LengLeng

No no please don't . I think it depends on context and how he feels about his trainer.

@RB Coop I always feel this is the hardest part to deal with, how to manage injuries. You want to be responsible and so on, at the same time not risking that the trainer won't invest in you. Add some language barriers and it gets complicated I try to downplay any kind of injury but that's from a woman point of view. Some trainers are very traditional and think girls are much more sensitive so if I start talking about some issue it becomes a big deal. Anyhow in muay thai everybody is injured. If I were you I'd not mention it at first, try out the training, test your limits and how you can manage. Most likely your trainer will notice if you're in pain and if you need your asthma medication and will be able to determine whether you can fight or not regardless of you explaining your health issues or not. And probably you're not the first fighter with these issues he's trained. I've seen it many times where a newcomer arrives and directly goes to a trainer and explains everything about themselves and what they want and need and cannot do and the trainer is always like "yeah yeah" but my interpretation is what he's thinking is "let's first see you train". Just my two cents.

You can buy thai sim cards in every 7/11 so you can stay online during your stay. At the airport they have some spaces where you can buy them, I think it's TRUE and DTAC stands just close to the exit (either same exit as taxi or one level below). Grab is Asia's version of Uber. When I arrived end 2017 you had both but if I'm not mistaken Grab purchased Uber and now there's only Grab. It is currently being (or will be) legalised and for that reason taxidrivers have been protesting outside Ministry of Transport lately. There are reported cases on taxi drivers having beaten up grab drivers. Regular taxi is cheaper than Grab taxi. Grab motorbike cheaper than regular motorbike taxi. Obviously grab has the advantage of the customers not having to explain where to go, which can be tricky with regular taxi. I use Grab motorbike every morning to work. Home from work I use the bike taxis standing there to support them but also becauss, as almost every taxi driver, they're big muay thai fans :). I don't think you need to worry about being rag dolled or exhausted. If by this you mean being swept and thrown a bit yeah that happens (for fun but no serious) but if you are an MMA guy you already got that advantage. They will pair you up in clinch and it's either gonna be with a trainer or student and it would be a dick move to go hard on a new guy. Thai gym trainers are used to westerners being tired just having arrived. The big risk is if you say you are tired but the trainer can see you are not (they know for sure) they might not respect you. But they will see if you are super tired and really try. If you are new they not gonna try to break you. Except padrounds and to some extent clinch training pace will be up to you. Personally I'm more concerned with getting easy padrounds and not being pushed at all. It happens I get a trainer who thinks I'm not strong enough and will give me short padrounds with very few speed kicks and never tell me to do pushups or anything in between. That hurts more than being so exhausted from padrounds. If you only stay 2 weeks unfortunately there's a risk trainers won't invest in you too much to push you too hard. Just be yourself, make sure to give an effort and enjoy your time. Let me know when you're there I look for you during the morning run .

Hi Gary! I've trained very briefly with FA group and joined the morning run and they do not run together. Basically walk from the gym to chatuchak park together and then run at own pace. But not everybody running. I'm now at a different gym but I live in the area so I run regularly in chatuchak park in the mornings and I see their fighters running and so far never seen a group run together but instead at their own pace. I don't think you need to be nervous about that. Re sunscreen oh I don't think that's an issue at all. I'm super white too and I wear sunscreen too but I never felt it was an issue at all. Yes they have a rinsing station (like a shower thingy) and it's considered polite to rinse off before or after clinch (although at my gym almost none of the thais do this just maybe 1 of 10). Best option for you is to get baht at one of the atms at the airport where you pick your bags. Follow the signs and instructions for taxi (no grab service for pick up allowed). You can also get sim cards there. Have a print out of address to hotel in thai with you for the driver. It should be around 500 baht to chatuchak area. Re food no idea about street food but if you google restaurants+saphan kwai you will find some good options. I can recommend Cat on the roof-bar in saphan kwai for great thai food and beer. Have a great time.

