[Head Kick Form, thoughts on mirroring of the spinning wheel kick]

For others, here is Master K teaching his head kick to Sylvie in 2011, driving from the hip, letting the leg drag through.

Maybe others can add other Muay Thai head kick videos we we can figure something interesting out here.

[Head Kick Form, thoughts on mirroring of the spinning wheel kick]

I think it is less helpful to look for a particular kind of kick as the Muay Thai head kick (and maybe this is something you are pointing out). There are so many variations in kicks in Muay Thai, other than the somewhat unique whipping action in the roundkick, its very hard to identify single characteristics. Other martial arts which have become formalized (rationalized) are more prone to this essentialism. Instead there are different schools, different styles, literally 100s if not 1000s of variations. But I do love what you are saying and doing here, trying to think investigatively on technique.

My guess is that there is a spectrum of techniques that mostly runs from a more chambered TDK-like kick (you see Saenchai use chambered kicks) to a leg dragging style, coming from the hip. Not looking studiously there seem to be kicks all along that spectrum. Master K's style of kicking is generally pretty old school. Styles of kicks sometimes reflect how the kick is hidden. Here is Karuhat, a Golden Age legend, teaching the straighter leg, leanover head kick, which he sets up with a body cross, out of a crouch. Sylvie says that Kaensak teaches this kick too.

- I edited this clip out from the exclusive Nak Muay Nation feature Sylvie shot for them. For the full hour one has to become a member. -

I don't really know the wheel kick or crescent kick well, but maybe you can see connections between those and these. Hope this proves of interest.

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

9-15

I've stayed away from the journal because each and every time I attempted to get to it the things that were happening just seemed too big. It was like trying to stand in a fast running river. I lost my biggest client due to corporate restructuring, someone we really relied upon to remain here in Thailand, and we found ourselves really having to scramble as to what we were doing to do next. As many of you already know we've turned to creating Supporter Only content - which is a huge step. But it just seemed like it was the right time. I've always been instrumental in planning and structuring all of Sylvie's content, I'm a Social Media consultant so this stuff is natural to me and something I enjoy, something I find redeeming, but this would basically mean that I've got to go to work for Sylvie, taking all my hours I used to spend on my client and trying to make it work for Sylvie on Patreon. Hey, I"m all for the adventure, but it put a lot of due stress on us, at a time of difficult treading.

Much bigger than all of that was that Sylvie just hit a tremendous wall personally, something I can't wait to read her writing about it. I get excited about her articles just as much as you do. Even though I'm her husband and we talk about things in great detail, when she sits down to write different things come out, beautiful things. I'll be so interested in reading how she reflects on this last month. She found herself in a perfect storm of stress, fatigue and self-doubt I think. She was training for her nemesis Loma, taking on new, innovative but sometimes psychologically difficult training regimes, she was making big changes to her diet, a change in her spirituality, many of her routines were upended, and it was too much. She's written a few times about this, about how mental training does not stop. Just like sit-ups, or miles run, you can't just stop doing the training and expect to be alright. And under great duress she was paying the price for not doing the work. This whole time has been a torrent of stresses, and she's fought through it like the badass that she is, but it had a cost.

But not only did it have a cost, it also had a prize. She somehow came through all the difficulty with powerful realizations, keys to unearthing heavy iron deposits that were anchoring her in limitation. I'm fucking proud of her...and amazed. It was a very difficult time, but she figured it out. This is the thing. I honestly think that no fighter in the world has Sylvie's training regime. Not necessarily at any one time, but so relentlessly, without breaks, going on 4 years now. Her fights are her breaks...and fights are not really breaks at all. She busts it at 3 gyms, juggling the psychology and expectations of 3-5 different trainers, more or less everyday. Even her Sundays are half-days. Why does she do this? She believes it is physically and mentally necessary to train at such a high level to fight 200 fights over 6 years. You have to be made of steel. Inside and out. But what sometime is lost is that there are huge mental tasks being taken on, and if you aren't doing the mental training to make your mind as sharp, dexterous and free as possible, through actual mental training regimes, it's going to be too much. Just when you are feeling good, like you've got a handle on this, that is when your mental training focus needs to rise. The things that make people fight, as an art, as a sport, are very profound things. The fighting (and the training) unearths shit, very deep shit, the stuff that glued you all together when you were little, and then glued you all back together again each time you were broken - and we've all been broken. At this level, this is no joke. It's going to come up. It's going to come out of fucking nowhere. Out of the bluest sky with not even a breeze in the air, it's going to come. And it's going to smack you. Just as you need the cardio, the brute strength, the fast recovery times, the heart of a lion, the intensity, you are going to need mental skills for the thing that will stab where you are blind. It will hit there, it's okay, it will hit there, if you are pouring your all into it. But you need to have developed the mental skills to identify, accept and subvert those dangers. It's very hard to remember how much you need to prepare mentally for this.

