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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Really enjoyed this title fight between Jaroensook and Captainteam, a classic stand off between Muay Khao and Muay Femeu. Jaroensook is out of the Boon Lanna gym in Chiang Mai and Hill Tribe (and ethnic minority in the North) which has had some modest success in Muay Thai, and Captainteam is Kru Thailand's son, and one of the more femeu specialists in the sport now. I didn't really know Jaroensak so the first round mislead me. He looked really comfortable leading with hands and I thought he was going to be a Muay Maat fighter (Boon Lanna has had a few aggressive Muay Maat fighters), but in the second round he went straight into Muay Khao persistence hunting, never rushing, just getting positive entry positions (better than in the first round) and starting to foil TeamCaptain's excellent throw-game. I'm pretty much always going to subconsciously watch for Muay Khao vs the femeu specialist, so nothing against TeamCaptain (love Kru Thailand!), it was just great to see that classic match up and the dynamics of yore. Also the finish - which looked borderline foul-ish, but clean enough - came out of nowhere in a way that is exactly how Muay Khao style works. You just start slowly degrading the ruup of the femeu fighter, not really winning the point fighting game, not even looking like you are having an effect yet, but then suddenly a door opens, the ruup is broken and open just for a moment and your "doh" (your continuous rhythms) just take the opening almost unconsciously. It's also kind of cool to see Jaroensak achieve some clinch position success with a variety of Long Clinch, a style of clinch somewhat perfected by Tanadet Tor Pran.49. Below is a film study I edited together of his approach: This is an article we put out on Tanadet's Long Clinch style with video and screenshots. Jaroensak doesn't lay out quite like Tanadet, and doesn't have full, wide manipulative base, but several times he got very strong positions in the clinch passing into Long Clinch dynamics for a few beats. Tanadet is Hill Tribe and from Chiang Mai, so I wonder if there was some influence or cross-over? He used to additionally train at the original Lanna Muay Thai, the gym Boon's gym has grown out of. You can find Tanadet's Muay Thai Library sessions here where he teaches the Long Clinch technique and style: #56 Tanadet Tor. Pran49 - Mastering Long Clinch (63 min) watch it here This is one of the most interesting and, if mastered, dominant clinch positions one can use, and the entire session is devoted to it. I filmed with young Long Clinch master Tanadet, and discover all the small refinements he created that turned what for many fighters is just a transitional position, into an entire system of attack. This is a rare session, capturing a little known and used clinch system.

I think people are becoming aware that there is a kind of tourism pipeline that has developed, from commercial gyms to Entertainment Muay Thai, put on for tourists. Tourists working for tourists in tourism "shows", (notably a sport redesigned for tourists to win). There are a lot of things of value in these fights, but people are also becoming aware that they are on a conveyor belt that was made for them. The Muay Thai they came for is far from these experiences. It's very hard to work your way free from this "system" which has become pervasively pointed at the Westerner. Gyms face the problem that people come to them and say: I don't want to fight on these shows, under these rules...because this is actually a tourism system. It's made for you. For you.

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

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.

Was talking to Sylvie about this very interesting historical cycle involving gambling in Siam and then Thailand. To be very cartoonish about it, provincial farmers would sell their crop and put the money in the ground, literally burying it. This would take the money out of the economy. Gambling worked as a counter to this trend, recirculating currency...but, when they would come to the capital to sell their crops in the 1900s this worked too much to the extreme. Chinese mafia and dens of gambling would drain them of their payouts, leaving them and their families enslaved (servitude). So, capital Chinese mafia gambling, which was very pronounced (gambling at one point in the early 20th century accounting for more than a quarter of the government's income through tax farms) developed a strong moral taint, farmers would loose their livelihood and fall into servitude in dramatic, destructive trends. King Vajirivudh ended up outlawing gambling in the 1920s. But, there is a kind of moral-economic tension or spectrum, between the money that stays in the ground (a traditional picture), and money that circulates in the wider, urban economy, with corrosive effects. And even to this day you have this pattern in Muay Thai, with Chinese ancestry Bangkok promoters who have been aligned with mafia and gambling (scene as a moral vice still), and the provincial fighter, who comes to the capital, looking to win big. There is a tension between tradition and custom in the land, and the (International) urban Casino. What is interesting though, the custom of local market gambling also is that which shaped provincial Muay Thai itself, which I detail here: On the history and psychology of gambling, I wrote about this here (there you can find the pdf of Gambling, the State and Society in Siam, c. 1880-1945 by James Alastair Warren which is very, very good):

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)

Never sure about provenance, but below is a photograph marked as a Funeral Fight for Marupongsiripat (1898). This custom reaches back well over 100 years, and to Thai royalty. The establishment of the 3 Schools of Muay Boran (just before the decade when Muay Thai would be modernized on the model of British Boxing) also occurred through funeral matches.