On Facebook (where photos from their training are posted daily as they have a professional photographer - which I felt was distracting) doesn't look too crowded atm. When I was there yeah it was many people, more westerners than thais which made it very "western" but the amount of people did not feel like an issue. Training is good lots of clinching, sparring and pads and your own bag work. Trainers especially Kru D and Yothin are great. They have an American manager who handles admin stuff so easy to get help with stuff if needed. One thing that was annoying was that mats get superhot in the afternoon and doing pads on them was tough. FA group is close to Ari and Saphan Kwai. The former being a thai hipster neighbourhood and the latter an up and coming area and in my view nicest areas to stay in Bangkok. If you like or not probably depends on the people currently training.

I agree! Thanks so much for sharing.

@Natewoods This is a great post on importance of running and hard training regimens in Thailand: https://8limbsus.com/muay-thai-thailand/paul-banasiak-sponsored-fighter-harsh-training-realities

I'm gonna jump on this one because I'm curious. Ajarn Gae is well known and so is Elite Fight Club. It comes up as suggestion in many discussions on muay thai gym, but mainly from westerners with limited experience of training in Thailand. And people with more experience will sort of not be too enthusiastic in their response. I've never tried it out because of this reason. I've seen one of the trainers (not Gae but also known) a couple of times on the BTS as I pass by EFC daily. Anyhow now I see the same non-enthusiastic response and I'm curious. Is it because Gae and EFC are a bit touristy?

I just got absorbed by it. It's like this destructive super-passionate relationship I keep coming back to even though I keep getting hurt and the guy is a dick but all other sports I ever loved are friendzoned forever. Mainly I love being in the gym. Or having a gym to go to. It gives me a purpose and feeling of improvement even though work might suck or other stuff in life might suck. Muay thai allows me to get out of my head and into my body. I like the feeling of being sweaty. The sounds of someone kicking pads. I love the feeling of pushing through exhaustion. Of always hurting a little bit. The constant presence of pain makes me feel alive. I like the physical closeness in the gym, with other students, with the trainer. To discover movements and skills I practiced suddenly becoming available to me. I learn so much and I discover so many things about me and others that I could never have understood in any other way than physically experience it. I learn patience. I learn how good things and beautiful things are parallel to pain and frustration. I get the physical experience of hard work pays off. I learn about violence and I discover my own violence. And I really like gym when people don't talk much. When bodies do the talking.

Thanks for sharing this is really interesting. To be accepted, meaning be accepted by the other guys right? Or if it's a mixed gym, does it matter what the women think at all? Or you want to seem impressive to the girls to be respected by the guys? Because as a woman, most of the time all you want is for the guys to accept you as well. Much more so than other girls accepting you. Re the support system, I think most of us simply think it's a chosen thing. That you don't need people. But of course we all need people. I guess this is why they say men are usually worse off after a divorce than women, simply because the woman did all the relationship building and maintenance with their common friends and without her the man suddenly finds himself alone.

I grew up with a guy as my best friend and hanging out with him and his friends was sometimes just about taking the piss out of one guy until he lost his temper or started crying. It was so insanely brutal and I never wanted to be part of it. In retrospect though I wished I had been hardened like that would've helped me a lot, especially in the gym. Regarding sparring with girls yeah we know. And we use it to our advantage all the time. We know the guy can't go too hard without looking bad. However I've sparred with a guy I knew was angry with me and it's pretty uncomfortable knowing he can kill you if he wants. But nothing is worse than the heavy tall dude who has no control. Thanks for your post.

There's a female only section on this forum which is very helpful for women training muay thai. But for a long time I've been wondering about issues men face in the gym. Where I train there are mainly guys. Young boys up to very experienced fighters. I watch them train and spar and bond. I see escalated aggression. Frustration. Inexperienced boys being pushed around learning to control the temper. I see bromance. I see all this touching (is this a thai or universal thing stroking each other's butts?). I see language confusion. Dominance. I see guys being laughed at for being chubby. I see guys not knowing how to clinch with a girl or whether to go hard when sparring. I see westerners trying to seek approval from thai trainers. I would be very interested to hear about common struggles men face in the gym.

