Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

This may help, the set of rules which distinguish Muay Thai clinch and throws from Judo (and some wrestling): Illegal Throws in Muay Thai – Just What Can’t You Do?

If it's not clear, from the array of materials above, if indeed the high art of traditional Muay Thai is a process of transduction, and the making of a fighter into a transducer (an artist), then the purposes of training, the sum of its experiences, is to create something analogous to the saturated solution which receives the "structural germ". This is in the sense in which the acquisition of skills, the experiences of training are in some real sense much more a process of saturation such that this germ can when it is introduced, will produce a cascading change in the qualities of the fighter, but as well, a training of a fighter such that in a fight, the fight itself works as a saturated solution, and the fighter the one who both saturates it (having developed a sense of narrative) and also he/she who then can introduce the structural germ to that solution, to produce the cascade which results in satisfying victory. Training often is just thought of in a structural building of skills, on top of skills. It is seen as a mechanical assemblage of parts (which ideally compliment and fit with each other). This assemblage analogy gets it wrong, and will just leave a relatively lifeless machination of parts, with few or rather short or contextless cascades, if any. The working upon "parts" (skills) is better understood as a saturation process, the experiences of saturation and growing sensitivity to a field. Readied for transduction. This likely gives insight into the traditions, customs and practices of traditional kaimuay Muay Thai training in Thailand, and why there is so little focus on technique, and the correction of technique (quite in contrast with the Western approximations and appropriations of Muay Thai). This also brings important perspective to training developments which are experienced as plateau'd, or stuck within a stage. As a general rule, if you are stuck the analogical solution is not saturated enough for transductive experiences. The practical wisdom in fighter development lies withing how to saturate a solution, and also also which structural germ to introduce and when.

I should note, as I have argued elsewhere when thinking about traditional training practices, and Bourdieu's concept of the Habitus, this is why techniques or specific patterns of Thailand's Muay Thai cannot really be taken out of Thailand contexts without radically losing much of their potency and meaning. The isolated patterns are being extracted from the cultural process of preparing, if you will, a highly saturated solution, which involves numerous charges and intensities, a solution which will react when it comes in contact with the structural germ. You can imitate the crystal that you see, copy its patterns in part, and try to build it on your own, of differing materials, or in part, but the process of crystallization, the way that something so ordered and beautiful comes out of what looks like a nothingness of water, is quite different from such exportation creates. It's a very different regime, something very, very different is expressed. This saturation of the solution (by analogy) can be thought about in terms of Bourdieu's Habitus and Doxa, which I've written about loosely in this post. If you go back to de Assis's description of the cloud of possibilities, the real of the virtual that faces the pianist, just before performance, in the light of Bourdieu's Habitus, and realize that traditional Muay Thai performance expresses the Habitus of its creation, we come closer to just what strikes mean in their milieu. Strikes, maybe be like notes, but the score is written elsewhere:

Short posts I've written which talk about metastability and how it relate to Muay Thai: Note how the function of self-organized cascading is somewhat analogous to transduction.

