Violet

I’m also a female and I trained at Phuket for one week back in March this year and is happy to share. I stayed at that street where tiger is at, although I did not train at tiger. I’ve went with my husband, but he did not train as often as I did while in Phuket. As a background, prior to going to Phuket I’ve been training Muay Thai for less than 2 years and no fighting experience, only done sparring with limited number of partners. To prepare for my trip, I upped the intensity and frequency of training months ahead of time so that I can get the most of my trip. Here are some of my experiences. I tried two gyms while there，first session at top team second session at dragon Muay Thai from there I decided to stick with dragon for the rest of my trip. The class at top team is definitely more demanding in terms of your physical conditioning, and all the people I seen training there are already in good conditioning. Their pad work is a bit different than the other gyms, as they will rotate you on to different pad holders. Which is kinda nice because you will get to try out different style of pad holder and if you really like one over the other you can book a few privates with them. After pad work I was told to spar with the other girls, this caught me by surprise as I wasn’t expecting that they will allow me to spar with none trainers. The girls are all very nice, the sparring went well. I then went to try dragon Muay Thai in the same day afternoon. I decided to stay at dragon because I felt more comfortable and at ease at dragon. Their class is less demanding on conditioning and more technique driven. After warmup and stretching, the trainers will guide you through some shadow boxing and then partner you up for drills. You then move on to do few rounds of bag work and few rounds of pad work with one of the trainers. After that everyone will be doing sparring, compare to top team, they put more effort into pairing people up for sparring. I think this might due to the fact there are more beginner training at dragon than top team. Basically they will group/pair off people as they see fit. And the beginners will get paired off with the trainers, so it’s totally safe. I spend the rest of the week training twice a day at dragon, one private in the morning and one group session in the afternoon. Even though I was only there for one week, my trainer was still very invested in me, as well he was not against training women and he did his best to help me improve my Muay Thai skills. He was able to identify what im good at and what I need to work on. None of the trainers made inappropriate advancement to me. On a side note, one of the kru at the gym had a fight one of the nights I was training there, I gladly joined with some of the other students to go see him fight, it was an amazing experience. The street I’ve stay at is very comfortable, easy access to food and pharmacy, lots of choices of gyms and hotels. There are many single ladies living and training in the area so it’s definitely one of the more female friendly places. To my surprise I even saw many girls entering the ring at the gyms above the bottom rope and was not told off(but at the stadium they will make sure all women entering the ring are entering under the bottom rope tho). Eitherway I always entered from the under the bottom rope even though they never demanded it. I hope this is helpful, and that you enjoy your stay at Phuket.