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.

Some Deep Black Portraiture in Action of Lakhin

It was just a perfect storm of a very deep talent pool, in the provinces, a huge economic boom in Bangkok with lots of money to invest, and the provincial (boxing educated) workers flowing into the city. The influx of workers was likely a significant factor. It created a hungry, educated and impassioned fan base. writing about Dieselnoi and Samart The so-called Golden Age of Muay Thai in the late 1980s and 1990s was driven by the economic boom of those years. Not only was there heaps of money to invest in gyms and fighters, flowing to enlarged fighter pay and sidebets, but it was the provincial man, the workers, who swarmed to Bangkok to find employment in the suddenly burgeoning, cosmopolitan economy. It was they that filled the stands with their wages in their hands, betting them. It was they who bought the newspapers and magazines. You have to add in things like the particular brilliance of the promoter OneSongChai who was expert at staging drama, pitting particular styles against other styles, and nurturing the talent of fighters without owning a gym himself. Another hidden factor could be that the influence of Western Boxing on Thailand may have also been its peak (there were boxing fights on each and every card, both at Rajadamern and Lumpinee, 9 cards a week - that's almost 500 boxing fights a year at the National Stadia). The mix with Western boxing may have even further expanded the fight skills of the talent pool. Amateur boxing was a very big deal in Thailand, especially after the King built provincial stadia across Thailand in 1979. These hubs of stadia likely anchored provincial fighting. Also, just structurally, the Muay Thai of then was not dominated by only a handful of gyms that simply bought talent up, as it is today. There was greater variety of BKK gyms, drawing from many more gyms in the ecosystem of the provinces. Even to get to Bangkok, it is said, required a great number of fights and proven skill. There was also great regional pride, and identity in the growth of fighters. Karuhat told us that every fight he had in Bangkok, when he was good, would pull 4 bus loads of fans from Khon Kaen in Isaan (his home town). This deep regionalism just doesn't exist in the same way now. The 1980s/1990s was a period of growing National connectivity, in the context of still powerful regional identities, expressed through the fight scene. The above is from a Reddit comment I made a few years ago. It seemed best to anchor it in my sub forum somewhere so as to not get lost as its a pretty decent, short summation. A few things that changed TLTR The economic boom in Thailand ended in 1995. In the 2000s there was also a rule change allowing sweeps and trips that were illegal in the Golden Age. This ended up radically altering the clinch fighting & grappling that arguably fueled much of the the complexity of Golden Age fighting styles. Boxing gradually started losing its influence on Muay Thai, until today there is next to none. Along with socio-economic, demographic shifts (changing the talent pool and the fan base) pedagogy & training methods seem to have also gradually changed as well, eventually accelerating the decline.

One thing that Sylvie noted is that very likely the smart phone has undermined even the most common Thailand gym culture. Trainers, fighters, everyone just does their work and then goes on their phones. The very communal aspect of trainers hanging out and watching the fighters do work, making judgements, correcting or commenting softly, talking with each other has become largely fragmented. The mutuality of knowledge and fighter development, even in trad settings, is quickly eroding. And in commercial spaces it may be entirely gone.

Dieselnoi told us once, "It's how you end up". When discussing the careers of legacies of fighters its much like the traditional narrative structure of Muay Thai fights. Early leads mean next to nothing, but as your legacy unfolds in the culture over the decades its exactly like 4th and 5th rounds. Dieselnoi was one of the most remarkable prodigies, between the ages 14 and 16 he rode into the Bangkok national stadia with a probably unpresidented 20 fight win streak, until he ran into the buzzsaw of the legend Wichannoi...twice, until overcoming it, and reaching the status of the unfightable fighter, retiring just shy of his 24th birthday. An incredible meteoric rise, peaking perhaps in his victory on Christmas Eve of 1982, beating the since-coming-into-consensus GOAT, and good friend Samart Payakaroon. When we think of the greats, and their legacies, we need to realize that many of them see themselves in this way, as a narrative fight, it matters how you end up. This is one reason, in fact our friendship with Dieselinoi, who we experienced at first as somewhat only as legend, a myth when we met him, but not so much a man, living a life, and came to know him as the man who loved Muay Thai perhaps more than any person I history, with all of his might, a volcano of love, that we've sought to preserve, uncover, raise up, document the extraordinary careers, accomplishments, arts of the soul in the ring that were forged in a time of the sport that no longer is. These men are fighting still in their hearts. All of them. As much as we push for progress in the sport, and international love and acclaim, we not only owe it to great fighters of the past for them to finish well, finish strong in the eyes of the people, but its also to the betterment of everyone fighting and consuming the sport today, that it have legs, that it has myths, that it has roots that feel unshakeable...because they are. These are roots that we have to preserve and nourish, and spent work delineating, tracing how they grew and how they today anchor the trunk of all that grows today.