Unfolding Spinoza's "We do not even know all the things a body can do" This won't be a long exposition, just a leaping off point for those who want to think about the philosophical textures of the traditional forms of Muay Thai. The philosopher Simondon who would greatly influence Gilles Deleuze wrote powerfully about the concept of transduction. He was preoccupied with just how things become individuated, they become concretely what-the-are. One of the most convincing analogies from the physical sciences were from how highly ordered crystals grow from what appear to be quite disordered, saturated solutions. The introduction of a "structural germ" produces something incredibly distinct. This process provides an insight into how things become what they are. They arise out of pre-individual states, and are triggered into ordered becoming. This alone is a productive and vast picturing of the world, something Deleuze made much with in his philosophy, but what I'm writing about is the 5th chapter in pianist and theorist Paulo de Assis, where he writes about this concept of becoming, the transduction of the structural germ, in terms of musical performance, how the artist just before he plays is swimming in a cloud of intensities and possibilities, facing the score of his music, the nature of his instrument, his history of practice and performance, the history of the piece, and any number of things, which he details in the chapter's introductory ideas: The musician is the transducer of all of that, in a performance, the structured germ, which makes the entire crystallization of the music appear. There is much to say about traditional Muay Thai and it's scoring, its practice and training, its aesthetic, under this analogy and revelation, but perhaps the place to start is that first and foremost Muay Thai's traditional form is about appearance, about clarity, about the crystallization of the moment. It is for this reason that priorities of balance, rhythm, posture, command over tempo, and individuated style feature prominently in traditional Muay Thai, and much, much less so in other fighting sports and arts. This is not the artifice of scoring, an arcane and detached aesthetic, far from efficacy. Rather, it is the way that the fighting art taps into deeper, metaphysically deeper, but also physiologically deeper, command-over-space deeper aspects of superiority over space, involving the way in which style is not an ornament, added upon a foundation, but rather a grown out empowerment, an authority over space and opponent. The Muay Thai fighter, traditionally, is judged on how much he/she transduces the cloud of techniques, histories, styles, event-space, rites, gamblers, narrative shapes into a clarity of moment, tipping the fight. And the reason why narrative is so important to the traditional form of Muay Thai scoring (unlike 3 round "damage" clashes) is that in fights time is taken to build up a metastable state, in the sollution, over-saturating it, so that a structured germ can suddenly turn it. At the end of the 5th chapter de Assis brings forward the metaphysical argument that this is not just the nature of the pianist, but of what is actually human (of which we can perhaps assume so too with animals, by degrees). Living things are transducers. The Art of Muay Thai, and Art in general, is simply hyperstating the nature of the human and Life. In this series of thoughts he draws out Spinoza's famed claim "We do not even know what a body can do", which ostensibly means "We do not even know what a body can transduce." For those that follow Spinoza as I do, we see in this emphasis on decision something Spinoza argues about the life of a human being. We are all balanced on an edge (a metastable state) wherein each moment we teeter between gaining power (which is experienced as Joy) or being diminished (which is experienced as sadness), and these edge points are found in the micro-seconds of our everyday experience and perception. Our joys and diminishments tick passed us in fleeting degrees, forming patterns. There are theories of the brain that argue that the brain itself is composed to teeter in the same way, along a critical edge, between chaos (confusion) and too much order. It rides like a heartbeat between these two. What an Art does, what the practice of an art does, and indeed the higher degrees of sport, is to bring forward this natural every-day-ness of oscillation, and present it in its exaggerated and honed aspect. It manifests and makes bold the very nature of our existence, of consciousness. And this may very well be the root of the value of sport and art, beyond all else. Logic of Experimentation Paulo de Assis The 5th chapter referenced is hyperlinked above. I believe you can read it online with a simple Google sign-in to JSTOR.

It is open as a gym, but I heard that they just closed it temporarily due to a positive COVID test. I'm sure they'll be open once again in a week or so. Emma Thomas @emma is part of the gym and a really good contact on what's up there.

The vital moment in the 4th, in the fight above. Dieselnoi calls off the attack:

I realize now that at the time of the original writing we did not have the Samart vs Dieselnoi Holy Grail fight. Here it is:

