Fight Opportunities - how easily can you get fights, and what kinds of fights? And how invested is the gym in finding you fights, and why? Female Safety and Respect - is there is history of respecting female fighters and students? are there reports of unwanted advances? are females given top training and enough fight opportunities? Ownership - Management - sometimes management/ownership can be a big positive for a gym. It speaks to the gym's motivations. It can also help smooth difficulties. Language - How much Thai do you need to know? Is English spoken? Are there other western language connections? (Some gyms have specific ties to other countries...Sweden, Italy, etc) Trainer Stability/Turnover - this can go two ways. Sometimes trainers never turnover, and become really entrenched in negatives or lack of caring. too much turnover can suggest unstable management. Quality of Equipment/Facility - some people find new equipment important. Cleanliness - gym cleanliness can reflect the quality of care invested by owners/management. Some people also find this to be very important. Clinch Training - does the gym provide substantial clinch training, practice? Pad Work Training - what is padwork like? Is it consistent? Between different trainers? Technical Instruction - is there much technical instruction or correction? some people really value and look for this. Privates - Are privates offered worth the cost? And do you have to pay for privates in order to get good instruction/training? Training Partners - Are there training partners for your size? Are they Thai? Affordability - How does the gym compare in price to others of its kind and location, short term, long term. Long Term Stay Opportunities - If you want to stay longer term, are there benefits? Discounts, sponsorship? Living Quarters/Options - Is there onsite lodging, if so what is it like? What are nearby apartment options like, cost and quality? Farang Gym Culture - Is there a long term western gym culture? If so, what is it like? Off-Time Entertainment Options - What are the things to do on off-days? Maybe add any aspects you find important if I missed any?