Agreeing with this, you could take the MRT to Chatuchak. I tried FA group and the trainers, especially Kru Diesel, are great. They also usually have girls training of various sizes. Lots of clinching. They have a photographer coming each afternoon so it's easy to follow current clientele on Facebook. I went to a different gym as their training schedule didn't match mine. I must say I felt the vibe was a bit off when I was there but could've been my own projection or just the people training there at that time.

I think it's good that you ask about these stuff. Some people are hungry for advice, some people learn better without too much interference. So I guess it's about feeling your way forward. My husband is a crossfit coach and I join his classes now and then. Some time back in one of his classes I saw a woman doing squats with a weird form. Since I think I know everything about squat depth I tried to get the attention of my husband and sort of whispered that he should check on her form. He just brushed me off. And afterwards he told me she squats like this because she has this injury she is struggling with. And I realised it was definitely not my place to think I could have any educated opinion on how she should move just from joining one class with her and that I shouldn't think I know my husband's work better than him.

I never even considered fighting, I thought I would try the sport when it was decided I would move to Thailand but I never even considered doing anything serious with it. I had never even seen a fight first time I tried and I did not know how to stand or what a guard is or anything. I was also incredibly shitty. Like the one everyone in the gym tries to help out because she cannot keep her limbs together. But after some months I suddenly had this vision in my head. Super scary. And about ten months in of proper training (starting 2/week to 6-10/week but no clinching, almost no sparring at all) I decided I really wanted to fight. And then it took a while to even get a fight and I only discovered how much I really wanted it when what was supposed to be my first fight got cancelled. And in the end I was smoking a cigarette having a beer when I was offered a fight five days later. So not ideal prep but it went well anyway. And nothing can beat that feeling of fighting for the first time. Everyone told me it would be just like sparring no worries and you won't feel pain. I felt a lot of pain. And it was nothing like sparring. So, even if I had done much more sparring and harder sparring I do not think I could have known before how I would react in the ring.

@guyver4 there is a thread I started on this called Unsolicited advice during training which might give you some views. Is your gym a place where people give each other feedback a lot? If it is I guess you just need to "feel" where the line is. Otherwise I would let these questions guide me: 1. Am I a teacher with a mandate to teach instructions? 2. Did this person ask for my advice? 3. Am I really experienced enough to know how to teach this particular movement/technique? 4. Why do I have this urge to give feedback to this person? Do I really want to help or does it originate from my own desire to seem knowledgeable? Learning is an individual thing. Gyms are full with people who overestimate their own knowledge and enthusiastically share their knowledge with others in a way that is not constructive.

.....oh and proper recovery stuff like nutrition sleep and body work (massage etc) is to me key to increase fitness level quicker. If I'm sloppy with that my training and endurance suffers a lot.

This is such an interesting topic. Personally I feel that if you have a decent level of conditioning you can get fight ready quite easily. But if you go from nothing it will take so much longer. We have a great fighter in my gym who is not actively fighting atm. But he joins clinching everyday to teach the others (he is one of the guys in Sylvies slomo video of Saranmuenglek clinching). He drinks a beer every evening and is as mentioned not training for fighting. But now he has an upcoming fight and he told me he needs a week to get ready. Most likely due to years and years of hard training giving him the basic conditioning needed. At fight camps in Thailand you usually train 2 2-3 hour sessions a day, 6 days/week. Morning session starting with a run and being a bit softer than afternoon sessions. Mix of bag work and pad rounds. At my gym I only join Saturday morning sessions due to my work and those are very soft. Run and then people working on their own stuff. 3 pad rounds. No clinching. Afternoon sessions start at 4pm with run or skipping depending on weather (30-40 min). Then 30 minutes clinch ending with man in the middle. Then it's either sparring usually 3-5 rounds of 3 min rounds. Or padrounds where you do your own work waiting to be called for 3 rounds of pads with 1-2 minutes in between. I often get three extra rounds of only teeps or elbows because apparently I need this . Once everyone got their pad rounds there is usually some technique drills followed by 200 jumping knees in the ring, pushups, 200 situps (but only a third of us actually doing any situps) and stretching. Done by 7pm. If any of the thai fighters have upcoming fights they will be given a lot of extra work and driven to the point of exhaustion by the trainers. The thing is people can say things like yeah we did skipping rope for 30 minutes and I did 5 rounds on the bag. But in reality they didn't skip for 30 minutes there were several breaks and the bag rounds were not efficient work. They pretend time spent in gyms is time spent training. But they just goofed around half the time not engaging in efficient training. So I feel it's difficult to get a true answer to how much time you need to prep. People are way lazier than they think. Personally (and I'm not very experienced in terms of muay thai but I've competed in other sports and have a decent understanding of how my body works) I want to keep a decent level of conditioning to always being able to train and learn. If I'm exhausted on the pads I will learn less and my movements will be sloppy. I train to train. What I find important is to drive yourself to and beyond point of exhaustion. This because I feel it increases my level of fitness, but it also teaches me that I have much more to give when I feel I'm dying. So it's both for mental training and for body conditioning. I love metcon workouts to do this. Sylvie has tonnes of very helpful articles on this topic on her blog. Perhaps look at articles tagged "overtraining". But also keep in mind that she is constantly fighting and she has done so for years. And I'm also pretty sure she might be a cyborg .

