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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The championship fight was such a perfect illustration of "basics make champions." Not fancy, not showy, just incredibly solid foundations.

This was their fight back in August, where Marie pulled out the upset. I believe Marie was a last minute replacement in that fight. Useful to compare the fights.

This was just a really wonderful performance by Barbara, on so many levels, for the RWS Raja belt. You could feel her training in her fight, the way she stays within herself, at surface a very basic approach in terms of weapons/style, but underneath it all is a very important thing that not a lot of Westerns understand. You fight WITH Space. And she persistently denies Marie the space she wants, it ends up blowing up the fight, especially because she brought with her a beautiful very deep, head-sink clinch lock that Marie had no answer at all for (and that Raja let her work from, thank goodness). I have to watch the 2024 fight where Marie upset her in the clinch, but in this one Barbara was loaded for bear. This is the same recipe Sylvie used to beat so many, especially bigger opponents. You fight the Space, not the opponent. And you fight your fight with the belief "If I fight my fight, my way, the right way, you are going to have a very difficult time". I also loved Barbara's 20% - 40% power hands, just using them to touch and semi-pop Marie, to stress the space. No mindless, 100% power combos, actually seeing one's way in the space, and touching the opponent. This is just glorious controlled dern Muay Thai. Barbara's lock was so pure, so good - with a very deep head sink. She also had something that a lot of locking fighters fail to do. Once locked you walk your opponent. Not only do you pivot, or pull, you drag and also literally walk them so that their feet cannot set, so you tangle them, breaking the line of counter control. This is advanced, developed stuff and great to see. A lot of Thai stadium fighters of today don't even do this, its part of the eroding art of clinch. She also was very aware to drag Marie off the ropes so the ref break doesn't come and she could paint longer pictures of her lock dominance. Small touch with big awareness and effect. I don't really understand why Marie decided to fight this fight as a pure femeu fighter, back to the rope. I have to watch their first fight, but this plays exactly into Barbara's closing style. I imagine this is something trainers have been moving her toward? I'm not sure. A very cool, very worthy victory.

You could just pick a high-level gym in a European city, just live and train there for however long you want (a month?). Lots of gyms have morning and evening classes.

Muay Khao in Padwork - note a little bit advanced stuff Talking a little more about Muay Khao training (and padwork), beyond some basic things like the padman doing rounds of "latched on" work where you trailer hitch and continuously knee or work into knees, there is a shape to Muay Khao that involves building up the fatigue in your opponent, which involves continuous pressuring and tempoing early on, nothing rushed, importantly with the mentality of depositing fatigue. Even if you don't have a padman aware of this, you can do this on your own, of your own device. People do not think much of manipulating or effecting your padman, but taking cue from David Goggins trying to mentally break his SEAL Team trainers, you can use your padman's energy managements to become aware of their fatigue, tempoing up or displacing them when they start to manage. This builds up your own sense of perception, becoming acutely aware of its signs, and developing responses, things that will serve you well in fights. This doesn't mean going HARD, like 200%. It means managing your own fatigue while you work that edge and tax your padman. The purpose of this is to slow reaction times and decision quality in later rounds in fights. You don't win fights early in Muay Khao work, you prepare the material so you can work late. A great padman will see and help you train this shape of the rounds, even as they manage their own fatigue. It goes without saying this involves not just "following along" with called strikes, which I believe is detrimental on a deeper level, because what you are training in those cases is "being dictated to". Lots of fighters have this problem, they have spent countless hours of (unconsciously) learning to be steered, so when their opponent looks to dictate timing, space or rhythm they have years of being comfortable being dictated to. This though is a subtle line to walk, and it depends a great deal on the experience of the fighter and the quality of the padman. Ideally, you want padwork to gravitate towards a dialogue, a back and forth, which mirrors the dialogue of fighting, accepting dictated tempos and spacing, modifying them, shaping them in return. Good padmen (who aren't just burning you out with kicks or holding combos over and over, largely ex-experienced fighters) will recognize this dialogue dimension, and you'll bring out more of their "fighter energy" and creativity, which is Golden stuff. Lesser experienced padman, or padmen who are just grinding, may not respond well, but you want to get into that zone of your 5 rounds being shaped like a fight...and for a Muay Khao fighter that means depositing fatigue in your padman early, if you can. Even if you can't, the aim of recognizing stalls, energy management, gatherings, and working on them yourself (not being passive) is a perceptual skill set you want to develop. For Muay Khao fighters though, you want to get to that clinch, or those finishing frames in the later rounds. You have to feel those angles of dominance, the cherry of what you built in previous rounds. Great padman know this, and develop pathways later where your body can sense, can experience those finishing elements. Femeu fighters, other style fighters, have other shapes in their fights. This is specific to Muay Khao.

I've recently been contacted by the head of a small gym in Samut Prakan (below Bangkok). The gym is small, mostly kids, but he's inviting westerners (both female/male) to come train with him and fight out of his gym. If you are in Thailand and wanting an experience of a local, small gym that isn't geared toward commercial training, maybe give this a try. No English, so just use a translator on your phone. Contact on FB: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61571372517312&mibextid=ZbWKwL https://maps.app.goo.gl/ELoJohV8qcGSSydd6

There is a mode of perception that developing Thais have less of today. Ever notice how your Thai trainer can humorously imitated exactly what you are doing wrong in an exaggerated way? How they can cartoonize the body. This likely comes out of the mode of learning itself back in the day, the way that "ruup" (form) was a mode of education and emulation. Intelligent, affective projection and modeling, in play, was how the art was communicated. With today's attention spans, difference in motivations, and really radically different Gaze Economies in gyms, this channel of development is highly diminished. It's a lost skill of perception. The rationalization of the sport, the mechanization and abstraction of the sport certainly doesn't help in this, because the sense of embodied "aura" has been lost. And Westerners enter the sport largely from this other direction, meeting the new gen of Thais in the middle, far from where the sport and art developed and was passed between persons.

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.

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

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

In this mix of conflicting Bodies of race, class and valorized ideals - literal bodies clashing - is the larger context, aside from what may have been the author's experience, that larger bodied Westerners are pitted against lighter bodied Thais (in the purported scale of fairness), and that since COVID under the imperatives of Soft Power a new ruleset style, "Entertainment" Muay Thai, has pervaded, which is designed for the somewhat explicit purpose for the Westerner to win fights. That is, in the balance of emulation that the author outlines, the way that fights are actually being fought and scored has been skewed against the demands of emulation itself, not without Colonialist overtures, especially in topography of the article. This is to say, changing the rules takes some pressure off of promoters and gyms to arrange "dives" to ensure the positive experience of emulative transformation. Now Muay Thai, larger bodied, can be fought in a more Western style, favoring Western skills. At minimum this further contrasts or perhaps complexifies accounts of danced-off 5th rounds, as signatures of authenticity.

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.

As Thailand's Muay Thai travels toward pure commerce and its consumption, it should be remembered that the Thai fight for the dead, before the dead...to the honor of the dead. In funeral rites for fallen fighters and figures of the sport it is customary, in these days, to perform a traditional fighting wai kru and to put on a theatrical display, a show fight (though even further back, and at times, it can be a real fight a reality marked often marked by wagers taken). There is a celebration of the art, the sport and mostly of the community of people within it, all present in the memory of the past nakmuay or figure of the sport, who is no longer with us, and certainly a kind of joy when it comes to the spectacle of the sparing fight itself. When people argue that Muay Thai is just a sport, they do not realize that Thais in the sport have the custom of putting on show fights for the dead who have left. It is far, far more than a sport. It is the weaving of meaningful violence, transformed into spirit and its dignified glory. Each and every fight, and each and every ceremonial spar and wai kru. Below three videos of ceremonial fights. The second one is part of a longer short film on the passing of the legend Sirimongkol. Dieselnoi and Pudpadnoi for Namkabuan Sagat and Pudpadnoi for Sirimongkol Yodkhunpon and Chatkating for the head of the Sittraipom Gym's passing Samart and Weerapol (not sure which passing)

Updated graphic for the above, some corrections. It was enjoyable digging around in the records, creating a new nice of achievement and talent. Jongrak Lukprabaht is the one figure up there with Kongtoranee and Chamuekpet with 12, a Golden Age fighter who fought on the Rajadamnern side of promotions. Notable perhaps that the elite Golden Age legends of Lumpinee and OneSongChai are largely absent. Either the belts were just to competitive on that side, or not fought frequently enough in that time frame (I assume). Probably a few names missing. Edit in, a new record found by Lev, Songkram Porpaoin with 5+8. He's just fighting for the same low-weight Rajadamnern title over and over, but it is still historic.