I think there is something flawed with how we view mental health, probably starting with the phrase "mental heath". We expect that as long as we are in a range of normalcy, we are mentally healthy. Health is ultimately or usefully not a context independent thing. What we are really speaking of are capacities. What are your mental capacities? What dynamics can you endure? What dynamics can you thrive on? For a performance athlete it's like breathing in high altitude air. Sometimes really high altitude air. You might be great in the foothills, but you are climbing in the upper-reaches. You might have thought mechanisms and skills that will serve you very well at work, or in friendships, but these same mechanisms are poorly equipped for extreme duress. And, the mechanisms you developed for emergencies, very likely when you were very young (or which were born innately in you), are too immature or brute to deal with the demands at fighting states where an art is being called on. There is an entire threshold of talents that you must self-make, piece by piece, if you want to get there, striding in the high-altitude.

Over this last month, I saw all of this. The breaking, the pressures, the perfect storm of duress, and then the diamond of my wife rising up, levitant. It's incredible. I don't know how else to talk about this, other than to say being this close to this is an honor.   

[Good gym advice with tall thai trainers and fighters]

Thanks for the incredibly fast and high quality answers!

I think ill be aiming towards Kems gym, and i dont think ill be dissapointed since you (Sylvie) just confirmed what ive been hearing about both Yodwicha and the rest of the gym.

I just have one more question and this is a silly one: are there lots of dangerous mosquitos in the area? Or is that more up in the north? Havent had all my shots and turns out some of them are really expensive ..

Once again thanks a lot, and take care :)

Simon

 

Just read your mosquito question aloud to Sylvie, she says she doesn't know. Most of the malaria problem I heard was up North, but maybe Google around with "khorat" or "korat" as a keyword.

[Good gym advice with tall thai trainers and fighters]

Chuwattana used to have a big guy (Kanongsuk) but now he's in Singapore with Evolve. I know Sitmonchai has a big guy holding pads as I follow Kru Dam and see him in their videos.

 

Sitmonchai has a pretty strong reputation, whether it is deserved or not, for not being a clinch oriented gym. It's a great gym, one that I know Sylvie recommends often, but as a striking gym it is known for more training getting out of the clinch.

[How can I improve my teeps?]

Sylvie shot a video this afternoon on this Alla, hopefully she can upload it soon!

[Gym recommendation at Chiang Mai]

Thanks for the info! My friend's gym is at the Fairtex in Pattaya, he made a suggestion for me to go. I'm not sure how far that really is from Bangkok. Any idea?

 

It's about 2 hours from Bangkok, that is where we live. Fairtex is kind of a "resort" gym. Pretty expensive, and has probably seen better days. But if your friend is there and enjoying him or herself you might too!

[Gym recommendation at Chiang Mai]

Hi all,

I am looking for some gym advice on which gym is visitor friendly in Chiang Mai. I am planning on visiting Chiang Mai from Bangkok to break up my trip. Also, any food and sight seeing recommendations?

Thanks!

Alan

 

Sylvie and I put together this map of Things in Chiang Mai that may be of some help. If you are an animal lover the Elephant Farm is pretty incredible though a little pricey (run very humanely, you learn elephant care, etc). Sitting with Tigers is also very memorable.

Lanna Muay Thai is very visitor friendly, and located in a very nice part of town up by CMU, its where we lived for 2+ years.

