AndyMaBobs

Honestly, I think you're at the point now where you may as well be trying out anything you think will help you. If you've trained regularly for a few years then I don't see any reason to not attempt in southpaw. I'm a southpaw for the most part and built my game off boxing/teeps - but if I want to get aggressive with kicks I've never been able to get that offence going out of Southpaw, so I'll switch to orthodox to make better use of my right low kick. Most of the time you find that switch hitters have certain go to weapons out of each stance, rather than being able to fight perfectly with everything out of both - which is why switch hitting is normally considered the fighters 'style' itself.

Follow up: Have secured a P.T. with him too. So if there's anything you wanna see, let me know

I forsee some growing pains for her because she's having to go UP in weight to compete in the deepest women's division. That being said, Tiger is a good camp. She's clearly going to be working on her ground game, so it's just a matter of adjusting her striking game and testing the waters. I'm not expecting her to become a top fighter in the division - but there will be fun fights from her I'm sure!

My gym will be hosting a seminar with Lumpinee Damien Alamos at a date to be determined. I am going to attempt to get some video with him either in or after the seminar. Is there anything anyone on here would like him to show, if I can grab him for a bit. I figure this is the forum to ask!

Whenever I see things to do with fragile masculinity in regards to training, I often get the impression that it's a cultural thing more than it is a gender thing. As a young man training Muay Thai I had a lot of issues that pushed me into training Muay Thai but it for me never came from training it. Challenges sure, but I never felt as if I couldn't get advice from more experienced guys at the gym, and now I'm in the position of a more experienced guy, training teenagers I do the same. More so than issues to do with muay thai, I find that guys training have issues more related to body confidence, such as not having visible abs, or lacking confidence due to their age (young or feeling that they are too old). That being said I find that people who train more tend to move past these issues.

I like the innovation! Won't it get knocked loose though?

That way would be cool! Especially if he's camera shy

Ramsey Dewey said recently that corrections are the lowest form of coaching, and to an extent I agree. If you go to a muay thai class and look at the guys sparring, you see them sweeping kicks, teeping, countering well and it's not like those techniques are specifically drilled again and again (especially when it comes to sweeps) with meticulous corrections to perfect it. Unless you're doing something quite wrong, everything falls into place with practise and time!

Has Kru Nu ever been in the library? I realise that there's a ton of footage of his work with Sylvie, but I'd be interested to see his style!

Another very good example!

Yeah that's all fairly standard no matter where you go. Same as with boxing with promoters, the rich people come and watch the poor people fight. That financial backing necessary to promote and give a martial art exposure is quite hard to do for working class people. Muay Thai was brought to the UK by well off guys who didn't really know Muay Thai. As Anderson Silva would say 'is normal'

There's a reason that boxing has been dominated by Black and Latin Americans in the states, and it's the same reason it was dominated by Jewish Americans in the 30s-40s. Same goes for the best Japanese fighters in karate/judo come from run down parts of Tokyo and Osaka. The rougher a neighbourhood you grow up in, the more likely getting into fights doesn't scare you, especially if you were the sort of kid who looked for trouble or hung with a bad crowd. The best example of this I can think of is Dagestan, which is probably the most dominant area in sports. This tiny part of Russia of 3 million people have not only dominated wrestling and sambo at the olympics and other international competition while representing Russia, but plenty of countries have Dagestani's who medalled for them. Which is insane, they are still a minority in terms of participants in wrestling, but have probably the biggest amount of medals proportionate to their size. I don't think it's a coincidence that they are also in one of the roughest, parts of the world, where every day has the threat of terrorism and/or war. While there are probably some, I can't really think off the top of my head any Muay Thai, MMA or boxing fighters in the UK who have come from an affluent area like Central or West London, Brighton etc. There are some, I'm sure, but I can name many from East and South London, Manchester, Leeds, etc. You generally don't take up getting hit in the face as your career unless it seems like a great opportunity for you, and if you come from a wealthier background, or have more job opportunity surrounding you, you're going to go for that.

Quite regularly I'll do drills with no shin guards and light sparring with no shin guards. It can hurt, but so long as you aren't belting each other as hard as you can, you should be fine. It's more that you have to be careful with body kicks than anything, you still try to kick to the body but you don't want to full on blast the kick like yo would sparring. The benefit of it is that you learn control and it mentally prepares you for a fight.

Happy to help dude. If you record any training videos send them to me and I'll see what help I can give. I'm sure others will too!