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

Watched some Ronnachai, who in the past was an incredibly boring, very passive fighter who really liked to play on the ropes with small leads. His recent stint at RWS may have brought out some of the more aggressive sides of his personality, balancing his trad style out some? (a rare instance of Entertainment fighting complexifying a top trad fighter?). This fight vs Yothin a couple of years back really shows that old, passive style. There are almost no points scored in the fight and Yothin wins it in the 4th with a big rip from lock, I believe evening up there record against each other. Here is Ronnachai at his most aggressive in RWS, uncharacteristically chasing a KO against a smaller, less experienced opponent: Yesterday versus View, known for his hands, he won all the hands exchanges, and was willing to engage there. Maybe they are related?

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

from Reddit discussing shin pain and toughening of the shins: There are several factors, and people create theories on this based on pictures of Muay Thai, but honestly from my wife's direct experience they go some what numb and hard from lots of kicking bags and pads, and fighting (in Thailand some bags could get quite hard, almost cement like in places). Within a year in Thailand Sylvie was fighting every 10 or 12 days and it really was not a problem, seldom feeling much pain, especially if you treat them properly after damage, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztzTmHfae-k and then more advanced, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcWtd00U7oQ And they keep getting harder. After a few years or so Sylvie felt like she would win any shin clash in any fight, they just became incredible hard. In this video she is talking about 2 years in about how and why she thought her shins had gotten so hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFXCmZVXeGE she shows in the vid how her shins became kind of permanently serrated, with divots and dings. As she discusses only 2 years in (now she's 13 years of fighting in) very experienced Thais have incredibly hard shins, like iron. Yes, there are ideas about fighting hard or not, but that really isn't the determining factor from our experience with Sylvie coming up on 300 fights and being around a lot of old fighters. They just can get incredibly tough. The cycles of damage and repair just really change the shin (people in the internet like to talk about microfractures and whatnot). Over time Sylvie eventually didn't really need the heat treatment anymore after fights, now she seldom uses it. She's even has several times in the last couple of years split her skin open on checks without even feeling much contact. Just looked down and there was blood.

"I don't know anything about tennis, but the one hitting the ball harder is clearly winning." Sylvie's brilliant encapsulation of Western advisements of how trad Muay Thai should be fought.

Heard that Cambodia has closed down the booking of Muay Thai fights, which were a pretty big alternate avenue for trad style fighting opportunities for a lot of Isaan fighters, and farang too, paying better than many BKK fights. It was a somewhat lessor known alt trad Muay Thai scene. Seems like the ideological battle of Muay Thai, nation to nation, is heating up. The border near Ubon is very contested right now.

Well that was quite a noble effort from Mongkutpet, defending her Raja belt with extreme vigor. I love how amped she was by the entire fight, no "performance". And forcing the clinch in a low-clinch promotion. Just force the break over and over and over. Steer the fight. Very nice stuff.

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

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

I am going to Bangkok in a few weeks and plan to stay there for one month, working remotely. I'm coming off a 1-year hiatus and will need to slowly ramp up my training again, so looking for a place that I can pop into 2-3x per week to start, and then slowly progress. I am a casual student so don't think training camps are for me right now. I also want something in between traditional and Westernized - just a gym culture that is welcoming to intermediate women, and makes sure that egos are checked at the door (I've been to way too many gyms holding pads for large, powerful dudes with egos that went unchecked, which led to a lot of unnecessary injuries for me - part of why I took a hiatus). Given this, I wonder if taking just private classes is better, until I "sniff out" the vibes of the other students, before holding pads with them.. I've been looking through lists on here and quite frankly, overwhelmed by the choice. Budget-wise, id like to keep the privates down to less than 40/hr Anyone have recommendations?

Wayfinding vs transportation or navigation. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tp9wr_v4