The photo and my thoughts written two years ago, worth preserving here: This is what Patriarchy looks like. It is not some great evil, though certainly great evils have been committed through its tendencies, as have many goods. It's a structure, a form. You can see it in this silhouette. In the midst of all these men, and boys, thronging like like fish in a Natural school, is one of the greatest fighters of this generation, Great in terms of magnitude, Great in the old sense of the word. There are probably more fights in her single body than all the fights in all the other bodies in the ring...or at least it is not absurd to imagine it so, and to make the count. But, this is the thing. It is an absolute struggle, more difficult than any fight, or even any year of fighting, for Sylvie to even stand here, right where you see her now...in the sparring ring. Every male flows, Naturally, into this ring, like pouring water into a glass. Sylvie fights white-knuckle and teeth-gritting to even stand there, with an adequate sparring partner. It's not that Pi Nu doesn't support her, or women, he is one of the most receptive Thai trainers to female fighters we've ever seen in Thailand, and gives so much. It's that the Form of fighting does not include women, it's not in its core syntax. So it is always as if you are trying to insert a loan word, or a turn of grammar, from another language. And in the case of Sylvie who is an absolute unicorn of commitment, experience and skill, it's a very strange word indeed. It always has to be "put in" the conversation. This means she is forever, and somewhat painfully always wedging herself into the Form, and it will never end, no matter how historic she or her accomplishments become. This is the Form. And, it is even more uncomfortable than that. As a child of the Patriarchy - and I do not use this as a Bad Word, only a descriptor, "founded on the Father", arche, the Old word implies analogical things like "cornerstone", "root", Ur Source - she embodies, and reswallows the Forms of Patriarchy. She feels, instinctively as a buried intuition, that female aggression is suspect, and that it may not work out well. This does not just mean the throwing of fists, but also the insistence and persistence that one needs to Practice the throwing of fists, ultimately to be a part of the Form, regularly. There is just a low ceiling set for women in Thailand, and likely elsewhere, that if you can RIP the pads better than anyone else in the gym, fight hard and regularly winning most of your fights...you have arrived. You are "done". It cannot be conceived by anyone around her the kind of fighter she yearns to be, the kind that Shakes the Earth. So they cannot imagine why she should spar now like madwoman, or, fight like a madwoman either. Just smash the pads, spar once in a while, take your place as a unicorn. They cannot imagine the thirst and the hunger that has taken her thus far, and will take her infinitely farther. So, she takes up her leaden inheritance of passivity and obedience, lugs it to the gym, to the Church of Patriarchy, and yearns out a few small steps toward what can only be seen as a transcendence, a making. All in lead, she forces her way into the sparring ring. How to make that lead Gold. The alchemy of Ages. This is the cauldron, the crucifix. People think it's the Fight ring, but it is here, in this ring, the sparring ring, where "everyone" is welcome, and a unicorn is not (shackled from within, and without). Sylvie pulled a trick. If you (or I) won't let me be shaped by the Form, I'll just fight it out in the REAL ring. I'll use fights - a hoard and a boatload of them, a historic number - to just transform myself, shoot myself out like a star, where none have been. And that has been an incredible hack of the Form, but it only takes one so far. The ring of real alchemy is in the training ring, where the landscape of Patriarchy is most rich and subtle. That is the next battlefield, where the overburden of inheritance can be stripped away, and Eyes, yes eyes, can be truly grown. Eyes are the only path to Yodmuay. There is no other path. And Eyes must be found in the Caldron of the Form. You have to stand there, until standing there means nothing at all.

Some interesting responses on the YouTube share of this article, adding to perspective:

I should add to the run of thoughts above something I've written about elsewhere. The irony of the built in bias against aggression for its own sake is that Thailand's Muay Thai has produced some of the most skilled, aggressive, stalking fighters in combat sport history. But it doesn't do this through being biased for aggression. It actually does it through its opposite. Because defensive, countering, controlling fighters have traditionally had a scoring bias IF you were an aggressive, dern fighter you had to be very skilled, and effectively aggressive. You had a hill to climb on the scorecard, and do it against highly evolved defensive fighters. As The Bull to the favored Matador, you had to be a very good bull. It's more complicated than this, in that there is not just "one" Muay Thai in Thailand, and I do believe there is almost ideological struggle over ideal representations of excellence (the rural tough guy vs the Bangkok artful guy for instance), but there has been this tension within Muay Thai developed through its Buddhistic perspective on aggression. It's for this reason that we like to say that Muay Thai isn't about aggression, it's about dominance. And there are many ways of being dominant, especially in a scoring aesthetic that praises self control and the control of the opponent. I write this as the husband of a fighter who is a dern, forward-fighting Muay Khao fighter who has fought in the country more times than any other westerner (260), and has lost many, many times to the retreating, defensive fighter who held the scoring bias. Instead of feeling that the scoring wasn't "fair" (ie, Western, or non-Thai) we came to thoroughly embrace it and admire it as beautiful. The advancing fighter holds an extra scoring burden because of how aggression is viewed. It's a puzzle to be solved and brings out much greater possibilities in the aggressive fighter. This feels right to the sport and art of Thailand's Muay Thai.