Love your review in general. But also especially this

If you meet someone on the street they would give you their nickname. If you want to adress them formally you use Khun and then their nickname. But if you add them on social media you most likely will get to know their other names. Or if you exchange emails as Emma points out above. A lot of thai people use their first name as facebook name which has the negative consequence that I keep forgetting people's nicknames which is what I generally use when talking to them. Some people use both first name and nickname on facebook which makes everything much easier. Many of them use thai letters (obviously) which makes it extremely difficult if you cannot read and write thai, especially if you want to tag them in a post . At work we have a funny system, non-thais go by their first name (no Mr or Ms) and their emails are surname@domainname. Thai staff we address using their nicknames, even our most senior colleagues and their emails are firstname@domainname. When they are new and introduce themselves they send out an email giving us their full name and then usually an apology for their name being so long and difficult to remember followed by "...but you can call me [nickname]". So I know the first name and surname of all my colleagues but refer to them and address them by their nickname. My younger thai colleagues I am casual with call me Pi. People I deal with for example companies delivering services call me Khun. I always address people more senior with me Khun, when writing an email usually you shorten it as in Dear K. Nickname (or P. ) However, in many cases with people I only deal with via email, I only know their first name and surname and not their nickname if they have not added it to their email signature. In that case, I use their first name. I never ever use their surnames. The few Muslim thais I know go by their Muslim names. I never had a thai trainer refer to themselves as a Kru, it has been other people who use it when referring to them in 3rd person. I usually use their nicknames or whatever they told me their name was when introducing themselves to me. Sometimes their fight name. At my gym we have two headtrainers, I would not think they are Arjans, they are in their early 40s, but even the thai guys refer to them as Arjan so I do too. I think it is a bit of a joke but I have no clue. However, I would not worry about this too much. Just ask how they want to be addressed. Thai people are tolerant people and understand foreigners are different and that their own system can be tricky for us. And if you in the US, I would go by local culture.

One of my former (and favorite) trainers met Karuhat recently at Rompo gym and proudly posted a photo of them both on Facebook with the caption "my idol". And others would comment and refer to Karuhat as Pi Sian. I'm pretty sure they don't know him at all so I took it as a sign that they used Pi just as dudes will use "my bro". Sort of to indicate closeness and "I know this dude he my bro"?

Oh yes, teep is probably best counter, but I feel it takes a lot of experience and practice and balance to react like this if the opponent is very fast. But I guess being tall I really would benefit from focused teep practising. Funnily enough my first session back at the gym I had to do a never ending teep session. I heard your comment in your fight video that apparently you were teeped out of breath, but I really saw nothing of it didn't seem to bother you. And thanks a lot . I've been picked apart by one of my trainers for the way I reacted to lowkicks (and everything else) and although a good thing for someone to care, it's hard.