As Thailand's Muay Thai more and more turns its face toward the World and the West increasingly those coming to Thailand to seek out, experience, train in, fight in, even commit to and honor authentic Muay Thai will have a hard time finding it. In this brief article I want to point out the two biggest areas of difficulty. Keep in mind, I'm writing this from the perspective of having witnessed my wife who has fought more times in Thailand than any non-Thai in history, coming up on 300 times, as a fighter who has steered as clear as possible from aspects of the sport which are arranged or made for you, and become perhaps the foremost documentarian of the sport and art. Everything I describe is from often repeated things we've encountered, found ourselves in, worked through, and what we've learned from the experiences of others. Importantly, pretty much everyone who has been in the country a long time has their own experience and understanding of authenticity, and this is just ours. Thai culture, and Muay Thai culture is also a very complex and woven thing, it is not homogeneous or made in one way, so these are benchmark ideas and there are many exceptions. Authenticity, that which is not made for us. 1. Increasingly Thailand's Muay Thai is made FOR you One of the first challenges is honestly that of recognition. Because Thailand is so culturally different, and Thailand gym training not that of than Western and international gyms, whatever you are experiencing is going to feel authentic. Its authenticity will come through in everything that is different. It must be authentic because I'm not used to this. And because we can only judge from our own experiences, and from what we see and read, this is difficult to overcome. After 3 months in the country you are going to feel like you have really penetrated to the heart of something really new. After a year, you really will feel like you know what's going on, and if you have gravitated toward "authenticity" you'll probably feel like you are in a pretty "real" place. My caution is: Nope. You probably don't realize how much of Muay Thai has been turned toward YOU. And if it wasn't turned towards you, you wouldn't be participating in it. This is going to sound harsh, but pretty much ALL Western/International Muay Thai experiences are something like an elephant ride. The elephant (Muay Thai) is very real, and there is great privilege and beauty in being on an elephant. You're touching a living, breathing, REAL elephant...but you are on an elephant ride, made FOR you. Now, there are all sorts of elephant rides. There is the one where they walk in a circle and you get off, and another where you bathe and then bareback like a "real mahout" would, and then maybe all the way up to 10 day safaris, trekking on elephant back (is there such a thing?). But it's still an elephant ride. You get in the ring, its real...even if its arranged for you, its intense and real. You hit the bag, you burn the kilometers in road work, its real. This isn't to say anything is inauthentic. All of Muay Thai in Thailand will change you. This is about reaching, as passionate people will, those aspects of the sport and art that are unique to Thailand itself, that may fall from view as Thailand turns its face toward you. The Rules, For You How do I mean this? The rules of the sport have been changed so that you (in a less skilled way) will win fights, or perform well in fights you might not otherwise in the traditional Thai version of the sport (there is a full spectrum of this, stretching from RWS entertainment Muay Thai to ONE smash and clash). This is a fairly recent transformation, covering perhaps the last 10 years. The sport itself has been altered for you...and, as it has been altered for you, this also has washed back onto trad Bangkok stadium Muay Thai, which has absorbed many of the entertainment qualities which are pervading social media and gambling sites. In some sense the "authentic" traditional Muay Thai of Thailand doesn't really exist in promotional fight form anywhere in the halo that tourist and adventure tourist has reached. It's just a question of degree. The issues and influences behind this in trad stadium Muay Thai are more complex than this, but it too has turned its face towards "the foreigner". Some of this is just what people like to call "progress" or "the force of the market place" or others might call the "deskilling of Capitalism", but just know that in the fights themselves, they are by degrees turned towards YOU. It really might only be in the festival fight circuits of the provinces where you will still will find the culture and aesthetics of the sport and art FOR Thais. To be sure in festival fights there can be matchups that favor a larger foreign student of a local gym, which has relationship ties with the local promoter, especially if there is no sidebet. But the EVENT isn't for you, designed around you, catering to you or people like you. You're the oddity, and the rulesets and aesthetics have been less altered if at all. The Training, For You On a deeper level, the training in gyms is also made FOR you. The traditional pedagogy of Muay Thai, the manner in which it was developed through youthful circuit sidebet fighting, the kaimuay culture of non-correction and group dynamic sharing of a grown aesthetic, has been seriously eroded, supplemented and sometimes just outright replaced. You are (likely) not learning in the manner of the Thais that produced such acute excellence so many decades ago. Yes, there will be obvious things like farang krus and padmen in some gyms (many of them quite devoted to Muay Thai, but not produced by the subculture), something that is increasing in the sport, but, subtly, even if your padman is Thai, he may not even be an experienced ex-fighter, as mid-so Thais are holding pads now in the growing commercialization. Muay Thai is experiencing a gentrification and an internationalization at the gym level. Beyond padmen, the very manner of instruction and fighter development will have been changed in some sense for you. For one, increasingly you'll notice "combo" training, memorized strike patterns, which is both a deskilling of the sport (making it easier to teach, replicate and export), but also is training that is geared towards the new Entertainment trade-in-the-pocket patterns and aesthetics, made for tourists and online fandom. The change in the rules of the sport over the last 7 years or so, also is reflected in a change in how the sport is actually taught...even in spaces that feel VERY Thai. The sport is bending to the "combo" because it is signature to Western and international fighting aesthetics, and it can be taught by less skilled/experienced coaches. Fighters did not train like that, nor did they fight like that. As the sport has become deskilled the combo has taken an increasingly important role. Added to this, gyms have had to accommodate the expectations of Westerners and other non-Thais, as the weakening of the sport economically has turned almost every gym in the tourism halo towards at least a hybrid relationship to tourism...it needs to give the Westerner something they recognize and expect...and, because tourists and adventure tourist come with all sorts of investments and motivations, on different timescales, a lower common denominator works itself into the equation. Group "classes", organized drilling of groups, increased conceptualization and rationalization of techniques involving verbal correction and demonstration, even foreign coaching, these are FOR YOU changes in the sport. Sometimes these trends and aspects will only be subtly present, sometimes they will characterize the entire process. This is an elephant ride. And often it is difficult to distinguish where the elephant ends and the ride begins. Even "Fighter Training" Isn't The Process Along these lines of hunting the "authentic" training in gyms you'll run into this difficulty. You may be in a gym full of Thai fighters, even very active Thai fighters. There aren't many combos being held for. No real "group classes". A lot of Thai culture is going on, or seems to be. You are doing the work of fighters, real fighters, right there next to you. It's by Thais its for Thais and its pretty authentic...but for these things. For one, this gym if it's not a kaimuay in the more grassroots sense, all these fighters were made somewhere else. They were bought and brought into the gym, to be part of a stable. So what you likely are seeing, and doing, isn't actually how they became what they are. They are in the polishing, or add-a-level stage. The heartbeat of what made them is elsewhere. Even if you are a developed, accomplished fighter, and you too are in the "polishing" stage, you don't have what they have, which is a very different history of training, fighting and development. They are made of a different material, so to speak, and in truth that "material" is the actual "stuff" that everyone comes to Thailand looking for, that is where the "authenticity" is in their movements, vision, rhythms, stylistics. You can do all the padwork, all the clinch rounds, all the runs, all the bagwork, all the sparring, and you'll get better, in fact a LOT better...but, you'll be missing that "authentic" piece, the thing they got before they came to this gym. To add to this, if you did seek out the kaimuay that grows fighters in the principles of the sport, and their fighting circuits, these are not economically robust spaces, they are no longer teeming with fighters, and they're not focused on the tourist. They are part of a fragmenting economy of largely provincial fighting, and in which is difficult to find one's place, especially as an adult, as they are made for youth. The best you might find are hybrid spaces, kaimuay on the low ebb, which also are run by a great kru, making room for non-Thais, but even these spaces are a kind of bricolage of culture, knowledge and practice. There is no pristine location for the "authentic". "Treated Like a Thai" A layer even further down in terms of authenticity, it's not uncommon to feel that if you've stayed a lot, trained a lot, fought a lot, that you are being (more or less) "treated like a Thai". This is a big desire in the reach for "authenticity", and that experience of being "treated like a Thai" is therefore quite meaningful. But you aren't. You are still likely on an elephant ride, in a certain regard. And that's become Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is culturally founded on intense social power disparity. It is strongly hierarchized, and hierarchies vie against other hierarchies constantly in a political struggle that the Westerner, even the Thai-speaking Westerner, largely cannot see...and if they see them, they cannot care about them in the same way a Thai does and would. This is a continuous struggle for social "position" in which the Thai fighter has almost always has almost zero power. They are bound not only by contract obligation (contract), but more significantly by strong mores of social debt and shame, and the networks of hierarchy which make up gyms, community and promotion. They are in a web with constant top-down and lateral pressures, with very limited choice, you are not. You do NOT want to be treated "just like a Thai"...and honestly, you probably can't be, even if you want to be brought into the same workouts or expectations of a fighter. The reason this is important is the almost all of the motivations you have as a fighter, to become better, to win, to be acknowledged are very, very VERY different than the Thai fighter kicking the bag right next to you...and their motivations are actually the "authentic" part of Thailand's Muay Thai. Stadium Muay Thai is not the free agent professionalism that non-Thais aspire to. It is intense social stigma straining under a culture of obligation. You can do all the work, mirror it beat for beat, but you are not in the affective position of Thai fighters, and so in some sense cannot fight like them, for their alliances and values, the things which bring the strikes out, are largely invisible to the Westerner. All these things: that they've changed the rules so Westerners can win or perform well, and will enjoy watching, that they've changed the way Muay Thai is trained, that you aren't likely exposed to the actual processes that made stadium fighters who they are today, and even that you cannot experience the disempowerment, position and dignity of Thai fighters themselves, all cut off aspects of "authenticity", much sought by those that travel in earnest. This is leaving behind all those more common internet concerns like fake fights, dives, bad match making. It's in the actual fabric of the sport itself, as Westerners reach for it, and as it has turned its face toward the Westerner, making itself for the Westerner...and others. 2. The Fighters Aren't the Same The second difficulty in reaching for "authenticity" is that even if you get through all those layers. If you shun the rehearsed combo, you identify living threads of kaimuay culture and its values and ways of life as much as possible, if you fight five round trad Muay Thai fights, don't take weight advantages when you can, if you emotionally connect with the low social position of the Thai fighter, all the things, and then make it to the ring where "authentic" Muay Thai is "happening"...it's not even happening there. I mean this in this sense. Aside from the erosion and deskilling of the sport due to new promotional motivations, tourism and market pressures, Muay Thai itself has been eroding on its own within the country. The rising economic standard out of the classes of people who traditionally fought it have changed many of the motivations and commitments of the fighters themselves, and the talent pool of fighters has dramatically decreased. I'm going to throw a wild number out, but I'm just guessing in an educated way...maybe the talent pool is 10x smaller. Leaving aside that combos and entertainment aesthetics are now working their way into more or less "Thai" gym spaces, the fighters themselves just are not that good, not as developed, complex or accomplished by the time they are in Bangkok rings. Big name gyms grab up local kaimuay talent earlier and earlier (green fruit off the tree before ripe), the developmental fighter classes (informal groups within gyms) that grow the skills are seriously on the decline. A kaimuay may have had 20 fighting boys, now may have 3? Traditionally there was a stirring of the pot that was cooking a very deep stew of skills, more and more its a process just a few ingredients heated over a short time. This is to say, even if you can get all the way to the "authentic" rings, the quality and sophistication of the Muay Thai you will be facing will lack something that "authentic" dimension that characterized the freedom and expressiveness of skill of past generations. You may in fact fight a Thai who will fight quite like a farang (as far as it goes). They may end combos with a body shot, or throw endless elbows, be unable to defend well in retreat, have a muay of one or two weapons, or be limited and simplistic in the clinch. Not only is the skillset diminished, but in new generation fighters the rhythms and shapes of fighting that are "authentic" may not be there in full force. In some ways the Westerner may encounter a dim mirror of themselves. I'm writing this because this quest for authenticity is seriously meaningful. It's meaningful to us, those of the West who love Thailand's Muay Thai, and it's also meaningful to Thais as well, who have great esteem for its legacy. The only way to significantly engage in the question of authenticity is to acknowledge that it is already substantively hybridized. You and everyone else may be on elephant rides. It's only by identifying the aspects of Muay Thai that are not made for the tourist and adventure tourist, the threads of culture and practice that developed without your presence, or others like you, and nurturing with respect those aspects, that will the authentic journey begin. You may be in a very commercial gym, full of combos and group classes, but your padman probably grew up in kaimuay culture. It's in him. It's what made him. Find ways to connect to that. There are also at times "Thai gyms" (mini-kaimuay) inside commercial gyms, which operates under a different code than the gym for customers. You may be in an Entertainment fight promotion, fight in the traditional style, try to win in the traditional style, even if the ruleset doesn't favor it. Push back against what has been made for you. Learn and identity the lineages of cultural practice that have defined Muay Thai, and connect to those purposely. In a sense, if we all realize we are on elephant rides, at a certain point you have have to love and care for the elephant itself, which is the beautiful, mysterious, almost-like-us, powerful, magical creature. This is the art of Muay Thai. And even if you aren't on the best ride, you are on a mother-effin elephant. Find the culture of the elephant. Find the elephant's history among the people. Find what the elephant needs. Find what is natural to the elephant. Protect and honor the elephant. we wrote a manifest of our values here