This really wasn't meant to be about Mike Tyson per se. It just so happened that the beautiful, insightful quote came from his formative trainer, and Mike practically embodies the quick KO fighter. It all came together in a brief space of the writing. But I would never say that Mike Tyson was unskilled. He was spectacularly skilled. In fact Teddy Atlas in his criticism says the same thing. The younger version of him is one of my favorite fighters to watch, and he's inspiring. Sylvie's even stolen from him a bit. This is really about notions of the acme of the sport, what some might say is the deeper value of it as an art, or a meaningful practice beyond that of sheer entertainment. I've written about Thailand's Muay Thai as an artful in the article linked below. The example of Mike though, as a fighter who admittedly came from fear, makes a good wedge into the ideas that are opened up here. It isn't that there shouldn't be KOs, or that there shouldn't be aggression. In fact much of Golden Age Muay Thai was founded on the contrast between "The Bull" (an aggressive fighter, Muay Khao or Muay Maat) and "The Matador" (Muay Femeu). Traditional Muay Thai excellence requires aggression in its pairing. But...the acme fighter isn't The Bull. The acme fighter is the artful, technical fighter who can control The Bull. The concept isn't completely foreign to Western combat sports. Tough guy Rocky Marciano vs silky smooth Sugar Ray Robinson. Everyone understands that dichotomy. What the Ancient Greek orator Chrysostom is talking about in his elegy is an acme image of a fighter, the idea of a beautiful boxer, a boxer who embodies qualities beyond those of his skill set. Noble qualities. He ideally endures the test of fire of the battle, the possibility of loss, and does not seek to end it prematurely. He seeks to crumble his opponent, almost from within, like kicking out the legs of a table. Chrysostom is setting up a hierarchy between this ideal fighter, and other Ancient Greek boxers who were surely incredibly tough. If we wanted to do similarly in western boxing (which unlike Muay Thai does celebrate the knockout as a pure virtue) we might compare sleek footed Ali who won extremely arduous battles, yet was quite artful vs explosive Mike. There have been lots of heavy handed knockout fighters in traditional Muay Thai, many of them celebrated. But the idea that is opened up is that broadly, in traditional Muay Thai the knockout is not hunted for its own sake. It is not a virtue unto itself. If you gain dominance in the 4th round and weaken your opponent, you don't go and chase them into the corner in the 5th round and end them. A fundamental part of this is because of how aggression is viewed, and that there are aspects of the sport which go towards the values of art, and ideals of the perfection of oneself. Where I have written on Thailand's Muay Thai as art:

I would agree with this, that there is always a chance that Thai culture becomes romanticized, "orientalized" or exoticized for Westerners. But we've been living here for 9 years now I believe, and we've done our best to understand the differences in culture that are expressed in Thailand's Muay Thai. Much of this actually comes from Sylvie learning how to specifically win fights under the Thai aesthetic, which involves learning how fighters and fights are scored. A lot of Westerners over the decades have come to Thailand to fight and felt like there has been unfair judging against them, as foreigners. But what we've come to see is that many who have fought in the country just don't understand Thai scoring. A big chunk of that misunderstanding is how aggression is scored in the ring. In the West aggression is almost a pure good. You show aggression, this is a near automatic plus. In Thailand, all things being equal, you have to be very careful in how you show aggression. Aggression on its own actually could be a scoring negative. As a baseline, for instance, in the West the advancing fighter appears to be in control. In Thailand it's (all things being equal) the retreating fighter. If you don't understand this, you aren't going to understand why a fighter won or loss often. It took Sylvie over 100 fights in the country to even learn how to fight a 5th round. It isn't esoteric philosophy, it's actually solving the problem of how to win a close 5th round in this fight culture. These are really subtle skills. Just from learning how fights are scored, and scored quite differently than in the West, the Buddhistic foundation of the culture seems to be the best root explanation for the difference in view of aggression. She wrote about it here: The Art and Psychology of the 5th Round in Thailand

Rodtang isn't really regarded an elite fighter in the context of Thailand's Muay Thai, certainly not historically, and not even of his generation. [Edit in: He was a MAX Muay Thai champion (an Entertainment Muay Thai promotion), then held the Omnoi belt for a year, never was a Lumpinee or Rajadamnern champion, then started fighting internationally...at least by wikipedia.] He's rightfully made a huge name for himself in an International promotion which favors aggression, is designed to promote aggression, and present Muay Thai as close as possible to International Kickboxing. ONE Championship is pretty much tailor made for a fighter like Rodtang. It is nominally a "Muay Thai" promotion. It calls some of their fights "Muay Thai", but they have been highly modified, including the scoring criteria. In many ways ONE is the opposite of Thailand's Muay Thai. They want the knockout, they want the highlight reel moment of aggression.

