Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

Only if you disturb your opponent, which means moving them off the spot, or psychologically affecting them. There is a secondary, more subtle way that it can score, and sometimes score highly. If you use it to "ring control" your opponent, meaning, juggling them in some way, appearing as if you are keeping them at the distance you want them to be, when you want them to be there. You can do this without disturbing your opponent physically or emotionally, and still score. But just a single, well placed teep that has no visible effect doesn't really score, at least by my observation.

Here, look at Somrak in this fight (red). He's facing a very tough opponent in Boonlai who gave lots of people a tough time. Somrak is fighting him with Ning, it really isn't Stoic, its something else: Ning isn't just a monk-like being unperturbed, it also has a kind of flair to it. It's the Buddhistic floating through, but it is also the coolness of an assassin. Which is why that article above, on how the Nak Muay is a blend of the Monk and the Nakleng. You can see that aspect of Ning in the fighting style of Karuhat:

The principle she referred to was "Ning", is very important component of Muay Thai excellence in Thailand. You can win entire fights through Ning. Samart, who many consider the greatest ever, was a Master of Ning, and his reputation for Ning made him very hard to beat. It's been a while since I read the stoics, but I don't think eudaimonia maps perfectly onto Ning. From what I recall, eudaimonia is a kind of blessedness. It literally means having a guardian angel (daimon) who watches over you, and is strongly connected to Greek arete (nobility and excellence). It carries with it a kind of imperviousness, and also an aspect of being above it all. There are many rough parallels between Buddhism and Stoicism, and sometimes when I'm reading western stoic influenced writers it feels like they have read Buddhism as well. Spinoza is a good example. But Buddhistic Ning, at least as far as I have come to understand it, does not have quite the same Christian-izable removal from events (at least to my feel). You are un-preturbed at a different level, maybe. The stoic is somehow above and removed. The Buddhist much more in the flow of things, in their reality, and due to that, undisturbed (if I had to take a stab at what I'm feeling here). Both of them counteract reaction, but use a difference of mechanism. That being said, if you became quite stoic about things in a Muay Thai gym in Thailand all the Thais would feel that you are behaving in the right way. To me there has always been a weird stiffness to western stoicism, that flows from concepts of toughness, endurance and maybe hierarchy of Being . Very inspiring and effective too. But in Ning there is an additional flexibility, a flowing quality. If you look at Ning fighters like Samart and Somrak you would never immediately think of them as Stoic, even in the traditional, philosophical sense of the word. They are almost floppy.

Geez, such a large, loaded issue that ultimately comes down to Muay Thai branding, and it's value. Muay Thai is pulled in two directions, right? Dive in, and become more and more like Kickboxing, which itself isn't very popular, which is parasitic upon MMA...so, ultimately, become more and more like MMA. There is a stream flowing, let's try to be in it as much as we can. And, alternately, try to brand Muay Thai as distinct, full of cultural heritage, unique, and not like Kickboxing at all. It seems to me that the more it tries to become like Kickboxing it's just going to be a weird form of Kickboxing. And as Kickboxing is already terribly niche, this kind puts Muay Thai in a very tiny corner with almost no real possibility for growth. Additionally, if we are going to admit that at least in the United States Muay Thai is always going to be niche, niche sports thrive on the passion of their followers. It isn't going to be huge numbers that is going to float that boat, but rather the intensity of the few. All this points to - at least to me - that western expressions of the sport really do have to embrace the Thai-ness of the sport, and this includes it's practices and beliefs, the things that make it historically special, enrich it. There are branding advantages to this. The specialness can feel exotic (there is a history of martial art passion through the exoticness of it), and it can feel transportive. The music is part of that. There is also just the case for preserving Muay Thai's identity, as an identity. I've written in the past on what I believe are the 6 core aspects of the sport, the last of these includes the cultural anchor: The Essence of Muay Thai – 6 Core Aspects That Make it What It Is

Sylvie has written and spoken a lot about this. Here is a list of articles that will give you insight, it's a very different scoring system that prizes balance, dominance but not necessarily aggression, and what is called Ning, the performed in ability to be affected, check those articles out: 8 Limbs Us - Muay Thai Scoring But yes, you can be hit in the back, and even the back of the head, which is why there is very strong advisement to never turn your back in the ring.