This is a line of reasoning I'd like to pursue, that global Capitalism is deskilling Muay Thai fighters, but changing the rules and aesthetics to breakdown complex fighting knowledge to repetitive tasks, like throwing memorized combos, in order to increase the labor force, making individual fighters less unique and more replaceable, and transfer the knowledge core to promotional and media oriented marketing. the chat gpt summary of deskilling: The argument that capitalism induces deskilling comes primarily from Marxist and critical labor theorists, particularly Harry Braverman, who expanded on this in his influential 1974 book Labor and Monopoly Capital. Here's a breakdown of the argument: What is Deskilling? Deskilling is the process by which skilled labor is replaced with less skilled or unskilled labor—often through: Technology or automation Standardization of work tasks Fragmentation of complex jobs into simpler, repetitive tasks Why Would Capitalism Encourage Deskilling? 1. Profit Maximization Capitalist firms aim to maximize profits. One way to do this is to: Replace skilled workers (who are more expensive) with less skilled workers or machines Simplify tasks so they require minimal training, which reduces labor costs 2. Managerial Control Simplifying jobs increases management’s control over the labor process: Skilled workers often have more autonomy and bargaining power Deskilling reduces workers' independence and makes them easier to supervise, replace, and discipline 3. Increased Productivity Deskilled labor allows for: Mass production techniques (think Ford’s assembly line) Faster and more consistent output Easily interchangeable workers, which supports scalability Theoretical Roots Karl Marx: Believed capitalism alienates workers from the labor process, reducing their work to mere repetitive actions Harry Braverman: Argued that capitalist development deliberately strips away workers’ skill and knowledge to concentrate power and expertise in management

Think of the highest level of Muay Thai fighting 30 years ago, in the Golden Age, in terms of Dynamic Range, as its applied to photography or sound recording. Fighters were able to perform skillfully at an intense range of distances. It wasn't just a matter of styles, it was that every distance was within the spectrum of competence or even excellence. With the advent of Entertainment Muay Thai, as Thailand seeks to fashion its sport towards the less skillful foreigner, the real aim is to reduce the dynamic range of fighting to only "the pocket" as much as possible, to generate clashes, because that's where memorized combinations favored by Western and other nationalities are the most effective, and that is where large bodied fighters will win exchanges. The entire spectrum, the Dynamic Range of fighting is to be shrunk. And the ranges were Thais especially held court, too-far (counter kicking defense) and too-close (clinch dominance) have been clipped out.

more on Noir aesthetics...

I'm not sure which video you watched but Sylvie has a whole clinch playlist Hop In Clinch Entry Getting in & Staying In Clinch Basics Seminar

I'm not sure about Sylvies approach to this, and can't really relate since i ain't that short, but i might have a small tip on closing the distance relatively safely in order to use knees.. It might be a bit clumsy to explain this in text, but i'll try. Try to push your opponent away with a teep, then follow up with a jab, you don't have to hit them with the jab, this is mainly to measure distance and maybe make them shell up a bit, then close the distance with a knee feint with your left knee, use the movement as you put your left foot on the ground again, step to the right of your opponent and try to grab them. Left hand upside down behind their neck, right arm on the outside of their bicep, use your strength to push their head downwards as you would in a normal clinch. If you do this fast enough, you will have very good controll of their body and they are in a pretty vulnerable position to take left knees in the stomach. When they try to push you away, you are also in a pretty good position to follow of with a sweep with your right leg as they step back, you will have maybe a second or so to do this as they gain their composure again, and you are still in the dominant position. I don't know how much you will understand of this as it is in text, but this has worked pretty good for me against taller opponents. But it is of course not withouts it's risks, every move is possible to counter. You might want to try this in a shadowbox routine before you apply it to sparring.

how to use head movement in Muay Thai: https://x.com/Egokind1/status/1906268431315280261 The highlight brings in general the thought that everyone has gotten spam-the-elbows happy in Thailand. This has happened quickly, and you could pretty much see the change start in real time because of COVID, beginning when they briefly banned clinch in paranoia (and with Entertainment Muay Thai). It feels like the Yodkhunpon template (which itself as an extreme outlier, and not well-esteemed in its time) got oversimplified. A lot of Muay Thai is just becoming Muay Elbow. As defense significantly erodes in Muay Thai though, the elbow is becoming a more and more effective go-to. It becomes chicken and egg. More elbows, less defense, the less defense, the more elbows are effective. The elbow may become the iconic cliche strike of Muay Thai, when at its height Muay Thai rather rarely featured elbows. They were seen as both "low" and largely ineffective.