Yes. Cus is NOT saying that cowardice drives the KO. He is saying that fear drives both fatigue...and the KO. But, when a fighter is effective, that fear turns into "Tiger" energy. It is me that that is adding the analysis to Cus's words that it is still fear driving the KO, which is the observation of Chrysostom, the Ancient Greek orator. The Cus quotation is setting the framework to understand what Chrysostom is saying. Tyson himself though affirms that in his opinion the reason he was so aggressive was because he feared his opponent even more than they feared him. He attributes his own explosive, hyper-aggressive style to the very high level of his own fear. Paraphrasing the quote of Mike's: "If you're afraid of me, I'm a thousand times more afraid of you. That's why I'm more aggressive." Teddy Atlas seems to be saying a similar thing in his criticism of Tyson. From Chrysostom's perspective, this trying to end it fast is a lack of courage and psychological endurance. Not saying that this is the correct interpretation, only setting the frame to understand how some fight cultures do not admire the knockout the way that we in the West do.

This is Sylvie's 269th fight, a televised fight with her commentary: I was able to have a camera in hand for this one and shoot a photo essay on it. You can find it here: The Magic of The Ropes: Fight 269 You can see this quick video scroll through those photos here:

Yes, very much so. Which brings us to perhaps a coincidence of how both Stoicism and Buddhism treat or have programs of self-control. I suspect that the real reason that Dio Chrysostom can speak to virtues that approximate scoring tendencies in traditional Muay Thai 2000 years later is that Thailand's Muay Thai is Buddhistic. So what we are really seeing is that Stoicism (and other Hellenic aesthetics) and Buddhism share a perspective on human affects, especially those of anger and aggression. Thanks for the links, I'll enjoy looking through them. Attached is the article: Athletic Beauty as Mimēsis of Virtue The Case of the Beautiful Boxer which talks about the prevalent social and philosophical attitudes around boxing in the era of The Terme Boxer. Athletic Beauty as Mimēsis of Virtue The Case of the Beautiful Boxer.pdf

I look at this photo and I cannot help but feel that I'm looking at Sylvie's origin story. This exact moment, this Joker's bathroom scene. In truth there is no origin moment, and in reality this was just a moment in the flow of things, but seeing it frozen here, photographically, it bends back through time and founds itself. It's that she is looking at herself, and taking herself in, as a whole, wearing the Frankenstein scars of her recreation, made by Muay Thai, and she does not shrink back. She is incorporated anew, almost literally. The backstory to this moment is that she was booked on a Yokkao fight. What a huge promotional name at the time for a 100 lb fighter who had been mixing it up in the North, fighting at documented rates no fighter ever had before, just pounding the local, very active Thai circuit for 2 years in the country. You can see her record here. She was making history already then, but she was nobody. She had a few passionate supporters, those that had followed her journey from Master K's New Jersey basement on YouTube, but on the face of Muay Thai itself, she was just another female fighter somewhere in Thailand. We were exploring moving down to Pattaya to get more serious training from Sakmongkol, and maybe better clinch training from a little gym filled with Thai boys, but had not made the move yet. Sylvie was a "clinch fighter" at the time, but honestly didn't really know how to clinch yet, and wasn't getting much clinch training back in the North. She was fighting, she was winning, but it was largely just will-power and determination, not really knowing. Suddenly she got an offer through an Italian connection in Pattaya to fight on Yokkao. Wow, okay. The fight was at 46 kg, but then suddenly it was at 48 kg. We didn't care. Sylvie just fought everyone. Giving up weight to someone we didn't know, not arguing for - or having someone leverage for us - small advantages wasn't and isn't our thing. "They change the name, they change the shorts" in the Wanderlei Silva way, something she really embraces. Turns out, she's fighting one of the best female fighters in Thailand over the past 5 years, Lommanee. We had no idea. Giving a few more pounds, huh. Sylvie was diced by Lommanee's infamous lead elbow, and experienced a transformation. This happened on several levels. One, its very difficult to give up significant weight vs elite fighters. Sylvie just wasn't there yet. There heart was there, but she wasn't formed. Secondly, her bloody face zoomed and bounced off satellites and ran through the Muay Thai world. As the Yokkao commentators made protective sexist comments about this worrisomely happening to "a girl", her asking the doctor to let the fight go on with blood streaming down her face became, right then, a kind of superpower of dignity. Sylvie writes about this experience of suddenly being seen here: Can Bleed Like a Man – Lumpinee, Muay Thai, Culture, Sexism and Meme A fighter has to be seen in order to exist, because fighting is a display, a performance before the public eye. It is an art that involves peak human states taken on so as to pull the public in. A fighter who is not seen is not a fighter, in a certain way. This is the first time that Sylvie was actually seen. To this day people tell her they know her from this fight, sometimes even thinking that it happened recently. But she is being bathed in the blood of public vision. She is being born into existence, as a fighter, in an origin sort of way. With 269 fights, the cusp of 200 fights beyond this her 70th, and 218 stitches taken to the face, this was her origin, when she stepped into blood. It's not the first time she's bled, but it's the first time the blood covered her, and she was seen. It's honestly a horrible moment on the face of it. It's embarrassing to be cut in any fight. It's embarrassing to just be out mastered in the ring. There is a well one can fall in with a loss like this, a dark, colluding well. But Sylvie has just incredible resilience, a kind of Phoenix power. Like complex comic book heroes (or villains) she walks with her extreme discomfort and shame like one walks with a shadow. She was seen. She walked with blood. I've known and loved her for a long time now, and I don't fully understand the powers of her endurance and transformation, I wrote a little about in 2016 here, but somehow this fight and that she was seen, bloodied, constituted her as a fighter, assembled her. The epic journalistic Muay Thai Library documentary project was but a flicker of a thought in the future, her years of struggling in the clinch in the training ring were before her, her friendship with legends of the sport, fights upon fights taking on massive weight disadvantages, beating World Champions out of her weight class, all before here...but here she had kind of Madame Bathory'd herself, and embraced herself as a new, imperfect, constructed, hardened, dreaming new thing. A force of fighting. It did not happen at the exact moment when the photo was taken before the mirror, above. But it was happening then. You can see it in her eyes. She is taking all of herself in. There is no shrinking back, no concerned examination. She sees the whole thing of herself. The Yokkao broadcast and all the subsequent images that flowed from it was when she was seen, but that was not the origin. It was when in the aftermath of that blood, those stitches, she saw herself. The path she walks to this day is extremely dangerous. That moment in the mirror was the consummate, retroactively imbued moment of origin...perhaps, but from that origin, from who she began in her embrace became a very difficult climb. It's a quite vertical climb up a rockface where honestly no one has taken hand holds or foot holds before. It began then, but it was only the first day. Since then being seen, and seeing yourself has become the weaving on a loom, back and forth, getting into the ring and bathing oneself in violence hundreds of times. I recall one of the variations of the origin story of Achilles, the near invulnerable epitome warrior of Homeric Greece. The goddess Thetis is said to have thrown her off-spring into the fire upon birth, each time, until she found one that was impervious from her divinity. In some sense, this is what fighting is. The exposure of the flesh to the fire that burns it until you find some composition of the self which remains unburned, unconsumed. I look at that photo at the top of this article and I see that composition. I see that body of herself that takes all of herself in, the stitches of her transformation. Origin Story.