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

8-28

Sometimes there are just natural binaries in the world, things that express themselves artistically, poetically, symbolically. We like to think in dual parts, black or white, rich or poor, humble or proud, 1 or zero, but the world itself sometimes finds these pairings, and in Pattaya there is one that is almost unspeakable in how much it shows, without concluding a thing. The motorbike, some have argued, has produce more profound social change than perhaps any other piece of technology in Thailand. Like the American automobile which utterly altered not only self identity and the social field within which one got around, the motorbike changed landscapes. Not only has it zigzagged urban highways and streets with free wheeling, independent, cheap transportation, making a democracy of one, a singularity, it created body to body proximities in the conservative, traditional villages where male and female bodies never touch in any other public way. It brought about intimacies. Gangs on suped-up motorbikes scream through light-less highways or black-top ribbons stretched between night-lacquered rice fields, often with their headlamps off, coasting only in the cocoons of their high pitched sound. Motorbike brothers cruise side by side with a foot reached out, resting on their partner's bike, creating a tandem at high speed, while in cities older women and men pile inconceivable stacks of foods for market, hanging off of every lynchpin or edge like a weighted Christmas tree, sagging with commodity. And families of 4 or even 5 can cram onto a motorbike, a veritable mini-van of two thin wheels, happily pressed in a single, unison trajectory, hugging each other with the promise of what a family really is.

Amid all of this, a taxonomy of freedoms and transport, Pattaya has a startling pair. In contrast to it, in Chiang Mai you see a veritable liberty of young women, sisters, most of them affluent college and high-school aged women, coasting through the streets in uniform, sitting side-saddle in school skirts and button-ups. The magic carpet young revolution in short travel in Chiang Mai, humming around the colleges and schools, has a modernity to it, in a part of Thailand that is still conservative. It becomes a ubiquity of criss-crossing errands, of a rising middle and female class. In Pattaya the motorbike finds a different, single, expression, a seemingly bonded pair. The motorcycle taxi driver: a working-class hero of rough edges who spends most of the time on a corner with others in their signature company vests, waiting to be hailed, or to take up someone in turn. And his pairing: a working girl, the sex worker dressed to the nines, impeccable makeup, short skirted, defiantly-high, stumble-prone high heels. It's like seeing a cowboy with a starlet on his dust covered horse. There is something so sibling about this pair, as he carries her to her work, seemingly at any hour of the day or night. Both ill-regarded by their culture, both treading water in the currents of the economy of bodies. His of transport, hers consort. He carries her, she rests with her feet near weightless in space, before she has to stop. There is nothing happy or sad about this pair, as they commune in a necessity, making space contract, there is only a strange and comforting twoness, of each knowing each. It characterizes this town, not to romanticize it. It shows how it is stitched together, how things are made far from wherever each may be, thrown forward by a combustion engine.

[Getting over the fear]

This is probably a stupid question, but please I some advice.

I've been training for nearly a year and a few months ago I had my first interclub, and I just froze. The nerves got the better of me, fear creeped in, I panicked and anyone would of thought it was first time wearing gloves!

I've sparred many times, I've been hit harder at training and I've hit harder, but on the day, I just couldn't do it

I would really like to compete, but I just can't get back in the ring. I've been offered several more interclubs where I've lied and said I'm busy that day, I'm still sparring and I don't freeze up, but I'm worried if I go in to another interclub will i freeze again, and end up giving up on my dreams

Any tips on how to just get in there and do it?

 

First of all, don't even worry about feeling that you are alone in this. Sylvie has 150+ fights and still is working on elements of freezing, whether it just being "frozen" as in growing physically still, or its your mind not being able to focus on the things it already knows. It is really common to have there be a gap between how things feel when sparring, even when sparring hard, and "fighting".

Sylvie's away for two days, but hopefully she'll jump on here. But for now here are some of the things she's written on fear. As a close on-looker I can say that a lot of this has to do with building the proper mindset for fighting in advance, and getting acclimated to those unique pressures. This was a really interesting article by Sylvie which talks about the kind of impairments that happen under stress, as the heart rate starts to go up. Once your stress level starts reaching gray area there is just a very limited menu of things that your mind can choose from. This is really one of the biggest challenges that faces a fighter, how to perform under duress. The first thing though is to tell yourself: "It's okay that I froze, and it's okay if I freeze again" - stressing over freezing will just add to the stress that can make it happen. Realize that freezing like that is a natural response to elevated pressure. Its okay that it happens, just learn to recognize it and then work to bring yourself down out of condition grey or black. Things like tactical breathing before getting into the ring, or between rounds can help. And also developing more confidence in your defensive game, like improving your guard, or teeping, can give you extra space and time to recover from stressful moments.

Also know, first fights are never really good for anyone  they are a blur. You don't do much of anything you planned to do. The only good thing about a first fight is that it gets you to your second fight.

[Gym in Town, or take the plunge and move to thailand for a month of training.]

Home of the laid off workers now, Calgary Alberta Canada - once the heart of oil country now boasts in lay offs throughout all the province. There arent a lot of options for work. Got a lay off and will no longer be working my boring ass 9-5 office job, a blessing but also tough since where else do I make my money. 