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

Instinct and the Thai Principle of Tammachat (ธรรมชาติ) an expansion upon my journal entry This will remain somewhat obscure, as it's hard to fill the gap in my recent reading, but thoughts on the nature of Tammachat (natural), which is one of the more essential, basic yet obscured qualities of Thailand's Muay Thai - and one that non-Thais most deeply struggle with. How can something be "natural", which is trained? They seem a contradiction, or at the very least in strong tension. Into the gap Westerners try to place concepts like "muscle memory", as if you can create a new causal chain, a new "memory" in your body which then operates with something like "naturalness". This supposed manufactured "muscle memory" is often trained with great tension - a very high degree of unrelaxed, biomechanically precise constant correction. It does not really solve the problem of Tammachat, and instead inserts a mechanical bridge between between what I'll call Instinct and Thought. I'm drawing from these two passages in the excellent book Deleuze and the Unconscious (2007, Christian Kerslake), (see them at the bottom of this post), discussing the influence of the philosopher Bergson. Bergson is concerned with how matter and memory work together. In a certain sense we all have a powerful inheritance of memory, something which includes not all of our conscious experiences, but all of our experiences, much of it unconscious. This is not just things that we can recall to our mind, but rather the very large raft of causes well below the threshold of our awareness, including our biological instincts. Instincts are wisdom, skills, reactions, frames of perception which have been developed through not only 10,000 years of ancestry, but also 100s of millions years of life itself, well below our species. All of this is inherited, in a way, in "memory", the form of the matter of which we are made. When "memory" is acting, this by default is read as "natural". If someone fakes a punch and we flinch...this is natural. It is speaking from our memory. It flows, seemingly, without thought. But Thailand's Muay Thai has a concept of developed naturalness, which is to say the qualities of physical expression which also can flow with the ease that memory has. The temptation is to create "new memories" (that's why "muscle memory") is a thing. If we can train and cram-down memories back into our causal shoot, far enough in, then they too might come out some what "natural" in the future. You see a great deal of this in the proliferation of the "combo", a fixed pattern of strike that is trained over and over again, trying to force it back down into the causal chain, so it can come out "natural"...though it almost always, when trained like this, comes out "forced" and far from Thai Tammachat. The reason for this failing is identified in the passages below (though, this is just a note, and the passages themselves may be hard to decipher, I'm drawing out a line of their thought). The point or idea is not to create new memory, or new instincts (they will never be as strong as those inherited by the instincts of biology, or of those learned deep in our forgettable pasts), its to put Instinct itself in relationship with Thought (or, in the text Intelligence). The ideal state, the Tammachat state, is one in which Instinct and Thought alternate and affect each other. Not only does Thought shape Instinct, Instinct shapes Thought. In some sense the great history of our Being, our personal Unconscious (all things experienced, most of it well below our threshold of awareness) and our collective biological Instincts, all the causes of how we act, is placed in communication with Thoughts, Intelligence, Ideas, in the sense that there is dialogue and mutuality, and no priority of either. In "flow states", presumability, this communication becomes utterly suffused. This is why "play" plays such an important part of Thai training and development, it approximates in a low stakes way this suffusion. * in what follows below I'll take a basic framework of 3 intensifications in kaimuay training: speed (which maybe the speed of a sparring opponent, a padman, or even the speed on the bag or drills); fatigue (the ways in which exhaustion creates spaces into which the mind-cannot-follow); and dominance (which may be the agonistic dominance of someone in sparring or clinch, the dominance of a high level padman, or the dominance of traditional culture & hierarchy. There are many more kinds or sources of intensification - for the Westerner of course a very large source is simply being in another culture, amid its customs and a language you do not know - but just for the illustrative purposes of the framework, these are the three. Aesthetics and Thought The role of Intensification. In the philosophy of Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) there is emphasis on speeds. The exposure to speeds (sometimes in an absolute sense, sometimes in terms of changes in speeds) produces an intensification within oneself. Something that is too fast, but also something that is too slow...intensifies. In this framework I'll position this as that-which-challenges-thought, or that-which-is-where-thought-cannot-follow. This is to say, using Intelligence to keep track, plan and react is no longer sufficient. Intensification is what puts Thought in relationship with Instinct. (And keep in mind, here Instinct isn't just animal reactiviness, though it includes that too. It is the sum of our Unconscious causations.) Intensifications produce a dialogue. Muay Thai active training, aside from drills and conditioning, is thought of as "getting used to" certain speeds and intensifications, things that would just throw you into pure instinctive reactions if you were untrained. But, it is much more than that. The "getting used to" is not just exposure therapy, it is actually putting Thought and Instinct into communication with each other, by degrees. You want both dimensions, otherwise you will never receive Tammachat. This is how Thai aesthetics - to which a non-Thai must submit and be shaped by - work to sew together these two aspects of our Being. The over-arching picture of what the art of Muay Thai is, is what allows the space in which Instinct and Thought can develop together in unanticipated, experimental ways. Each must shape each...within the Aesthetic, held together by the Aesthetic. The use of intensification - there are many aspects of intensification, but we can stay with solely the quality of speeds - is to unseat Thought and place it into community with Instinct (your Past). If the intensification is too strong Thought will be forced completely down into Instinct, too light and it will operate over Instinct. The key to Tammachat is that they suffuse, the "wisdom" of each in combination. This is why Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, its very high level of command over the fight space, is an art. Fighters develop within a sphere of progressive, integrating, creative intensifications, and the fight is conducted at the level of a Tammachat suffusion of Thought and Instinct. This is what the great legendary fighters of Thailand's past exude an extraordinary degree of being "at ease", which is why they are so "natural" in their speeds and relations. One is not simply "getting used to" speeds and intensifications. Your Past (the full causal panoply of what you are, reaching much further back than even your person, into what you are as an organism) is being synthesized into an Aesthetic, a certain kind of creative completion, or some variation thereof. The Role of "Technique" Techniques are not bio-mechanically pure modularities, any more than words in a language are distinguished by perfectly performed phonemes. Techniques, which each contain their own intensity, shape, duration (duree). You cannot train techniques by rote to bury them into your past, hoping that they will come out in a kind of blind apparition that is Tammachat. Techniques are like words given to you to actively use, to express yourself within the social space (the fight space), as you encounter intensifications (speeds) that unseat thought. It is the use of techniques, as a kind of language, to weave Instinct and Intelligence (Thought) together. They perform a kind of active armature of expression, which of which holds its own intensification, just like poets let us know that words do. Do not get lost in techniques. The appeal of Thai techniques to the West and other non-Thai centers of fighting is clear. It is the most modular "piece" of the fighting Art of Muay Thai that can be exported outside of its art, like borrowing words of another language. Techniques yield to bio-mechanical reproduction, they can be analyzed by Western sensibilities and translated into angles of force and body position, accelerated by video replications and study. They can be and "are" extracted...but as extracted become nearly useless in the pursuit of Tammachat, the synthesis of Instinct and Thought. They instead operate, usually, with a jarring abutment of Instinct and Intelligence, expressing a mechanical repetition, amid exposures to intensifications of speeds which unseat Thought, often placing Instinct and Execution of technique in a kind of war or struggle of expression. No matter how much one trains technique and practices by rote repeated patterns of striking, one can not reach Tammachat. What is Intensification? The Relationship to Speeds (detour) a small sidestep to Tarkovsky to draw in a thoughts on how kinds of Time are stitched together. This will be helpful later, in a comprehensive picture of how Time operates in traditional Muay Thai, both in training and performance. Understand that the argued aim of a high level fighter is to link "time-pressures" together, just as a filmmaker like Tarkovsky does. To build aesthetic continuity (which the Thais of fighters call "Doh"). The great Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky in his book Sculpting In Time wrote about his philosophy of editing shots together. Known for his dreamlike cinema, this concept of intensification in alternation is key to the way in which he places Thought in relationship to Instinct (our collective Past). He has compared the linking of shots together as to connecting pipes together of various diameters, differing pressures, through which water flows. A shots pressure builds up slowly, then he cuts. His art is about alternating and working through various pressures. Some quotes from his writing: The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythm...rhythm is not determined by the length of the edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them Rhythm in cinema is conveyed by the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame. Just as from the quivering of a reed you can tell what sort of current, what pressure there is in a river, in the same way we know the movement of time from