A little more on the idea of the cowardice of the knockout, take in Teddy Atlas's harsh & controversial statement that Mike Tyson "never won a fight". Teddy Atlas assisted in Mike Tyson's training under Cus D'Amato (and had a bitter break with Tyson). At the very least it weaves into the idea that the purpose of the knockout may actually be trying to find a way out of the pressure of a continued fight and the possibility of failure. The sheer explosive, very quick knockout style of Mike Tyson would lend to this possible interpretation of a use of the knockout : In support of this view, as Mike Tyson said in the recent ABC Sports documentary on him: "If you're afraid of me, I'm a thousand times more afraid of you. That's why I'm more aggressive."

Golden Rule: When in doubt outside of Thailand go for the KO. hahaha.

It depends on if it is just modified Muay Thai (limiting weapons and changing the way aggression is scored) or if it is technically Kickboxing, as in scored as the sport is commonly scored. If the judges are scoring for kickboxing, as a sport, there are some very big differences. The most important one is that in kickboxing you can take kicks on your arms and they don't score, including head kicks. These are some of the most dependable points in Muay Thai and they are more or less null in Kickboxing. This means your upper body guard is important. It also means that attacks to the lower body can score higher in Kickboxing than in Muay Thai (where low kicks only score if they contort the opponent). The graphic below shows some of this. It's not 100% as head shots in Kickboxing score highly when not blocked. Also, broadly, punches score much higher in Kickboxing. At least that's my sense of it. Also, forward pressure is much better regarded in Kickboxing than it is in traditional Muay Thai. Short advice: pressure, throw in combinations, mix in lots of low kicks, maintain a strong upper body guard, punch more than mid-kick.