I have a little but of money to pay for some muay thai for 6 months (800 bones is what its going for, this is standard here). so 6 months of 4 days a week muay thai, or thailand training campy for 3 weeks. 

I registered for a course at the university and that will take up the semester, right now - I could potentially postpone this since there arent many jobs anyways, but maybe its useful for making a living online, I am pretty intuitive with design and website building and just need some clients I guess to do some work for - I want to do it for free to start out. Sorry just went on about randomness.... 

So Thailand or home gym? has anyone had to face a layoff and then just packup and go? I have been to thailand and tried to train at horizon camp in kho phagan - but it was shut down! I want to train on an island and not in a city, I am tired of the city. I feel like Phuket is where I want to go, I havent fought competitively but i would say im intermediate to advanced depending on the gym.

I guess I need some sort of guidance here. 

Thanks guys! 

Mike

 

My rule of thumb for decisions like this are: What is more likely to change the direction of my life? You've already been to island Thailand, so you know what that is about. Maybe intuit which choice is likely to lead you into a new direction?

Sorry that you lost your job. It always sucks, even if your job wasn't awesome.

[Khongsittha Muay Thai camp , Muay Thai guy, Sean Fagan]

Hi everyone

I'm hoping someone has been on Sean Fagan's, the Muay Thai guy's fighters camp in Thailand?

I'm looking into going next year, Jan / Feb camp, and was hoping someone could tell me a bit more about it

How much you learnt, would you recommend it, how fit or experienced you need to be, how much 'spending' money you took etc

Anything really, I'll be a solo female traveller from the UK, bit scared of the journey to be honest, flying doesn't bother me, but for some reason flying alone does!

Or if anyone is thinking of going to the camp, please let me know

 

Sylvie is attending for two days starting tomorrow, she should have lots to say when she gets back.

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

8-22 - what is a fighter?

I was just talking to a fighter who was feeling low because he just lost on points to someone he felt he could have beat, and was flying back to Thailand to fight up in Isaan in a few days. Utterly impressive. Why? Not because he's fighting twice in so short a time. Not because he's fighting shortly after a disappointing loss. Not because he's flying across the world to fight one after another. It's because he is riding the line. This is what separates the fighter from the non-fighter. The line. When you ride the line you are riding along the possible and the impossible, where nothing is sure. You are pushing the limit of what is and what can be. This can be physical limit, a mental limit, a performance limit - but in truth these three always form a holy trinity, never one without the other two. Fighters ride this line, the point where things threaten to break apart, where it might not quite hold together, nothing is set for you. This can be facing one huge opponent you might not ever beat. Being a part of a high-pressure event where your opponent isn't even the biggest hurdle. This can be fighting 6 fights in a month, or fights in back to back days. Or facing opponents that expose your weaknesses rather than just those you match up with nicely. It's the line. Fighters seek out that line. They seek it out in the gym, they seek it out in the ring, they take it up into their hand as a thread that stitches the meaning of their lives together. And you might very well fall on the wrong side of that line again and again, into the shadows where there is no glory, where few see the merit of what you are. Or you might fall on the right side of the line and be covered in the perfume of glory. But in either case, for those that ride that line, truly ride that line, they know that both sides of that line are joined, that finding and riding that line again and again is what the whole thing is about. You lose. You collapse. You freeze. You doubt. You fail. Just find the line and ride it. It is the path to true, personal victory.

[Muay Thai Documentary: A Fighting Chance (with Sam Sheridan)]

The husband of the director of this film finally put up a copy for the general public. Featured in this film is the fight author Sam Sheridan of the books "Fighter's Heart" (and "Fighter's Mind"), presumably when he was gathering material he would write about. One can compare the film footage with some of his description of what was going on:

 

The description of that book:

In 1999, after a series of wildly adventurous jobs around the world, Sam Sheridan found himself in Australia, loaded with cash and intent on not working until he’d spent it all. It occurred to him that, without distractions, he could finally indulge a long-dormant obsession:  fighting. Within a year, he was in Bangkok training with the greatest fighter in muay Thai (Thai kickboxing) history and stepping through the ropes for a professional bout. That one fight wasn’t enough. Sheridan set out to test himself on an epic journey into how and why we fight, facing Olympic boxers, Brazilian jiu-jitsu stars, and Ultimate Fighting champions. Along the way, Sheridan delivers an insightful look at violence as a career and a spectator sport, a behind-the-pageantry glimpse of athletes at the top of their terrifying game.  An extraordinary combination of gonzo journalism and participatory sports writing, A Fighter’s Heart is a dizzying first-hand account of what it’s like to reach the peak of finely disciplined personal aggression, to hit—and be hit.