This is pretty insane, because I was just talking with Sylvie this morning that she needs to write this kind of book, because nothing that we know in this area of exists, if we are speaking of Thailand's Muay Thai. There are definitely philosophical/metaphysical/religious/cognitive underpinnings to Muay Thai in Thailand, but they have not been teased out, on their own. I think she's going to do it if we can find a publisher. I would be interested in what others post, if anything though. I'll add something if I think of it. These are Academic articles on Muay Thai in English which Sylvie and I have run across and read, though nothing really touches on this subject. You'll get a little bit of it in this essay on the nature of Thai hypermasculiity: Thai Masculinity: Postioning Nak Muay Between Monkhood and Nak Leng – Peter Vail which talks about the versions of masculinity that are expressed by the Thai fighter:

I like all your thoughts. I think there is a fundamental kinetic relationship between a grounded foot, which creates a leverage point, and the ability to store energy through torquing/tension, that come by virtue of that grounded foot (feet). There are other ways of creating tension (storing energy to be released) in a more localized sense, without such a direct relationship to that grounding, I imagine, but ultimately it seems to come back to that grounding, fixing the point. Where there is relaxation, where there is tensioning/torquing, seems to be all the subtleness of a technique, if I understand your question or idea here.

I checked out another compilation of the same kids, some of it really looked like excellent fake fighting. Punches pulled, like little whacks, but just for sound. Some might be hard (leg kicks, hey, there's no damage in that). This seems like Chinese performance, not far from the stuff we saw with Phetjee Jaa and her brother that freaked out the internet. But as Sylvie said, you don't know for sure unless you are there. Totally. And Sylvie and me might see this in a very different way because we see VERY competent young fighters all the time. We see 10 year olds that know how to handle themselves better than 30 year olds, so that can color our sense of safety too. But, to me, these kids look like they are swimming in water they have been been in for many years.

Ha, this is the video that got Sylvie writing in the first place. I think JWP and Sylvie are 100% on opposite ends on this. Sylvie looks at this and she's like: These kids aren't even making contact. JWP is like "Holy Fuck!" I think JWP has been outside of Thailand for too long, hahahaha.

Yes, Somrak has been on everyone's list, including our own! We got very, very close to filming with him when he had his own gym in Bangkok. We visited and filmed there (he wasn't around, so we filmed with some of his trainers), and then we visited again just to talk with him, and how do I say this delicately...he was several sheets to the wind, but kind of amazing. He said then he doesn't train people anymore, at all really, and we got the sense that he spent almost all his time in the part of the gym where chicken fighting was being done. But, he took Sylvie in and said yes, he would definitely film with her for the project (photo below). So, we were almost there! But, he then lost his gym in a very heavy gambling debt (I think). We literally drove up to it before the news broke and it was completely bulldozed. Like it was nothing but a lot. Without a gym, and with probably a somewhat carefree lifestyle, it will take some doing to get to the place where we can film with him. My own intuition is that this is something not to rush or push, but to just let it naturally evolve. When it happens it will be special.

Yes, this exactly. Master K, Sylvie's original instructor back in the New Jersey basement days, a 70 year old Thai man, used to say: "Don't hit with 5 lbs (your fist), hit with 100 lbs!" You get the same thing with boxers who "hit above their weight" or have "natural power". It's from all the parts lining up together, and communicating energy.

This is Sylvie's recommended gym list:

Sylvie and I have no knowledge of Phuket. PTT is a huge, successful gym there, but there is no way for us to know what that means in terms of opportunity.

You had a good blog post on this way back in 2016: Hard Sparring in Thailand – Beyond Going Light

I think it valid to critique techniques and fight values that flow out of unreal fighting styles, that is styles that develop along increasingly artificial lines usually involving scoring or packaged promotion styles, in so far as these fighting styles ALSO try to portray themselves as "real fighting". For instance, to take a non-Taekwando example, for a long while historical Karate apparently developed a real lack of combination fighting because it had adopted a philosophy (fantasy) of the death blow. Karate strikes were imagined to be dealing death blows (something inherited from older weapons martial art forms, where sword strikes really would be death blows). This lead to a very abstract and unreal development of fighting techniques, one which shunned full-contact sparring (how can you spar with "death blows"?), that took some serious and devoted branches of Karate quite far from real combat or even fighting prowess. BUT, I also think that these kinds of fantasy detours of fighting styles can be super important too, because they allow imaginative, and even artistic developments that otherwise might not be given the space and time to be explored. I liken it to Science Fiction writing. Science Fiction is NOT Science. But it has had lots of impact on Science. Hey Sci-Fi writer Arthur C. Clarke imagined that one day satellites would circle the planet in a vast communication network, and look what happened. But, just as it's important to distinguish between Science and Science Fiction, you would want to distinguish between fantasy fighting and efficacy fighting (which sometimes is harder to do, because all sport fighting is shaped by rule-sets and aesthetics). Even if it is difficult sometimes, it's healthy to make the distinction. If Karate is claiming death-blows all over the place, and refusing to spar, it just can't sit there as the most deadly martial art because other fighting styles/systems are sparring and fighting frequently (with non-death blows).