the flow of the life-process reproduced in the shot Editing brings together shots which are already filled with time, and organises the unified, living structure inherent in the film; and the time that pulsates through the blood vessels of the film, making it alive, is of a varying rhythmic press reading deeper into theory: Time and the Film Aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky, Donato Totaro, A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky’s Theory of Time-Pressure, Part 1. This is to say, Tarkovsky in his cinema Art makes use of the same unseating qualities of speeds (changes in intensity), which unseat the priority of Thinking, that Muay Thai training (and fighting) does. The highest level Golden Age Muay Thai artist is displaying speed/intensity changes expressively, in Tammachat, in the same sense that Tarkovsky is in his films, producing a dream-like synthesis of Thought and Instinct. It is dream-like because it overcomes the fundamental tension between Thought (directed, intelligent action) and Instinct (one's Past causal treasure trove), allowing each to communicate to the other. The qualitative Flow State. One does not "bite down" on technique when exposed to intensifications (speeds, but there are many others) which give rise to Instinct. Instead, one turns oneself over to the Aesthetic of Muay, and searches for "words" to integrate oneself, within Instinct, within Thought. Seeking the line of Tammachat. In this sense, ring Muay Thai could be regarded as a proto-form of cinema. The Role of Emotion Primordially, the greatest instinct that a training fighter encounters is Fear. The Art of Fighting is in many ways the Art of Communicating with Fear. One does not merely dull or annul oneself to fear, fear which contains great wisdom acquired not only through one's own life, but also through the history of the organism, passing through aeons back. The Art of Muay should be considered the Art of Fear...and with it the attendant Instinct of Aggression. Training includes the Instinct of Fatigue. Fear, Aggression and Fatigue can be thought of as the Instinct loom upon which Thought is woven, through the exposure to intensities and the arch aesthetic of Muay. One finds a language, one finds words, which work together the instinct and intelligence of Muay, in a new Tammachat, a new naturalness. Returning to the original reference (below), emotion stands as that which exists between Thought and Instinct. Emotion is that which surges when Thought loses its footing, inviting Instinct in. It is the qualitative way in which we pass through the world, bouncing from intensifying state to intensifying state. For this reason the Thai Buddhistic approach to emotion plays a central role in achieving a new Tammachat communication between Instinct and Intelligence. Emotional reactions in training are to be expected - and emotion itself provides the bridge - but in order for the Aesthetic to provide the cover for development emotion needs to even'd out, understood as a connective force, but not reaching intensities that obscure the sought-for connection. Emotion is simply the sign that Intensities (speeds) have reached a place where Though can no longer adequately follow. It is the door that allows Instinct in. In the right regulation, the right temperature, enough Instinct will enter to guide, and technique (one's learned words) will be allowed to speak, joining Intelligence and Instinct together. Emotion is the conduit. The extension of emotion into a perceptual space (and not merely a spiking or depressive reaction), along Buddhist non-reactive principles, is what allows the art itself to work the synthesis together, properly in training in play. It allows the Tammachat to grow. Without emotion, the substantive expansion which exposed to intensifications that leave Thought & Intelligence behind, one cannot be nourished by one's collective Past. But, it is a question of temperature. Emotion drawn towards Mind. All of this has grown quite esoteric, but it is much more human, much more basic than that. In training one is exposed to differing speeds (intensities), and given techniques (words to speak), both with these speeds, but also amid these speeds. Importantly, these speeds are not just intensifications of fast, they are also intensifications of slow. One is working through a disorientation of the mind (thought, intelligence) in manners which are designed to provoke emotion, but emotion which is only a door to the much wider wealth of Instinct (Unconscious). Emotion is to be regulated, encouraged to be non-reactive, eased into a larger framework of the Aesthetic of Muay, so that the door to Instinct remains open, just enough, so Instinct and Intelligence can collaborate and find ground in a new Tammachat. The invocations of Instinct come out of the very form of training in the Kaimuay in Thailand, a summoning up of the Past, both individual and social, in a community of fighter development. One cannot simply "take out" the techniques of the kaimuay, from this matrix. As fighters train into fatigue, Instinct is also invited in, to speak and inform the Mind. The Aesthetic of Muay steps in to hold the two together, also brought together in the social glue of the kaimuay itself. There is an important mutuality to training, which also falls to the traditional forms of Thai hierarchical culture, a way that the Past inhabits the Present through social bond. Muay Thai is the art by which the Past is allowed to continue to speak, so as to inform (and be informed by) Intelligence. This occurs though, principally, through the exposure and involvement of speeds (intensities) designed to provoke emotion, which itself must be modulated by Buddhistic appeal. This is a fundamental shoreline in training, which then expresses itself in a higher state when fighting. The Fighter and the Unconscious: the flinch and the archetype To follow along in this discussion its important to understand what the nature of the Unconscious is. We are very far from Freud's vision of a repressed Unconscious of drives. We are thinking of a productive Unconscious, the Unconscious understood as everything from flinching to (perhaps) Jung's concept of archetypes. This is because the Unconscious is everything that falls below the threshold of awareness. It includes all the aspects of one's personal history, the experiences of childhood and before, all the things learned as "forgotten", and (following Jung) the energies of one's personal force such as the Shadow or the anima/animus, etc. In training the fighter is engaging, in a systematic craft of intensity exposure and development (its no accidental that Muay Thai is by custom part of the pedagogy and maturation of male adolescents), eliciting emotion for its relative control, turning it onto a conduit. The conduit is connecting Mind (Intelligence, Thought) to Instinct (the Unconscious), and back again. It is drawing forth on the resources of the Unconscious (all of the Unconscious - from the composite of the organism and the species, all those reflects and affective capacities and perceptions, to archetypal forms of being in a social world, the mythos of the Individual - all of it), to animate and inform the art of the Muay, which operates as a continuous aesthetic. Both the flinch as a reflex, and the flinch as a half-memory when you were hit as child, (and also the flinch that served emotionally as a recoil from a dominance, a psychic positioning of your energies before a stronger energy), all of those levels of Unconscious capacity are drawn into the aesthetic of the Muay, and are given words to speak, so as to be symbolically present, imbued in movement. The movement is also informed by those Unconscious qualities and many others, made full, through the deeper knowledge of survival and persistence. Key is understanding that the Past is not regressive. The Unconscious is not limiting/limited. It is full of a wealth of the capacity to do...but, it is beneath awareness, and definitionally not accessible by Intelligence/Thought alone. The instinct to flinch, the reflex, following our example, despite violating the aesthetic of the fighter is imbued with tremendous resource, a speed of perception, a defensive priority, which surpasses any conscious action. Those extra-personal knowledges are to be folded into the Aesthetic of Muay. So this is the case with enumerable capacities to sense and act, affective energies of presence, aspects of the organism and the Self which are so infinite they cannot be known. Imperceptible transitions between modes and embodiments of Time. The training (and the performance) reaches reaches through up from the reflex to the sweep of the mythic Self, all of it inaccessible to the direct perception of the Mind. Emotion and Intensification Noted above, in training intensification gives rise to emotion, which opens the doorway to the Unconscious (Instinct). Intensification on one level, let's say in terms of sparring (play), operates along the aspect of speed. One is exposed to speeds, including changes of speeds (tempos), which defy the capacity of the mind to follow, which gives rise to emotion. The intensification though is not emotion. It produces emotion. Emotion that rises to the point of object obsession (that "fighter" is doing this to me, that "technique" is doing this to me, making me feel this) has already lost its role. It's role is to open Thought to Instinct. The coaching and calculating mind, the analytical mind, will lead emotion in the wrong direction. That is why the Buddhistic aspect of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai works to solve the mis-steps of emotion. The Buddhistic aspects of Muay Thai are embedded in its aesthetic form. One doesn't have to think of emotion in terms of Buddhism, but it can help. This is to say, the directionality of the rise of emotion is toward Instinct. One wants to open a two-way door toward the Unconscious. Because Muay Thai is trained also through fatigue and an aesthetic of dominance, intensification (and its attendant rise of emotion) can also occur through fatigue or dominance. Together they can create a very large doorway, weaving together both the materiality of the Body (fatigue) and the psychodynamics of personhood and social status (hierarchies). Turning to the aesthetic of Muay, its conditioning of Ruup (body posture and form), its characteristic display of presence and being at ease (physically), its flattening of emotion, allows the doorways of intensification/emotion to remain open, productive and expressive. Ideally perhaps, emotion per se is stretched out toward Mind, experienced more so as direct intensification alone, a portal to Unconscious Instinct, and the formative powers of what one is. prospective graphic The Mythos of the Self and the Fighter Thailand's Muay Thai is culture bound, which means that its figures of significance and valorization are drawn from the culture itself. It operates within a