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

8-20

Thailand is an incredible incubation. There is something about the way that it plays to western fantasies - most of them male, sexual or violent - that allows for a maturation of inner vision, not always for the good. Pattaya is filled, I mean filled to the brim, with hormone and steroid injecting coursing sexuality, the aging male ideations that never were what they thought they were, matched with slight-boned girlfriends purchased for the witness. But it isn't just the sex trade as men ascend to bar stools like soft thrones in familiar quarters. It's the full wrought of how the west applies its fantasy self to Thailand, across every single avenue and park, every rice field, business and mountain. The whole of Thailand receives what you think of yourself, what you dream of for yourself and it puts it unto the test...by making it possible. When you make fantasies possible, when you let flesh be grown on those phantom bones, the skeleton of what you believe about yourself, about desire, it creates a hard salt water shore. The otherwise pristine and unchallenged, floating, undirected desires of your life then become responsibilities, become constrained, bounded, real and living things, with the unnumbered aspects of their reality. It is the very same with fighting. Or, the mad desire to "fight a lot". You can hold this dream anywhere in the world and it really doesn't mean the same thing. Here, you can have that dream and it really, honest-to-god, can and will happen. You can walk into a gym, never having trained, and be fighting within a few weeks - and not just against a Phuket circus "tuk-tuk" performer. Fighting. Like knocked-out. You could want 30 fights, and actually have them. You want to explore and become more than proficient in Muay Thai? You can. You will have to build that mountain, rock by rock. You will have to scale that mountain, rock by rock. But it is right here. What it does it forces your desires and dreams to the surface. If you want to party, you'll end up partying. If you want girlfriends, you'll have those. If you want fights, you'll have fights. Thailand is filled with those who have become what they want. 

Beneath all of this, are the people of Thailand. It is not easy to find your way across the layers and veils that separate cultures. But beneath all of the fulfillment, and misunderstandings, the projections, are relations. These are luminous examples of what may be, beacons of a possible that is woven from something very different than all of the above.

I ever return in my mind to the way that the "fake" and the "real" is braided in Muay Thai. For the western fighter it is even more so the case, because the westerner is caught in the simulacrum of their own desire (and it's fulfillment). I suspect that one of the reasons why westerners who trained and fought in Thailand even a half-generation ago did not share their fights, or even their detailed stories, was not simply that there were so many fewer cameras, or mechanisms of sharing (like blogs, or Facebook)...for even now fights and details of experiences are not often shared. It's that the western fighter is swept up in the very production of Muay Thai here. I mean production in really almost a capitalist sense: the construction, presentation, consumption and perpetuation of Muay Thai, as ideological form. A way of seeing and expressing the world. The western fighter is somehow sandwiched between the production (and fulfillment) of their own desires, and the role that desire plays in the production of Muay Thai, for Thailand. I recall a western pioneer of female fighting in the country, more than a decade ago, describing how poorly trained many Thai female opponents were, as westerners "destroyed" them (a story without any specifics). But this same fighter was overwhelmed by the most dominant Thai female fighter of the decade, who outweighed her, and also surely fought some very strong opponents. How does a westerner authentically position themselves in such a context? How does one talk about and share the very tension of the real and the unreal? I recall the story of how two French fighters were brought to fight big named Thais on Khmer ruins a few decades ago, and how (surely), none of the French knew that they were very likely there to re-enact the thrashing two disrespectful French brothers took at the hands of the King's champion and guard in 1788 (the first ever farang vs Thai match) - yes, there was that meaning. Today, very fine western fighters are fighting real fights, hard fights, on MAX Muay Thai, which is essentially a Muay Thai "show", and it is impossible to really ascertain what is happening there. Some fights seem bizarrely matched. Some bizarrely judged. All of it is geared towards producing hyper-aggressive clashes that do not resemble the Muay Thai of stadium fighting. How is one to tell that story? Position oneself in that story? You are a fighter at a gym that has a reputation of producing world title belts, producing them, but you fight like hell and beat top talent. What does that mean? But again, "artifice" does not necessarily mean "unreal" in Thailand. This is the production of Muay Thai. And for westerners we have to grasp beneath the surface, at the fight itself, towards the bodies to understand. The fighter in a way loses his or her voice. The time here tends to become cocooned. Shared only with those in the gym, because there is no easy way to convey its reality beyond the boundary. Most of the time the unrecorded time here becomes a fish story to those back home. But this of course is what is unprecedented in what Sylvie has done and what she is doing. She has been making reports, sending message, essentially from the Moon. Over 200 vlogs. 800 articles, 150 fight videos. These are raw evidences, impressions, stakes in what there is here. It is remarkable and its meaning really will not be digested for years perhaps. 