I'm going to leave this here for maybe further elaboration and comment. It's compelling to think about any striking technique in these two terms, either the acceleration created (usually through the storing of energy in tendons, ligaments and muscle, which comes from fixing one's point on the ground), or through the transportation of mass (which usually involves involving a greater portion of body weight in that acceleration. There is so much in this it is tough to unpack, but advisments like those of Thai Krus that say you must step on every single technique (in the Library Kru Thailan, and Rambaa) is about mass. Discussions about the Thai Golden Kick, like on this forum, are really about the subtle techniques of creating both acceleration and mass involvement. And then you can reach all the way back into Daoist energy imaginations of Yin and Yang, connecting to Earth energy, and coming to release it as Yang, how the torsions of the body, and it's relaxation (which allows parts to connect together, energy to transmit), work to deliver the Earth through accelerations. The full span of this analysis can really be immense. Yodkhunpon Transmitting

I'm really unsure of this. I just read a complete history of Taekwando, which I thought had a long foundation in this, but it was pretty clear that so much of the "spinning" stuff is really a modern invention (far from its Karate origin), maybe since the 80s and 90s, and grew out of very non-fight oriented practices, and some of it from demo performance. In fact almost all of what we now think of as Taekwando arose out of pretty suspect rule-scoring shiftings (very, very light blows "scoring", no punches to the head, etc). None of this is really traditional martial art stuff. It's all very modern. It really surprised me. I think this is a significant thing. And I completely agree. But, at least for me, things are "working" against fighters who just are not very high level, fighters that lack deep-seeded spatial awareness. There are lots of things that work against more limited fighters. But the reason people get super excited about it isn't because "hey, this works!", it's because someone made a highlight clip and then that clip "works" in the social media stream.

Now that we've totally revamped the Roundtable Forum, with new software that will be regularly updated with the latest latest stuff, I'm starting a new features thread. This software is so awesome we're still stumbling on very cool stuff built in. If you find something you like screenshot it and share it with others. The first thing is simple, but not completely intuitive. How to Quote someone when answering a topic or a comment. You just drag your cursor over the part of what they are saying and you'll see the quote option pop up next to the highlight. It looks like this: When you hit quote the entire highlight will be dropped down into the comment box, with a citation of who wrote the original and when. That way people know exactly the parts you may be referencing in your thoughts. The part that isn't super intuitive is that you can quote several parts of a single post, just by doing the same highlight again. You can in that way quote a part, respond to it, then quote another part of interest, respond to it, and so on. The new quote will just pop in wherever you left your cursor in the comment box. And, even better, you can quote from more than one person, in a single comment, in the same way. Just highlight the words of someone in the thread, hit "quote", and then scroll to another person in the thread, and do the same. It makes for a nice, neat way of ordering the conversation. This is on desktop, I'm not entirely sure how it works on mobile.

In recent research on the history of Taekwando and Karate techniques recently I came across this argued historical point. The Karate round kick early on after the introduction of Karate to Japan evolved into a wide, circular power strike. It was meant as a single strike, and some of this came out of the lack of sparring, board-breaking and such. Taekwando, because it eventually took on very strong competition scoring point values which "scored" even lightly thrown kicks, completely took out that wide circular kick of original Karate, from which TKD derived, and created a very fast kicking style, with the upward knee action, and then a little flip, which chambered the kick. So you had a spectrum, in history. The big circular Karate power kick, and the super fast, but very lightly landing TKD kick. The Golden Kick is a really beautiful optimization of both of these. It removes the chambering of the kick (most often), but comes from the same very fast upward action. Because it's not flicking, but really ripping through with the hip or torso turn, it maintains a lot of the inner dynamics of the old circular power kick. There really is no "one" Golden Kick of course, it's a biomechanics tendency. Some of these great Golden Age kickers also have very subtle means of generating power through their kicks. You don't see the 1st stage, 2nd stage transition, but because of their high repetition training their bodies kind of swallow it, and turn it into a graceful transfer of power, like how an an elite western boxer can generate huge power on a hook without seeming to twist and load the punch. The speed and power seems to come out of nowhere, because it's not very visibly expressed. Rather the tendons and muscles in the body have learned how to generate the torque, subtly, and they might not even know how they are doing it. It just came out of 10s of 1000s of repetitions. Karuhat is an interesting example. He feels his power generation as a kind of chest-rising action. He feels like he's rising, or floating up, when he teaches it. But not many Thais even had his kick. It's particular to him. All this is to say is yeah, it could be that in the UK there was some Karate or TKD influence in technique, but my guess is that Wooten is doing the Golden Kick pretty good, but just hasn't reached the level of smoothness and expression that may have evolved if he kicked this kick 1000s of times since he was a kid. All that internal, personalized transition isn't quite there. Which doesn't mean that the kick isn't awesome as it is.