Thai-Siamese mythos. For this reason great legends of Thailand's Muay Thai past, let's say of the Golden Age of the sport or before, stand in the same light as the gods that are performed and invoked in the Ram Muay. In my discussion of the 10 Principles of Muay Thai I call this "be the god". The meaning of this is to be understood within the mythos of the Unconscious, both at a personal level, but also at the collective level of a people. The fighter in the ring draws up from the Past (the Unconscious) the supra-personal forces that go beyond their mere ego (constructed identity), so that they can assume a symbolic capacity within the ring, making of the art a collective rite. This occurs through the aesthetics of the sport, and the ways in which the fighter has attained the capacity to transmute intensifications into Instinct and Thought syntheses. In this sense fighters can become embodiments of a collective, mythic past, drawing on the forms of what anchors a people, but remain inaccessible to Intelligence alone. The openness of this capacity is achieved in the openness of training, through play and the aesthetics of Muay. Time and the Nature of Muay (the Natural) Bergson's concept of Duration (la durée) is an important building block for understanding what is happening in traditional training and in fighting. A duration for Bergson is an unbreakable envelope of Time. Returning to the example of cinema, a shot holds a certain complete shape to itself. If you edited it in any way you would break what it is. Bergson describes duration as Time what is "swollen with its past". Just as a story is told in a narration, the ending of the story is swollen with its history, the telling of it from the beginning. A duration is anything that cannot be broken, in terms of Time. There may be durations within a duration, unbreakable envelopes within the duration, this does not disturb its wholeness. The image is given of music where one has the musical piece (a duration), and individual notes played (a duration), as well as refrains, phrasings, melodies, etc. Our lives are durations, our days, our thoughts, our bodies, anything that swells with its past, with the passing of time, so to complete it. When one enters a Thai kaimuay to train, or enters a ring to fight, one is entering as a duration (in fact a duration made up of many durations). And one is joining a duration, the event. The rhythms and shapes of the event envelop your duration hold you in concert with other durations you will encounter. In a kaimuay these are the patterns of training, the aesthetics and customs of the art as trained; in the ring it is the aesthetics of Muay as it is fought. This is the set-up. As you train your duration, what is the you of you, your temporal wholeness will be challenged by intensities of speed, fatigue and dominance. This will lead to intensification, and usually emotion. As Thought ceases to be able to manage one's place, one's wholeness, one opens up the the Unconscious/Instinct, to draw on resources that allow your duration, your rhythm, your wholeness to persist. The Time of which you are made (your duration) is enriched by the rise and integration of Instinct, and that which usually falls below consciousness. Your duration is expanded. Fighting is the art of breaking another's duration, their rhythm and tempo which makes them whole. This is why Muay Thai is principally a Time War, and why it occurs under an aesthetic of narration (the scoring is narratively anchored, and not abstract point counting). The techniques of engagement are temporal battles, strikes holding their own duration within the larger duration, attempts to break the unbreakable coherence of the duration of the other. This is why Ruup and continuity play such a large role in Muay Thai aesthetics and skill building. The Natural, the Tammachat, comes from the presence and integration of Instinct, the presence of the Unconscious, which is engendered to flow with Thought. This is achieved in training, through the application of intensities and the invitation of modulated emotion/affect. The Gross and The Subtle: drawing up the Past When I say above: "Fighting is the art of breaking another's duration, their rhythm and tempo which makes them whole." its important to track the layers of duration. There is the duration of the human body that remains composite, which if broken would result in severe injury or death, and then there is the duration of a performance's artifice, the wholeness of their techniques, presentational command over space (which is why things like balance, rhythm and ruup factor in significantly in scoring). Under a Western conception of fighting one might imagine that the purpose of fighting is to break the duration of other person's body, to in a sense decompose them (for instance, perhaps idealized in the Knockout, which signifies a kind of "death", the ending of consciousness). But in the art of Muay Thai the battle is within the performed duration, the ways in which one deplays one's material, bodily duration as a person, within a style, an aesthetics of dominance and endurance. This is why the sport is scored, and not just until the loss of consciousness or even death (as it once reportedly was). This, arguably, is how it rose to an art, an art which raises the level of efficacy of fighters, the development of skills and capacities that result in the control over Time (and Space), a control which would substantially result in the capacity to break the duration of a person. This is why Knockouts traditionally, around the middle to late 20th century, were not favored in Muay Thai, it was about skill development, but skills that are quite subtle, the skill to battle in Time. Key to this development is the principle of Tammachat, the subject of this piece. As I've argued, Tammachat naturalness is only developed through Instinct and the capacities of the Unconscious, which is to say you cannot leave Instinct and the Unconscious behind. Instead, the Instinct/Unconscious is invited to enter into the present and take up the techniques, aesthetic forms (rhythms and ruups), and use them perhaps like words. To speak anew, because the words are anew, and developed through the art and execution of the sport, now at least well over the last century in the country...and perhaps for 100s upon 100s of years, in various versions. This returns us to the thought of a basic Buddhistic approach to the affects of training (and of fighting), that spikes and surges of emotion are seriously discouraged (until recently, with the globalizing of the sport, attempting to make it join the Rage Fighting of the combat entertainment world, satisfying consumers in increasingly small bits and chunks - Instagram posts, endless highlights, scream-faced promos, etc). The reason why principle of Tammachat (natural) and Ning (being at ease) are prized and essential to the development of the sport is that, as explained above, intensification and emotion opens the doorway to the Unconscious and Instinct. They invite Instinct into the process, and it is very important that the doorway be moderated, in fact even artfully controlled (this is why in a traditional Kaimuay the quality of the head kru and gym head is very significant, the training controls flow through them). The larger the emotional-intensification gate, the more course, the more gross the instinctive entry into the present. This is why lots of very hard sparring or anger surges, or wild swings of emotion will produce only the most reactive contributions to training and skillsets. Fight or flight, adrenaline rushes (and depressive purges) will push their way forward, through into the present to solve the problem. Only their very primitive hands will pick up techniques, if at all. And techniques may even battle against the instinctive, as fighters try to "bite down" and overcome the instinctive response. Lost is any sense that the Past, the Unconscious, is filled with wisdom and capacities that the Conscious mind could never know, specific know-hows of how to control Time (and Space), manipulating reactions, bending possibilities, things not only inherited from our personal past, but from the millions of organisms that survived spatial and temporal struggles to eventual rise to you. These are the virtual simulations of contest which create a composite of what a fighter is capable of, almost all of them well below the level of awareness. As the emotional door becomes narrower, the Instinctive Unconscious is invited to enter the present in subtler and subtler ways. No longer will they be emergency solutions, gross motor contractions or compellings, sheer spikings of intensity, instead the spread out web of temporal and spatial understandings, the ways the body can move and perceive, when in flow, are invited in. The more subtly the Instinctive and the Unconscious enters in, the more likely it is to pick up the new "words" of techniques and the Thai aesthetic altogether, and think through them, express itself through them...in other words...be Natural. Natural is experiential clarity and fluidity. Taken to the extreme one might venture that the meditating Buddhist monk is producing the lightest of all intensifications, like the thinnest rumbles on a drum skin, without emotion altogether, to draw up the most subtle web of the Unconscious, increasingly subtle, increasingly spread wide. Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, in its training and performance, makes use of this principle at a more directly intensive level, to develop the Tammachat of Thai fighting, inviting the Past and the great well-spring within us to speak, with new words. the above graphic loosely presents the more "course" Instinctive responses to solve present problems, fear, anger, freezing, which pass through the wide door, and the much more subtle complexities and patterns/connectivities that come from Unconscious knowing, passing through the narrowed window, coming in contact with technique/aesthetics. Muay Thai at its richest is the development of Instinct and the Unconscious in increasingly complex techniques and styles, in dialogue with each other, carefully increasing the passage of Unconscious capacities - in their sophistication - into the present moment, the speed, perceptions & anticipations and adroitness of what lies well below the thresholds of conscious attention. This cannot be achieved biomechanically, through rote repetitions and imitative perfectioning, nor by "biting down" as intensification rises. It is achieved through the durational experience of Time, and the art of shaping Time(s), bringing the fullness of what is Unconscious in us, to speak, to the fore...the Natural. Bergson on Instinct and Thought, from Deleuze and the Unconscious (2007): This is the original passage set that began these thoughts; one can leave aside the direction of this argument toward frenzy and the mystic. Important is the relational dichotomy of Instinct and Intelligence.