Also important, the Yodkhunpon shadowboxing session: #104 Yodkhunpon Sittraipum - The Art of Shadowboxing (64 min) watch it here Some have said this is one of the favorite sessions in all the Library. It's very rare to get detailed instruction and advice on How to Shadowboxing, let alone from a great fighter fo the past. This is a FULL hour of how to shadowbox, learn with me as I learn from The Elbow Hunter of 100 Stitches Yodkhunpon, the greatest Elbow Fighter in Thai history.

Here is Sylvie's quick vlog on "how to punch with a loose hand": You can also study Neung's boxing style in the Muay Thai Library: #71 Napapol Giatsakchokchai - Powerful Boxing For Muay Thai (81 min) watch it here Nothing is a better match than world class boxing added to fundamentally sound Muay Thai. Napadol was one of the best western boxers in all of Thailand, a WBC champion, and he teaches a gorgeous, powerful boxer's technique that is easily married to Muay Thai.

To me this is huge. The worrying trend that all of Thailand would start to be pushed toward new "Entertainment Muay Thai" action-first models, reducing clinch and devaluing high-level defensive skills gets exciting news in this. Lumpinee already has remodeled itself on hyper-modern, commercialized Muay Thai meant for an international audiences (not necessarily quality or skill set), becoming distinctly non-Thai in many ways. Regular MMA promotion will have its debut as part of the New New Lumpinee Stadium in January. It had me concerned that everything was just going to slide in one direction, some promotions much more than others, but all of them shifting. Things change fast in Thailand once they get going, and one never knows where it can swerve. But Lumpinee GoSport shows are already mixed shows, with "real" lower level Muay Thai on a card, also with something like "Entertainment Muay Thai" as well (these fights are only 3 rounds, but it's unclear if it's judged in the clash-only, Channel 8 ruleset). This New New Lumpinee approach was probably somewhat mimicking the mixed cards of ONE, where Kickboxing, MMA and modified rules Muay Thai (in the Entertainment, clinchless style) have had success. It's quite startling that Superchamp and Hardcore, which after the demise of MAX Muay Thai, have been the spearhead of Entertainment Muay Thai promotion would open itself up to 5 round, regular rules Muay Thai. It's not completely clear if they will be judging in a traditional clinch and defense can win style, or if the "if you back up you lose" rules will be in effect (a big, important deal). At the very least it shows that a variety of rule set fights on a promotion are being seen as the way forward, and it sets up a direct comparison and competition between Lumpinee GoSport and Superchamp/Hardcore (Channel 8), not to mention the coming Fairtex mixed card promotions that are soon due in Lumpinee as well. The move towards 5 round fights by Superchamp/Hardcore at the very least shows that even in the "Entertainment Muay Thai" model, which Superchamp/Hardcore has a firm lead in, they see incorporating more or less traditional Muay Thai as an advantage. Maybe it's to raise the value of the brand and bring more widespread legitimacy? Saying: we are not just "entertainment" fighting. Maybe they'll bring in bigger Thai names and compete with the transformations that are happening at Lumpinee? At the very least it gives more foothold to the value of traditional kinds of Muay Thai, and a desire to braid things together. These kinds of moves, across promotions, also coincidentally raise the value of foreign fighters in the country. As more and more promotions embrace mid- and low- tier skill set matchups, which are almost always Thai vs non-Thai, and the more these promotions take a bigger slice out of the Muay Thai pie, the more non-Thai fighters are needed.