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

8-19

Preparing energy coming into a big fight is like driving in the snow. We used to have a way of talking about pre-fight energy calling it "coming in too high" or "coming in too low", as if one is trying to land a plane. Sylvie's gotten so far along that we don't really talk that way at all. The compass of fight energy really starts weeks out, and if you are fighting all the time like Sylvie it means it's always in play. Like driving in the snow you have to feel what the road is like, with your foot on the gas. And, you don't ever hit the brake. The road might look great, only a thin layer of flakes or powder. The road might look awful, the headlights bouncing off huge falling crystals, catching glare. But what tells you if you are going too fast (or too slow) is the feel of the road. And when you feel the car starting to lose itself you take the foot off the gas and let the weight of the car slow itself. To a crunchy halt if necessary, ever ready to start rolling again. The driving is the negotiation between the weight of the car (you) and its momentum, caught in the context of the road. When in a hurry to get where you want and need to be everything is determined by the play of your own weight, your own momentum, and the feel of the gas pedal. It's the physics of feeling. Nobody can read it but you. It's an art. I can remember those 4 am NY hurtlings up the Palisades, back to Fort Montgomery from nyc, with Star-Wars-like hyperdrive filling the windshield.

Within oneself, when you are desperate for progress and performance, look to see if your wheels are spinning. And do not touch that brake, certainly not if you are rolling along. Feel your own weight and how it creates ballast. This is the beautiful thing about fighting 150 plus times. You get to drive in the snow over and over and over again. You can feel the relationship between performance and inertia. You begin to sense the conditions before they even become "conditions", the drift before it becomes drift. This is the learning of fighting in volume. This is beauty.

A body in motion stays in motion, for all that it means.

[FEMALE FIGHT ON SUPER MUAY THAI PROMOTION]

Thanks for responding so quickly! I thought that Sylvie may have fought her as she has had a lot of fights ,but wasn't sure.I too hope others will see the value in these fights.........the audience did!!

Duangdaonoi's teeps had a crazy amount of power and speed.Who needs a push kick when you have that much power in the front leg throwing teeps.

 

This was her fight against Duangdaonoi, she's a nice little fighter, and even held the 105 lb WPMF title for a bit.

[FEMALE FIGHT ON SUPER MUAY THAI PROMOTION]

I just wanted to mention that I regularly watch the Workpoint official channel on Youtube so I can view the Super Muay Thai series.For those that don't know a new show is posted on the channel every week and is usually 1 1/2 - 2 hours long of Muay Thai fights.When i tuned in to watch this morning I was pleasantly surprised to see a female fight which I have never seen on Super Muay Thai or Max Muay Thai.

It was a fight in the 47 Kilogram division and featured a fighter from Thailand vs a fighter from Italy.Would love to know if they plan to feature more female fighters?

Hopefully this fight will open doors for more female fighters to be featured on the show and others like Max and The Champion.

Sylvie if you see this please comment as I'm sure you know more about this and would also like to know if you have been approached to be on the show as I would love to see you fight on it?

 

Hopefully sylvie will jump on, but I can say that she doesn't know much about the series. MAX though is very firmly against female fighters. Currently though, PPTV is showing female fights every week it seems, though they are only 3 rounds. So while MAX ignores women, maybe others are seeing the profit?

The fight that you are talking about featured Duangdaonoi who Sylvie has fought (and beaten), she was pretty awesome in that fight vs the Italian - such teeps. Video was posted in the Female Fight thread here.

[Muay Thai Angels Season 2 - Applications now Open!]

Any idea of the prize money? Maybe you can lure Tiffany Van Soest from Bali? It isn't that far away.