I can't speak to this as a fighter, but maybe as someone who offers support, and who is close to these kinds of swings. There is nothing wrong, first off. The reason why people fight, I mean the real reason, is that they are processing, and at many times expressing something deeply personal to them. And with that comes real risk. If it is going to mean something, that also means that it involves real risk. And the risk isn't "losing" or getting hurt. It's that whole bundle of things that are involved in why she is fighting in the first place. What likely is happening is that she's just coming up against, and facing the shadow side of what that is all about. So, how you support her would be the same as supporting anyone facing their demons, or shadow beliefs. First of all, probably just letting her know you are there is a big deal. She might know you are there, in a practical sense, but hearing "I'm here" can make a difference. Something that I think is also important, is to get the fighter to see through the fight, which means that what the fighter is after isn't "in" the fight. It's not going to occur there. The fight itself is part of a larger process. Just like in Karate you punch "through" the wooden board, in fighting you punch through the fight. It's very hard to advise about this because I don't know your relationship to her, or the level of the kinds of things you discuss, but even making plans for progress that will happen beyond the fight, like "After the fight let's start working on body punches together, I really want to get my body shots going!" or, "Maybe it would be cool to book a private with [whatever trainer x that is respected] after the fight", anything that gets the gaze going past the fight, to the larger project of self-cultivation that is what fighting can be about.

There almost seems a dialectic (geez, I usually hate that word and concept) between the perceived but yearned for "rawness" or "reality" of the poor (visual artist, fighter?), as nearly a fantasy of the affluent, and the transcendence of social strata (or even human strata), from the disadvantaged artist/fighter, in response. The raw "talent" is taken up by the urban elite, polished (in a gym, in a gallery), and brought into the marketplace when suitable for it. On the other hand, of course, in writing, in music, and in many other aspects of the arts, you don't always have this high/low dichotomy.

Here's a long selection on the history of -do, you may find it interesting: Here is an amazing passage that lays the foundation of Judo, as an art, right along class lines, in the words of the founder himself, Kano:

I'm reading a really good historical, critical account of Taekwando, mostly because I think it is important to understand the history of other martial arts and sports, how politics, economics and culture shape them, if we are going to understand and help the preservation of the Muay Thai of Thailand. This passage I'm posting here was particularly interesting, because it details the winding history of many of our conceptions of what a martial art is, much of that focused through Japanese Karate. Posted here for the edification of others, purchase the book here. Click on any of the pages below for a full screen view.

There is in Muay Thai a definite -do dimension of Muay Thai, which Sylvie expressed some of in the quote below. It's in the scoring aesthetic, in the comportment of fighters and krus, probably buried in the agricultural roots of the fighting and its performance. But any Thai involved in the Muay Thai of fighting would think it strange if you tried to isolate it, or make a discipline of it, make a Dao of it. I think we in the west (affluent as we are), can be drawn to the Dao of Muay, partly because of our affluence, but also because we are outsiders to the culture of Muay Thai. I'm not saying it's without merit or worth to contemplate it, but sometimes the "It's all about respect" western stories of Muay Thai feel like ideological fantasies of our own privileged. I'm not sure about that, but it feels that way. Sylvie quote:

Yes, but we tend to think of the -do as somehow older, more traditional, or grounding. But, from the book on the history of Taekwando I am reading, which is really also a history of Karate (because TKD is basically Karate at root), it may have been the case that the -do movement is relatively modern, that that nomenclature came after the -jutsu. And, at least by that writer's account, the -do movement very well may have developed as part of the affluence of the new Karate students in Japan. I'm not educated in the history of Karate, but I do find it interesting that Okanawan Karate was basically imported to Japan principally in the abstraction of forms. Japan already had a history of sparring oriented martial arts (Kendo, Judo), but instead Karate took on a -do priority in philosophy or orientation, at least in its first decade or so. The non-fighting nature of Japanese Karate seems to meet up with affluence, at least to my ear. You get the same thing in the appeal of traditional martial arts to the west, at times, learning less-applicable abstractions (taught to the middle class), while projecting images (fantasy?) of lethality. Today I was just reading that one of the reasons why mid-century Japanese Karate did not have much "combination" fighting and concentrated on only single strikes was the belief in that a single strike would be deadly. There was no reason to throw and land more than one strike. One could see how a martial art developed both around - do (Dao) and one-death-strike, grows quite far from actually fighting prowess. Perhaps we go to far astray in this, but I find it interesting.