You don't. Not for now at least. Your best bet is to make sure in a muay thai class regularly and learning the basics, but when I say learning the basics I don't mean understanding them in principle, but I mean drilling them over and over, in the same way a Vasyl Lomachenko would. Lerdsila isn't actually doing anything crazy or advanced. He just has perfect fundamentals, because he's so comfortable there, that frees him up to feint more and throw his brazillian kicks with more accuracy! So don't get too worried about if you're doing what he would be doing in that situation, because you're going to have a very different upbringing in Muay Thai to him! Like Sylvie mentioned! There's going to be a ton of sparring and moving involved, lots of shadow boxing! But so long as you've mastered those fundamentals you'll be able to develop something similar to what he does with hard work.

Yup, completely allowed. It's also how Manny Pacquaio got a lot of his knockdowns. It's quite hard to do though. When you get it down though it's very effective.

I've trained a few children with learning difficulties - needless to say it's a challenge. We had one little boy who was very passionate about muay thai, but also very passionate about planes flying above the gym making noise. It helped that there were plenty of kids in the class who were good with him and would cheer him on

I'm happy to listen to unsolicited advice, even if someone has less experience than me. Sometimes people may say I'm doing a technique 'wrong', but that is very rare and when I hear something like that, I know better, people are sometimes confused by my technique because I've got more of a Thai style than a lot of the gym owing to having a different teacher. An environment where everyone gives each other advice and feel comfortable asking for advice should be encouraged. If someone finds it annoying then the best thing to do is politely say that you know what you're doing and want to keep practising it. You might be 'wrong' in that persons opinion, or wrong conventionally, but it shouldn't matter what that person thinks. Muay Thai is a team sport. You might fight on your own and get the glory on your own, but working with other people, training with them and building trust with them and exchanging techniques is what makes us all grow. So for me, I prefer a gym environment where that interaction exists.

We as people can get so caught up on individual successes that we sometimes forget the wonderful people who support us to do the many things we love.

That's always how I've taken it as well. I think that's where the idea of qi comes from that you hear a lot about, especially in Shaolin. When you hear them talking about the flow of qi at first you're like 'huh, okay qi isn't real' but then when you get past the apparent wizardry they are usually meaning the flow of kinetic energy. So when the punch comes and you hear that grunt and exhalation it's tensing the core and allowing that power to go through you and into the target. That's why styles with iron body/iron shirt conditioning are big on exhaling as you get punched to harden up and protect the organs.

If you want to go to Holland I'd definitely recommend Lucien Carbin, who's an acquaintance of mine! I've been meaning to go to his gym to train with him but I've been lazy! Mousid Gym is another great place to be! Just be aware that sparring in Holland is VERY hard. The British spar quite hard too but they're more likely to go at your pace - the Dutch smash really hard to the body and legs at all times. It'd be a great escapade though, you'll have a blast! If you ever get to do it I'd love to see you blog it!

I gave the article a proper read and I do have a few issues with it just factually a source. The fact that it gets the year of the fight wrong really bothers me, it was not 1963, it was 1964 as Tadashi Nakamura said in his autobiography (I trust him on the date, he was there after all!). There are obvious things about the article and this thread that I wouldn't dispute at all Sawamura's laughable fixed fights, Japanese kickboxing complete with elbows seemingly like they swiped Muay Thai and put it under a different name. All that stuff 100%. But there are some errors in the article which are normal for black belt magazine, that make me not like it as a primary source. Not that there is much available as far as information goes. But the bottom line is that in 63 Thailand issues the challenge (before Kyokushin was founded), the event gets rescheduled several times, they fought in '64. Muay Thai lost 2 of the 3 bouts, and Nakamura bitched about an unfair stoppage to elbows because in his mind him winning for most of the fight means it must be favouritism and not a come from behind victory (dumb). From all I can find on the fighters, all three were born raised and trained in Thailand, one is a Chinese immigrant. We could discuss whether or not they were 'ethnically' Thai all day but that's really neither here nor there. The issue isn't that were they ethnically the Thai, the issue is that they didn't know how to defend throws and it seems that at least two of those guys (I believe Huafai and Rawee) were coming out of retirement to do it. It's a rivalry that martial arts fans created in their minds, really this event regardless of the fights outcomes themselves just developed martial arts more and as you say, kick started kickboxing. I think saying anything more beyond that by this point in the talk is really going round in circles haha. It seems like we do agree for the most part - there's just details that I don't think are accurate, and from the magazine that bolstered Frank Dux and Ashida Kim, I can't expect them to get everything 100%

Absolutely, Haggery has been looking really good. Generally the best fighters are being put out by Keddles Gym, Double K and Bad Company Gym. There have been good fighters to come out of other gyms of course but those are the gyms that have beaten top Thai fighters at the top of their game without spending months to years training in Thailand to do it, that's the quality of the coaching in those gyms themselves.

Thai system as in the twice a day, six day a week rota that most gyms operate off of. Not as in everyone learning muay thai in the same way or with the same mechanics

Absolute best attitude anyone can have in martial arts. Everyone has their approach to techniques and they all think that their way is the right way. I really like that you recognise that.