[Top Female Muay Thai Fighters and Fights - Full Fight Video Thread]

https://dai.ly/x4oh938

Former 105 lb WPMF champion Duangdoanoi vs Sara Donghi

12/8/2016 Super Muaythai

Inspiring, almost text-book use of the teep against an encroaching western style hands-heavy fighter. What a performance by Duangdaonoi.

[Top Female Muay Thai Fighters and Fights - Full Fight Video Thread]

Damn that 4th round was nuts! Also I had the fight for Petpaya. Does WPMF have different judging or something like that?

 

It is not something that is talked about publicly much, but there is a very strong connection between the WPMF and Kaewsamrit gym, and Thanonchanok is a fighter with longtime Kaewsamrit connections. She's a very good fighter, indeed, but she lost this fight. But things go this way in Thailand sometimes.

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

 I made a great show (in my opinion one of my best) when I was stuck at home with two small children and a dying father; I basically scrapbooked instead of shooting out in the world (collaged).  It was not actually appreciated at the time, but has had a long and great afterlife.  Good luck.

 

It is great to be in parallel with you in this Dana, and for you to be with us. But that sounds like such a difficult time.

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

8-15

I lost my biggest client the other day. The huge preponderance of my time in Pattaya, in Thailand, is spent in the apartment. I could be literally anywhere in the world and my life would be pretty much the same. Very little of the exotic seeps up to me here, while Sylvie is accomplishing herculean tasks, and beating a path through a male jungle of twisted vines that regrow surprisingly fast when you stop slashing away with the machete of your heart, I'm calculating social media effects, and numbingly running through platform protocols, for hours. It was a corporate structuring over seas that took my client away, pairing things down to bare minimum, and its the kind of thing that happens. Its part of the life of businesses. But it does leave our time here in jeopardy. Opening up is a chasm of some sort. A beautiful uncertainty. I love times like this, in the way that you might come to love a food that is an acquired taste. As I've aged, and I'm much older than Sylvie, I've become much more sensitive to a principal that I think I read and learned from mythograher Joseph Campbell. We think that time moves in a line, but in Life it really moves in circles - huge, symbolic circles that have stages that they go through, over and over again. What is key about this is that the times for "change", the times for increase, the times for doing the things you really, really want, or becoming who you really want to be, only happen in windows that open and close. Much of the time you really cannot create the changes that you want to. Yes, you can prepare for them, you can build the foundations, or grease the rails of whatever alteration you are looking for, but the change cannot be made...just yet. Much of the frustration of life comes from not recognizing this essential nature of Time. You push and push, directing mental energy - sometimes even enormous emotional energy - and the change never comes. And when the window happens, when the time of the cycle spins round to open up, you are often distracted, or more likely, lack the ability to see that it is a window, that what you really wanted to happen can happen now.

Part of the reason for missing the window, not seeing it for what it is, is that with it comes de-stabilization. And de-stabilization can be felt as very unsafe, or unnerving. You can feel how nothing is firm beneath your feet. This is unnerving. But this is the time when the world, your world, has become malleable. This is the chance. If you have created the foundation points for the place you want to get to, the future you, the values you want to adhere to, they can carry you through to the other side, and create the new world as a better place.

There is an amazing working analogy in the history of AI computation called Simulated Annealing. I wrote about it here, at a time when I was a personal blogger. The basic premise was that you could treat data in the same ways that molecules can be treated, through "heating" and "cooling" schedules just like those that work in annealing metal. Annealing is the process that makes the steel of swords harder and potentially sharper. I'll leave aside the computational theory and just look at what is being talked about in the annealing of steel. It explains what I'm talking about. The smith heats the metal which at room temperature had settled into a hardened into a rigid state. It is not as hard or as resilient as it might be, but the molecules are more or less "locked". When you heat the metal the molecules become unlocked, as the metal starts to redden and glow, its world is now less stable. In these states the molecules can fall into new arrangements. And the overall shape of the metal can be changed. As the metal cools it stabilizes. For metals like steel, the cooling schedule is very important, it is slower than other metals. If it cools incorrectly it can become brittle. If it cools artfully its re-crystalization will leave its molecules locked in a stronger, more organized structure. This is how the samurai swords become what they are. Through artful heating and cooling. This is a long way of saying that the window of de-stabilization in the cycle is often lost because the eye is on the emotion of de-stabilization itself. All the changes you hoped to make through the entire cycle, are actually available to you now, when the molecules of your life are suddenly unlocked. What is really remarkable about everything that has happened for Sylvie and me, in this time in Thailand, is that we've been very "lucky" in the windows like this. We've somehow, so far, been able to identify when the molecules start to jump, and we've been patient when they are firmly locked. This goes for growth in Sylvie herself, her fighting, her emotional steel as a fighter, a journalist, and also for circumstance - the real world boundaries that constrain what is possible (where you live, financial limits, community). Somehow we have been aware of these windows. The Japanese swordsmith knows many things we do not know. There is an art to these things.