The famed trainer of Mike Tyson Cus D'Amato had a spectacular theory on what made fighters tired. Fear: “Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning in any area, but particularly in boxing. For example, boxing is something you learn through repetition. You do it over and over and suddenly you’ve got it. …However, in the course of trying to learn, if you get hit and get hurt, this makes you cautious, and when you’re cautious you can’t repeat it, and when you can’t repeat it, it’s going to delay the learning process…When they…come up to the gym and say I want to be a fighter, the first thing I’d do was talk to them about fear…” “The next thing I do, I get them in excellent condition….Knowing how the mind is and the tricks it plays on a person and how an individual will always look to avoid a confrontation with something that is intimidating, I remove all possible excuses they’re going to have before they get in there. By getting them in excellent condition, they can’t say when they get tired that they’re not in shape. When they’re in excellent shape I put them into the ring to box for the first time, usually with an experience fighter who won’t take advantage of them. When the novice throws punches and nothing happens, and his opponent keeps coming at him…the new fighter becomes panicky. When he gets panicky he wants to quit, but he can’t quit because his whole psychology from the time he’s first been in the streets is to condemn a person who’s yellow. So what does he do? He gets tired. This is what happens to fighters in the ring. They get tired. This is what happens to fighters in the ring. They get tired, because they’re getting afraid….Now that he gets tired, people can’t call him yellow. He’s just too “tired” to go on. But let that same fighter strike back wildly with a visible effect on the opponent and suddenly that tired, exhausted guy becomes a tiger….It’s a psychological fatigue, that’s all it is. But people in boxing don’t understand that.” …[Heller, 61] Trainer of one of the most vicious and entertaining knockout artists in modern boxing reveals how it is fear that can drive the knockout. One of the more inscrutable aspects of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is that classically the knockout is seldom chased. There have been a handful of knockout artists, but the most esteemed fighters, legends of the sport were not knockout fighters. You'd see an elite fighter with 120 fights against top tier competition and maybe 10 or 12 KOs. In the West we thirst for the knockout. It's practically the entire entertainment goal of watching fighting. Highlight cut-ups are filled with starchings. It's the porn of fighting. Why do Thais - who by many measures make up some of the most skilled fighters in combat sports - not esteem the knockout? A large measure of this is that aggression is not viewed in the same way in Buddhistic Thailand as it is viewed in other cultures. It lacks self-control, a big aesthetic dimension of traditional Muay Thai is the exercise of control over oneself. But I turn to Cus D'amato's quote because I ran into a very interesting passage on the boxing of antiquity. The Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (c. 40 – c. 115 AD) is describing the virtues of the undefeated boxer Melancolmas. And one of the things that really struct me was that he claimed that knocking out an opponent was an act of cowardice. A fear of endurance: source notes linked Nearly 2,000 years ago in Hellenic Greece the same equation of fear, fatigue and aggression that Cus D'amato harnessed to produce the great Mike Tyson, was already understood, but fell in another light. The rule set of Greek boxing appears to have favored defensive fighting, and depending on your source, either consisted of a boxer fighting multiple opponents in succession, or fighting one opponent until collapse or relent. The fear and fatigue, the prospect of endurance was real and heightened. The praise for Melancomas was that he never took the easy way out and sought to end the fight, the test of himself, to end the fear by knocking his opponent out. It was rather through mastery of his opponent - and himself - that he would win. In the mouth of Chysostom we also find the aesthetic of Thailand's femeu fighter. He is the fighter who masters both himself and the space, and produces a victory out of the crumbling of his opponent's character. He chooses defeat, or collapses under the weight of its inescapability. When I read this I was quite struck, even feeling that I had never quite thought about this before, but somewhere in my mind it must have been registering that I had all the related thoughts that make this up, because I also stumbled on an old essay I wrote about how knockouts can feel like they have taken the "cheap" way out: you can read that essay here "Shame and Why Fighting Signals the Glue of What Holds Us Together" What's telling is that both Cus D'Amato and Chrysostom believe the same thing. Fear rises and the fighter is looking for a way out. Cus directs that fear into an instinct to end it all with a KO, Hellenistic Greece 2,000 years ago - and in many quarters of Thailand's traditional Muay Femeu greatness - counted the endurance of that fear, and its resolve through self control, and the control of the opponent as the greater art of fighting. This coincidence of fight philosophy came out of my research into the Terme Boxer, or The Boxer at Rest. A bronze sculpture of a boxer who has been bloodied and scarred by the endurance of his match. Contrary to the Greek classic ideal of the Apollonian athlete, depicted as standing, flawless and physically beautiful, this statue embraces the realism of the boxer 2,000 years ago. Scholars are not entirely sure why he is so realistically shown, but some feel that it was in answer to an over indulgence, an eros, in the image of the untouched boxer. Some feel that the sculpture depicts in inner beauty of a man facing that fear and enduring it, overcoming himself: What is interesting is that if the fighting arts / sports are to have culture value beyond the sheer visceral release of watching people get starched, some semblance of the idea that the knockout is an act of cowardice needs to take hold. Some sense in which "just wanting to end this thing" might be looking for a way out. We are conditioned to feel that the retreating fighter is the cowardly one, and we can certainly understand how that might be so. But perhaps best is to understand that there are two exits from the fear, one in disengagement, and the other in trying to cut it short through sudden violence. If a fighter is being forged like a blade, it's the lasting presence in the heat which creates the transformation and the perfection of the steel.