Contact Sylvie in private message on Instagram. She can arrange a session for Dieselnoi, she communicates with him regularly. https://www.instagram.com/sylviemuay/

Here are some thoughts I had today regarding padwork which made me think about your question. It doesn't connect directly to your question, but it does open up thinking about padwork in different ways. (Also, thank you for your kind words - I realize that I neglected thanking you as it means a lot when people learn these deeper qualities, can feel that "language" element, and its bothered me that I didn't respond to what you said). If you click the top banner of the below you'll be taken to it. It is somewhat advanced stuff though, not easy to do or get to, but it does open up different ideas about what padwork is for, and what you can get out of it.

Coming back to mind the pejorative of young kids fighting in Thailand called "child abuse" recently by a redditor in a discussion I was having not long ago. I suspect this issue is about as complex and profound as any in West vs Thai relations and the ways Muay Thai is translated/transmitted to the West. But...this small piece of video goes into the complexifying folder of those arguments. Kids cheering as intensely as at any Little League game for their mate. This doesn't "solve" the ethical question, but it does push it further away from polarizing, simplifying pictures. It touches such a raw nerve along the faultlines of culture I do find the conversation almost impossible to have with some otherwise fairly reasonable people. It just is very hard to see the assumptions behind the very fabric of our culture, assumptions which likely distort and even motivate the appeal of Muay Thai itself to the West.

We've been watching a lot of David Lynch since he passed. Rewatches of Lost Highways, Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet, Inland Empire...and now working through Twin Peaks. I talk about it a lot. One of the things coming through is the way that he works with melodrama, and in Twin Peaks the soap opera tv form of it. It allows archetypal (in fact at times wooden) characters who are moving through scripts they repeat, stories that are told about these kinds of characters. As the actors say in Inland Empire (paraphrased), "I thought we were doing an original script, I wouldn't agree to do a remake". IN this sense Lynch is saying we are all doing "remakes" as we repeat the scripts we have inherited. But the characters are experiencing very real, intense emotions in these scenes, just like we do in our "real" lives. We are acting in scripts, doing "remakes", but living with tremendous pathos within them. Lynch, I imagine, is making two points about our pathos. There are two doors. The first is akin to Buddhistic (un)attachment. The only reason we are suffering (or enjoying) intensely is because we are attached to these wooden characters, the "remake" we are making. If we saw that these are just recycled characters the grip of our emotions would lessen. But, there is within his films & show another door. Sometimes characters suffer or intensify their experiences so thoroughly they transcend it, they are transformed, in a passion-of-Christ (archetype) type intensification, often it is female characters who pass through this door, with a sort of glowing, mixed divinity. As such with the Muay Thai fighter who is a woman, in a certain way. Female fighters especially are putting on the "clothes" of the fighter, because the fighter is a model of hypermasculinity in many cultural traditions.

Thank you Kevin for your response. It's interesting to hear Kaensak saidthat training on the pads was like charging batteries...as I remember it as the complete opposite finishing the 3rd round of 6 minutes with no strength at all, ie dead battery. hahaha...of course I never got to be in a physical state like these historical fighters. Maybe that's the big difference Hey thanks for continuing to watch and analyze the world of muay thai in thailand. Your and Sylvie's analysis of the fights have been very revealing, almost like deciphering a language or something like that. Great job! I wish you all the best!

There are two schools of thought on this. Padholding is now used, often, to teach techniques, but in Thailand's past it was much more of conditioning, rhythm-making training mechanism. Kaensak said it was used to "charge the battery". One reason why it could work in that way was because the kaimuay was full of training many other aspects of fighting, including lots of play-sparring, and timing building training. A better approach, given that kaimuay training has been somewhat lost to the sport, is to use padwork to build your own sense of control and rhythm taking, turning padwork much more into a dialogue. But...this takes an advanced, experienced padholder, usually a former experienced stadium fighter, who can work in that way. You want to build and change intensities, work at different distances, etc. One of the most important (and neglected) things in fighting is control over distance, and varying tempo/intensity. When you have a good padman, these things can be work with.

I'm an 18 year old taking a gap year before college, and i'd love to go to Thailand for a month or more this spring for Muay Thai. I've been kickboxing for 2 years and doing MMA for 1, and really enjoying those. I had an opportunity recently to do a month of Muay Thai as well while traveling and it was awesome, but now I want more. If the "fanciness" (staying in a resort, nice facilities, etc.) isn't important to me, does anyone have any recommendations for good gyms? I have the experience and conditioning to go somewhere a little more intense, which is what i'm really looking for. I'd really appreciate any help and/or suggestions y'all have!

The Chicken Wing Punch in Thailand my answer below to this Reddit question, which the moderators for some reason deleted. Who knows why, maybe some kind of AI filter, etc? This is a very interesting subject though, reflecting on the way techniques get preserved and passed on. Do people who do muay thai punch oddly? The author then went onto describe how they've been told by some that they punch like they are throwing an elbow, but that this is how their coach taught them. I assume you are talking about straights and crosses. In most examples, in Thailand this chicken wing punch honestly is likely just a collective bad habit developed out of bad padholding, often with wider and wider held pads (speculatively, sometimes because Thais hold for very large Westerners and don't want to take the full brunt of power all day long). It also has proliferated because Thailand's Muay Thai has moved further and further away from Western Boxing's influence, which once was quite pronounced (1960s-1990s, but reaching back to the 1920s). Today's Thai fighters really have lost well-formed punching in many cases. It has been put out there that this is the "Thai punch" (sometimes attributing it to some old Boran punching styles, or sometimes theoretically to how kicks have to be checked, etc), but Thais didn't really punch like this much 30 years ago if you watch fights from that time. It's now actually being taught in Thailand though, because patterns proliferate. People learn it from their padmen and krus (I've even heard of Thai krus correcting Westerners towards this), and it gets passed on down the coaching tree. Mostly this is just poorly formed striking that's both inaccurate and lacking in power, and has been spreading across Thailand the last couple of decades. There are Boran-ish punching styles that have the elbow up, but mostly, at least as I suspect, that's not what's happening. We've filmed with maybe (?) 100 legends and top krus of the sport and none of them punch with the "chicken wing" or teach it, as far as I can recall.

You asked simple, so the answer is simple, but can be very effective. Just kick under it to the open side. You can even be late on this kick. There are probably a few reasons why there isn't a lot of jabbing in Thailand's Muay Thai, but this is one of them. A kick to the open side is a very significant score, one of the few strikes that doesn't even have to have effect. The jab is almost a non-score. So trading these is pure win. But, in same stance this would require you learning a quick, lead-side kick. It's a very good kick to have, so no loss there. Key though is to not rely on point-fighting. If you can develop this to have some pace (preferably with no "step" in the kick) it can become a serious deterrent, not only to the jab, but also to the straight. And, because you are tall, if you turned this also into a long knee, this could be a significant problem for opponents. These are very simple, high scoring, maybe a bit difficult to develop power in, (but you can do it), answers.