There is a small holy statuette that sits on a mantel in our apartment. It is a bronze-looking figure of a man, a warrior, posed with a spear pointed upward at a diagonal across his body, and with the other hand near the spearpoint he holds a bouquet of green. His face is that of a demon. His body that of an athlete. He is a little known god, much debated in niche circles, Phra Pirap. He as I understand it is a kind of god of war and battle, but mostly is known as the god of dance, the one that leads the arts. At his left hand come together both the spear point and the bouquet. This the unfathomable combination of what makes up Muay Thai in Thailand. For us in the west there is a fundamental division in how we parse the world. There is the "real" and the "unreal". In Thailand these two things come together to braid into something else. People looking at fights want to say "that's a fake fight!" or "that's a 'real' fight!". What makes them real or unreal are supposedly the intention of the actors. But because Muay Thai is an art, and not only a sport, these things come together. It is ultimately both dance and violence. The reason for this is timing. Phra Pirap happens also to be the god of timing. Of finding the perfect moment. Nietzche made a big deal of this in Beyond Good and Evil. In Greek there are two important fundamental kinds of Time. Chronos is circular time, the time of the seasons. Kairos is the time of the moment, the perfect moment to act. Kairos makes an incision in Chronos. Phra Pirap is the god of Kairos. This is why he is god of the dance. This is why the Muay Thai of Thailand is both real and unreal. It carries the power of artifice into the world of the "real" of violence, to steer it. It recognizes the moment of change, and therefore may spend much of its time in the realm of the fake, the performed. It is steering the cooling schedule of the steel, when all the molecules are afloat and changing their positions. In the west we only think of linear time. For us the "real" of fighting is merely the degree of "heat" in a fight, and the application of force of one body against other bodies. In Muay Thai, for Phra Pirap, it is the point in the circle when real change can happen, it is the art of taking hold of that change and shaping it to a valued outcome. It is where the spearpoint and the bouquet come together.

We are at that point now, we are the molecules of the steel that we are are starting to unlock. Many things may result, not all of them good or preferred. This loss to Loma was an event marker, when the heat weakened the metal and it began to glow.

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

8-14

There is a strong breeze blowing hard across the urban sector we live in, the kind of constant wind that only comes from the beach. It isn't far from us, but we seldom see it. There is a rooster crowing at 4:30 in the afternoon, and another one after him. And then another, staggered in sound and distance. Remote sounds that I love having never been a country boy, and loving the unconscious meaning of what it means to live by their clock, or even near their clock. The streets themselves are narrow, cement alleyways. Everything is cement, as if modern Pattaya looked to seal out its forgotten jungle and bush past that was not long ago, concrete poured like glue over everything. High walls stacked with cinderblock, and the sea breeze blows over all of it, rushing like a weightless river, crashing through our open window on the 4th floor. Sylvie is gluing news clippings into her scrapbook which she hasn't worked on for a very long time. I'm a little astounded at how much she's collected, and this enforced 5 days into inactivity for concussion is probably the longest she will be still in the more than 4 years that we have been here, and that she's be grinding it out in the gym, day after day. Even after broken bones she's in the gym after 2 days. Even when stitches require no sweating, 3 days max. This time it will be five. A time to reflect. To gather our mental forces for what the next 6 months will bring. 

I hear the old newspaper creaking and crisping as she turns dried pages, now able to read the Thai that she once had to really strain to get through. I've always felt that Sylvie's Muay Thai has (and will) progressed at the same rate as her Thai. Each of these are mysteriously parallel. For the longest time she was too shy to speak to Thais in Thai, retreated into her shell, just as she was too afraid to spar and clash. But then one day she found herself on the other side of that, in confidence. Now she glues the newspaper into books, looking at words, sentences and paragraphs she feels more comfortable with. 

[A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand]

Ah I see. Better to be safe for sure. How long is Sylvie planning to take off?

 

We've read that most concussions resolve in 7-10 days, and this one appears symptomatically mild. So 5 days totally shut down. Then very slow reintroduction, looking for symptoms to return. We are being cautious.