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

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

In thinking about Muay Thai training techniques, and the deploy of techniques in fighting, I always turn to a chess analogy. There are "bad" moves one can make against mediocre players, that are in fact "good" moves in terms of results. But, it feels questionable to learn and train "bad" moves of this kind, not only because you might run into a strong player - you might, or you might not - but also because when you learn bad moves, and don't see "why" they are bad or weak, you just don't understand the game at a necessary level. The whole point of looking at moves and thinking about this is understanding the underlying principles that make moves (or tactics, or strategies) good or bad, so that in thinking at that level, you can creatively and spontaneously create novel moves for a given situation. There is an interesting sub-example of this floating out there, the "don't turn your lead foot on a hook in Muay Thai because you'll get kicked". There are layers to this idea. The first is the idea that "sure, you can get away with this against a poor opponent, but if you fight a good one, you'll get kicked". Sounds good, sound penetrating, along the lines which are above. But, not the case. There are any number of ways that this isn't really a readymade practical danger, no matter the skill quality of an opponent. Strikes always exposed oneself to counters. The efficacy or dangers of strikes relies very heavily on set up and situation. What is your range? What comes before and after? A 100 questions that matter. There isn't really just a "if you do x, y will happen", and a lot of the discussion of techniques falls into this error. You can't boxing slip or you'll get kneed. You can't body punch or you'll get elbowed. There are always trade-offs, and its important to see potential weaknesses, but honestly getting calf kicked with a turned foot (which isn't likely to happen at the right distance in most effective hook throwing scenarios) isn't that much different than getting your calf kicked without your foot being turned, in fact if you are weight transferring to your back foot its probably not a major problem...and if its a problem, you adjust. Is your foot outside the stance of your opponent? How far are you, what is the distance? Are you proximate enough? What did you just throw? What are the trade-offs? Inotherwords you need to look at all the pieces on the board. Instead you just get meme'd wisdom. If you do x, y will happen. This is the layering of the chess analogy. This is when we think about the larger picture, the larger principles. In some cases turning your foot may not be optimal, but in others it may give you several trade-off advantages. Some of this goes to the philosophy of the hook itself, why you are using it and how are you generating power? In general though, its worthy to move past the "it works it must be good!" assumption, because there may be larger principle reasons why it will not work against a better opponent, or, the success of the technique may mislead you into thinking a whole class of approaches are fundamentally sound. But, on another level, any question of soundness because of reason "x" also has to be put in larger context of how it matters how a strike is executed, how strikes work in concert, and the trade-offs of offense and defense.

Geez. I spent the whole night watching all 11 of the existing fights of Wichannoi Pontawee, who many legends named as the GOAT. I've watched his fights before and have enjoyed them, and a few times wowed, but I felt like he's just too important a fighter to be only "somewhat" familiar with him. I had crisp idea of how he fought, and I saw him have some spectacular moments. But its an entire different thing to sit down and watch all the fights - taking lots of notes - back to back, one after another. I don't think I've learned as much watching any other fighter. It's remarkable. Hopefully I can put these notes together for others.

Been pondering a new style gym, but one radically different than what Thailand knows. Something of a studio. And even a profit sharing concept...but I suspect that Sylvie will never let me do this, as she really doesn't want anything to do with having or running a gym. But, it may not be what she thinks. It's a space like some spaces, many moments really, we have experienced in Thailand, where "Muay Thai happens". It's not practiced, its not done. It "happens". There could be an environment like this, which is not lost to the restrictive difficulties of the past, or the vast commercializations that are coming. This would necessarily not be a "successful" gym. In fact it would be structurally against any such possibility. Much more like an experiment in Muay Thai thought, a small island...which then might echo out and influence other spaces, spaces we are not really interested in. #idea

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.

