Thomas V

Hello fellow forum dwellers, I am trying to figure out how to make the most progress with a limited amount of time. Any feedback is welcome. My situation: I currently spend about 6 hours per week on Muay thai. Some weeks this drops to 3-4 hours, but I've been training 6 hours per week quite consistently for about 6 months now. Most weeks my schedule looks like this: Monday or Tuesday: 1 hour on the heavy bag Thursday: 2 hours on the heavy bag Saturday morning: 1 hour of technical instruction (1v1 trying out different techniques with a trainer correcting us, controlled class environment) Sunday: 2 hours on the heavy bag Warm up before heavy bag session: 5 minutes of skipping & 5 minutes of shadow (no particular focus during shadow) Equipment available at home: Heavy bag, skipping rope, running shoes Some limiting factors are: I live in Belgium, not Thailand. So I can't just go to a Muay thai gym any time of the day. (Only scheduled classes) With winter arriving, outdoor temperatures get to about freezing point every night, so indoor training is preferred. Goal & alterations to schedule My overall goal is to become more skilled in muay thai (fitness is a bonus). I want to improve my ability to fight, although I don't currently plan to participate in any actual fights. In order to improve, I am trying to free up 30 minutes every morning before work to train as well (on top of the schedule above). Some other changes / improvements I could make at the moment are: Replace heavy bag session on thursdays with a sparring class. I haven't attended yet, but trainer says students go at about 50-70% power (shin guards, 16oz gloves, no headgear). replace monday/tuesday heavy bag session with private sessions with a trainer My questions to you What does your schedule look like? What alterations would you make to my schedule? If you could free up half an hour every morning for training, what would you do? (run / skip / shadow box / ...) Is it useful to incorporate sparring for casuals/beginners? If so, how often should you do it? I appreciate all input from both hobbyists and actual fighters.

I watched Jaroentong's session a few months back, and completely forgot about it. After watching the session again last night, I am definitely going to go over some of his and Karuhat's switches in slow motion to see how they time their switches with the opponent's movement. As for the drills: I started thinking about drills for switching stance when watching some of the footage of general Tunwakom training Tim and Tyler. It seems like the very first thing he works on, is switching stance while keeping protected at all times: simply walking up and down, while staying guarded and balanced. I'm going to try the Tunwakom walk, as well as working on stepping back and countering on the heavy bag, like Xestaro suggests. These seem like some solid options to get started. As for Kevin's footwork suggestion, footwork is something I've probably been neglecting too much. At the moment my footwork is good enough that I don't fall over my own feet, but there's definitely a lot of room for improvement. Yodkhunpon's footwork really is something special. In my mind, when working on footwork you should focus on being light on your feet, and never being unbalanced. However I'm not certain if there's better things to aim for. What do you think the focus should be when working on footwork?

Short version I am a natural southpaw and starting to work on striking in both southpaw and orthodox stances. Work schedule does not line up with class schedules of local gyms, so working on this solo at home. Allready watched Karuhat, Samart & sifu mcInnes patreon sessions. Looking for advice on switching between stances in a fight, specifically: solo drills, possible pitfalls and which fighters to watch. Long version I am a natural southpaw, and have been casually training (1 class / week for a year) + 1-3 Heavy bag sessions / week at home (1-2hours at low - medium intensity). Not in shape (when going for a run, after 2-3 km I'm done). For the past few months I haven't been able to go to classes due to a new work schedule, but I still do heavy bag sessions by myself. In these heavy bag sessions, i'll do sets of about a 100 of single strikes & simple combos (e.g. 100 teeps, 100 1-2's, 100 knees, 100 midkicks, 100 elbows, ... ). I aim to do about 2000 strikes per session, with a couple hundred of each type of strike and about a 1000 teeps. For the last few weeks I've been dividing these sets evenly between Orthodox and southpaw stance. There's still a huge gap between the effectiveness of my strikes in southpaw and orthodox, but I'm definitely making progress. Since I plan to continue working on striking out of both stances, it seems like a good idea to carve out some extra time to work on actually switching between both stances. Usually I'd turn to Youtube for guides at this point, but I've found surprisingly little information on switching stances effectively. Most video's on this subject fall in 1 of 2 categories: The video explains "The stance switch". Which is basically the movement you'd make when throwing a switch-kick. (Which seems a little limited, if your goal is to develop a switching style) Videos like Sylvie's Patreon content, specifically the Karuhat videos. In these, you can see the way Karuhat is moving, which in itself is very helpful. However, these videos lack specific drills or exercises you can work on if you don't have a switching master to correct you. Rather than rambling on and turning this post into a long wall of text, at this point I'll simply list a number of questions, which could help me and hopefully others who want to work on stance switching: 1. What are some good fighters to watch for switching footwork? Already looking into: Karuhat 2. Are there any specific videos you would recommend (Patreon or otherwise)? Already looking at: On the forum: Tim's sessions with general Tunwakom (specifically the movement drill in day 1 vid 1) On patreon: all Karuhat sessions On patreon: session with Sifu McInnes On patreon: session with Samart 3. Do you know of any specific drills I can work on? I am Mostly looking for drills without a partner. However, drills with a partner will probably be useful for other readers, so please post those as well. 4. What are some pitfalls of stance switching, I should look out for? The answer that's all over the internet, is: Your defense will suffer. However, people never seem to feel the need to go into details here. I would appreciate any answers with specifics.

Yesterday, I sent the following message directly to Sylvie. While the question was originally meant for her, I'd appreciate other people's insights as well. --- actual message --- I have been casually (1 or 2 classes per week) training Muay thai near my home in Belgium for about a year. The classes are great, but there is little to no clinching. The main reason is that the gym's head trainer has very little clinching experience. As I'd really like to get into clinching, I am going to take some privates with another trainer at the gym. Apparently he has some clinching experience, and his knowledge is probably adequate for learning the basics like posture, balance, swimming in, same basic positions and their counters. Having watched most of your content on Patreon, (your videos with Yodkhunpon are especially awesome), there are a few things I want to integrate into my clinching sessions from the beginning. 1. Playing around with the clinch, not just doing drills 2. Building a frame (You explained it quite well in a video where you're teaching it to your friend Kate) 3. learning some extremely dominant positions to work towards. Looking through your Patreon content, the following positions stood out to me: 1. The basic lock you learned from Bank (Seems like a strong basic position to learn, and useful to progress to even better positions) 2. Satanmuanglek's Lock, using shoulder pressure under the chin (Seems like a direct upgrade to Bank's lock, if you can manage to get to it) 3. Tanadet's long clinch (Looks like it's very powerful once you get the hang of it, and can relax in the position the way Tanadet does) 4. Rambaa's arm lock (Seems like a guaranteed win, if you can get into this position) A few other positions I'd like to look into in the long term are: Yodkhunpon's standard clinch position (1 hand controlling the neck/head, the other resting on the opposite bicep/shoulder, ready to elbow) Dieselnoi's favorite head lock: 2 hands on the back of the opponents head, and kneeing until your opponent collapses These last two look great in your video's, but I suspect they're more dependent on the specific style of striking of the fighter to be successful. Do you think the overall approach I describe above is a good way to go about learning clinch? Do you think the dominant positions I described are a good collection to look into, or would you add some more / leave a few out? I'd appreciate any advise you can give me. Thomas