Well, the PAT announced 24-30 hr weigh-in, a huge change the sport. Get ready for tons of weight bullying (including bigger farang fighting small Thais in trad stadium fights). Basically for all practical reasons all weight classes have been expanded. This is in part in relationship to the labor crisis mentioned above, the capacity to draw from a wider range of fighters to fill cards. Trad Muay Thai will likely have greater skill disparities (shrinking talent pools) and now more massive size differences, as well as drawing in more farang who will become part of this solution. This will also likely mean more farang stadium/promotion belts in trad fighting. Of course laws in Thailand are unevenly forced, so there could be major hiccups in implementation, including a significant problem that fighters now have to come to Bangkok the day before, which means even greater costs to fight...which could ALSO shrink the fighter pool. Already many gyms, small kaimuay, have difficulty even breaking even in Bangkok fighting expenses. Will outlying fighters be able to regularly afford to come to fight in Bangkok, especially in a scene that favors the political power of major Bangkok gyms (they can't dependably recoup their expense by betting on their fighters). These changes could have a massive stylistic impact on Thailand's trad Muay Thai over time, as it gives even more advantage to size and power. Saenchai was famous for his criticism of the loss of femeu fighting after he left the trad stadium scene, because large-bodied power clinch fighters (who he had some trouble with) had become the gambler's favorite. With the even greater increase in size differential now, and the influence of more smashing and clashing fighting styles of Entertainment Muay Thai, it stands to reason that power will become even more effective over femeu skill than ever before. In the Golden Age there were fairly substantial size differences, but the technical skill level of fighters was such - and the trad artful scoring bias in favor of - that small fighters like Karuhat and many others could handle 2 or more weight class (in the ring) differences. This high level of the art just really is missing in this era, and scoring biases are shifting toward the power aesthetic. Trad Muay Thai may become much more combo-heavy smashy with the big man coming out on top.

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

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

I put together this compilation of little notes Sylvie has taken in a stretch of training and sharing Muay Thai, and was surprised that there is a full 30 minutes of these. I'm just struck and really almost shocked at how much knowledge she drops and the nature of it. These are not "demos" of techniques, but looking beneath or within techniques, something that comes from being closely connected to techniques for many many years, and her self-transformation. I can't think of another person in the world who could drop notes like this, of this much variety, because this just comes out of her path. These are like reading notes of Muay Thai. It's a very interesting, and kind of inspiring level of knowledge. She's a walking encyclopedia of experience and knowledge. That foot-drop taught by Manop is just this kind of thing. It's not "technique", its a piece of a technique, but its related to a generative principle that informs all sorts of other techniques, and even can touch all of your Muay Thai. There are so many of those.

I have to say the whole "Sport's Science" invasion of Thailand's Muay Thai, including both the real and psuedo-real, as well as outright con manifestations, as it comments on Thailand's Muay Thai, situating it as somehow primitive in its knowledge of itself, less efficient, or non-ideal...just strikes me as a vast colonialization. A lot of this in the Strength and Conditioning market place of internet ideas. Experts of every kind who are detached from the very notion of craft and artisan knowing get not only lost in the abstraction of their principles, but also in the commerce of their identities a lot of the time. And, quite often, they do not even understand the principles or dynamics that actually win Muay Thai fights...they have instead a kind of two fold assumption: The faster, stronger more enduring athlete will just tend to win...and, secondly, the cartoon (and often dead wrong) understanding of the actual physical characteristics that trad Muay Thai draws upon, then shapes that overall imaginary picture of physical superiority. To indicate just how far off this whole approach is - and I don't think this is an exaggeration - probably being strong, fast or enduring, each of which is less important than being relaxed (which actually makes you performatively more of each of these), which is essential to trad scoring and superiority. And, the usual S&C approaches to each of those tend to actually produce the opposite of relaxation.

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.

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

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

One of the most interesting mysteries of the evolution of Thai clinch is how stadium Muay Thai in not more than 10 years after the legalization of trips and various sweeps (early 2000s) suddenly flourished with a complete art form of these techniques, when in fact none of them were prevalent in the decades before (the Golden Age), so much so they became signature of Thailand Muay Thai's unparalleled fighting style. The only answer to "why" or "how" is that these movements were already implicit, were already within the "adjacent possibles" of highly developed Golden Age Muay Thai, because Thailand's Muay Thai operated at such a deep level of attunement to balance and timing, and thus it was only a short path between almost no trips and sweeps to suddenly dominant tripping and sweeping...in a few short years.

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

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

The Deskilling of Muay Thai Through Combo-Fighting Discussing again the deskilling of Muay Thai in the ONE promotion (and to a lessor degree, other Entertainment forms of Muay Thai): To be quite broad about it ONE is just bite-down combo fighting turned into a sport so larger bodied, less-skilled farang can win endless pocket trading (which is seriously up regulated by bonuses and hidden penalties), so the (new, invented) sport can be promoted to non-Thais. It has nothing to do with the history of Muay Thai. It has to do with trying to create a product that will sell through Knockout highlights on Instagram. It also has almost nothing to do with Boxing. The impression it does is just the rather vast conflation thinking "combos" = Boxing. It, in my opinion, is contributing to the accelerated deskilling of the art and sport, rather than introducing important new skills, or returning it to past sophistication. Boxing is NOT "combos". 3 Zones of Fighting Here is a graphic to help explain: Over-simplistically there are 3 Zones of Fighting: ONE has effectively removed the importance of 2 of the 3 zones (because they take the most skill development, and Thais have been much better at those 2 down regulated zones). This is a deskilling of the sport: And, in the zone that remains (Zone 2), by removing defensive distance taking (the Thai emphasis on retreat and counter-fighting, and clinch, the traditional counter to a hands-heavy striker) they have made Zone 2 a haven for bite-down combo fighting (and NOT Boxing proper). That is to say, you can succeed by combo-ing through this zone, especially if you are larger bodied. On the other hand, if you look at the top graphic with all Three Zones, you can see how Boxing proficiency connects up, or fills in the high level development of zones 1 and 2 in Muay Thai. When all three Zones are in play bite-down comboing through the pocket doesn't actually do this, because it lacks the timing, vision and control over position that Muay Thai deploys in Zones 1 and 2. Boxing, on the other hand, because its so highly developed as a mid-distance art developed over centuries really, like Muay Thai, adds great complexity to the management of the 3 zones. A Historical Example: If you want to see what combo-ing does against a 3 Zone fighter the classic example would be Ramon Dekkers vs the 19 year old Sakmongkol: Sakmongkol simply refused to trade in Zone 2 and completely controlled Dekkers. ONE is basically the complete inversion of the Dekkers vs Sakmongkol fight. It removes Zones 1 & 3, and ostensibly would have forced Sakmongkol to trade with Dekkers, if we reimagine it. Eventually Sakmongkol, if he was forced to trade would have probably gotten caught...but not because Dekkers was a high level "boxer". It's because he combos through Zone 2, and the traditional control of that kind of fighter is dominating Zones 1 and 3. This is why Dekkers struggled when fighting Thais in Thailand, despite usually having a pronounced weight advantage. ONE is basically a "reversal" of the imagined injustice Dekkers losing to Sakmongkol and so many other Thais, changing all the rules to down regulate everything the Thais did better than anyone else in the world. But, this has nothing really to do with Boxing. Thailand was plentiful with Muay Thai fighters who were better actual Boxers than Ramon Dekkers. It has to do with the role of combo-fighting. asked to "define Boxing" (ie, its not "combo fighting): It's pretty hard to define a sport or art in a few sentences - or even paragraphs! - but what I would say is that Boxing has always been a sort of parallel in principle to Thailand's "Muay Thai", if you could somehow extract all the Boxing influence (which you can't). This is to say that "Muay Thai" excels at controlling the fighting space that lies outside of the boxing "pocket", through timing, the capacities of strikes to relate to each other at that increased distance (improvisationally), and very importantly, through defense. Boxing (abstracted) compliments this with a priority over the control of the space of the pocket, through the same. And, Muay Thai clinch then takes back over at the closest proximity, as a stand up grappling art (though Boxing too has its own lineages of very close-pressed fighting and even grappling). Training bite-down combos is really the opposite of all of this. It's just firing of memorized movement patterns and using them to blast or chop through the fight space. Combo fighting is not about controlling space at all, but rather dealing with the fact that you can't control it.

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

6. I'm very femue-leaning when it comes to preferences, but this is like the strongest kid I'd ever seen in my life. Ferrari Banktongtaipetchburi

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

I'd add to the list The TDet99 gym in Bangkok which we recently film in for the Muay Thai Library (Kru Hem), watch that here: It's a Bangkok kaimuay, a gambling stadium trad gym, with not a lot of Westerners (last we checked), and a top kru. A Walk Through of the Gym: Map link to their location

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

There are so many variabilities it is really hard to say. The best comparison is to Western Boxing which doesn't have a belt system. But one would imagine that within 2 years in a good gym you'd be fairly proficient.

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

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