Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

from the Tao of Boyd: According to Boyd, ambiguity and uncertainty surround us. While the randomness of the outside world plays a large role in that uncertainty, Boyd argues that our inability to properly make sense of our changing reality is the bigger hindrance. When our circumstances change, we often fail to shift our perspective and instead continue to try to see the world as we feel it should be. We need to shift what Boyd calls our existing “mental concepts” – or what I like to call “mental models” – in order to deal with the new reality. Mental models – or paradigms – are simply a way of looking at and understanding the world. They create our expectations for how the world works. They are sometimes culturally relative and can be rooted in tradition, heritage, and even genetics. They can be something as specific as traffic laws or social etiquette. Or they can be as general as the overarching principles of an organization or a field of study like psychology, history, the laws and theories of science and math, and military doctrines on the rules of engagement. Because Boyd was more interested in using the OODA Loop as an organizing principle for a grand strategy, he tended to focus on these more abstract types of mental models. Key to applying Boyd's OODA Loop to Rickson's excellence, or the relentless pursuits of transition by Golden Age Muay Khao fighters is appreciating the mental models that Boyd is thinking about, as summarized above. Not so much the abstract types of mental models - though those would be interesting to examine as well - but rather in terms of fighting as the presentation of puzzles. There are of course the puzzles of styles, for instance in the adage that styles make fights, certain styles pose problems for other styles, or make for more dramatic or interesting action, or, in another sense, a fighter's style may even be expressive of a Nation or culture's aesthetics, which another style, from another culture, can create problems for. John Wayne Parr's defeat of Orono, who in many objective ways was a superior fighter (experience, vision, techniques), but had no solution for the western, upbeat, aggressive tempo JWP fought with, refusing the fall into the cultural lulls of Muay Thai rhythm (the same could be said of Ramon Dekker's few early successes in Thailand). Here we have a kind of clash of mental models (styles) wherein one style produces ambiguity and confusion for another. These are interesting, wide-scale thoughts, especially when debating what the "best" fighting style is in hypothetical way. What is much more relevant in this case are tactical puzzles, which means the tactical pressures or better yet, patterns that are set up for an opponent, as the opponent seeks to avoid or surmount ambiguity. You start jabbing the body repeatedly in a fight, you have set up a puzzle. It's not a difficult puzzle, theoretically, but depending on the opponent's relative experience with body jabs it could demand more and more of the opponent's resources to solve. This is where transitional thinking, and more importantly experience, comes to play. As a fighter, once you ascend beyond the Fool's Mate stage of fighting (finding "unbeatable" or tricky approaches that simply overwhelm your opponent due to inexperience or lack of training), what is really happening in a fight is that each fighter is presenting ambiguity, or the threat of ambiguity, to the other. It's puzzles. Some are easy, some are hard. But it's just one puzzle after another. Some fighters are good at solving puzzles of one type, and not another (which means that the "easy" puzzle will require very few resources, the hard type will demand a lot of resources. Some fighters might be just pretty good at puzzles in general. *As a sidenote, in our recent Muay Thai Bones podcast Sylvie and I talk about why Muay Khao fighting is so effective for Western women in Thailand (and in general as well). It simple removes a whole class of possible puzzles from being presented by your opponent, often puzzles opponents are very adept at presenting. Bottom line is, the war against ambiguity isn't really a case of fighters trying to "trick" each other, although trickery can play a part on ambiguity, it's about the mind's ability to interpret and uncertain environment. This is really near- or flatout yes, metaphysical stuff. It's not just what human beings do, but all life forms. The patterns we fall into express our history and habits of our knowledge, and our knowledge is organized around making an ambiguous environment more predictable, more stable. When you expose an opponent to ambiguity, especially one that is not trained to respond well to ambiguity, the results can be catastrophic (in the old sense of the word). This is one reason why quitting in the face of the world becoming unreadable (either due to fatigue, or due to technical or emotional disadvantage) is a very bad habit indeed, and cuts across the grain of what fighting really is. Fighting is, in many ways, the struggle for (and imposition of) pattern, in the face of the UN-patterned. Now let me slip into what Machado is talking about in Rickson and transition. He says a few things, but I think the most important thing he says is that "Defense is short" (I think that was the phrase he used). He means both spatially and temporally. Because the body can recoil, that is shorten itself, and can do so quickly (short in space and time) defensively your opponent has an advantage when attacking. Small angle adjustments can defeat large investments of attack. The defender can conserve. Time Fighting In this very interesting sense, fighters are Time Fighting. When you attack you are working from a Time Deficit, generally speaking. Your defending opponent has more Time in the bank than you do. Or, it's much more temporally expensive to attack than it is to defend. An attacking opponent has a math problem. Now, a primary way of overcoming this Time Deficit is to present very hard to solve puzzles. Not only will this demand lots of resources from your opponent, the most valuable one of those resources would be Time. If a puzzle takes a long time to solve then you have overcome the Time Deficit. You get a lot of this in early, developmental fighting. You've trained in one thing your opponent hasn't, you present a very difficult puzzle. You overcome the Time Deficit, you win. At higher level fighting between experience opponents in the same rule set most of the puzzles are known. Yes, some fighters might be better at solving (or presenting) certain kinds of puzzles, but seldom is it just one fairly basic but "too hard" puzzle winning a fight. Instead, its a puzzle war...Time Fighting. This is how I read what Machado is saying about Rickson, and I draw this from our study of legendary fighters of Thailand's Golden Age. What Rickson was doing offensively was not presenting impossible, singular puzzles. What he was doing was presenting a series of puzzles. He would present one, and as you started to work on it (spending your time bank), he's present another, and then another. He isn't rushing through puzzles, he's in flow, he's in the tempo of his Jiu Jitsu, transitioning. And as he moves, keeping his breath where he wants it, he's eating up the Time Deficit, until as Machado says, you don't have time to defend. You might very well be able to defend that last puzzle pretty easily, all things being equal, but things aren't equal. You are Time Fighting. Your breath is short, your are under duress of repeated puzzle solving, and you can feel the predictability of the world slipping away. By the time the last puzzle hits you you just don't have the resources to solve the problem. This is very akin to the Thailand aesthetic of dominance. You ideally don't want to beat the crap out of your opponent - though sometimes that happens, its a very violent sport/art - ideally, you want it to look like your opponent crumbled from within. This is achieved through Time Fighting. and Time Fighting is brought about by training in continuous flow and transition, not favoring abstract positional knowledge (abstract knowledge is great, if you aren't under Time pressures, musing about the perfect move). Your body, which has millions of years of predatory (and prey) knowledge in its software, vastly capable of reading the patterns of Time and Space ambiguities, has to learn to move through those patterns of continuous transition. Each and every time you call a "break" or a time out, you are robbing yourself of the most vital and highly valued aspect of the fighting arts. The other half of what Rickson is doing, according to Machado, is that he is slowly guiding you into more and more predictable positions. While your ambiguity is going up, his is going down. He wants to move you left, half the spatial possibilities have been cut down (less ambiguity). In non-grappling situations this is really essential to what Karuhat does (and teaches). Continually put your opponent where you know they will be. When this happens you can Time Travel, or Time Hop. Your next puzzle is already waiting for them in their future, and they are occluded to it. What is really interesting about this is that none of this is hurried. Perhaps this is why they call BJJ "human chess". You are checkmating 5 moves out, 10 moves out, 20 moves out. This is what John Boyd called "Getting inside your adversary's OODA Loop", which is what he took from his own dog fight experiences as a fighter pilot. This for him was the moment when you are onto of the enemy aircraft and you are already inside the defensive turn the are about to make to counter your position. It's an incremental dominance, and the power of it, he contended, is that you are sitting inside the very orientation mechanism of your adversary, the means by which they make sense of the world at all. There is no escape, because you are within the means of escape. Metaphorical, but very real, checkmate.

This is a pretty good breakdown of John Boyd's OODA Loop, read the article linked below: Thus, once you move past the simplified, Cliff Notes version of the OODA Loop, you find that it’s actually pretty heady stuff. It’s not “groundbreaking” in the sense of revealing insight never before conceived; rather, its power is in the way it makes explicit, that which is usually implicit. It takes the basic ways we think, decide, and operate in the world — ways that often get confused and jumbled in the face of conflict and confusion — and codifies and organizes them into a strategic, effective system that can allow you to thrive in the heat of battle. It is a learning system, a method for dealing with uncertainty, and a strategy for winning head-to-head contests and competitions. In war, business, or life, the OODA Loop can help you grapple with changing, challenging circumstances and come out the other side on top. The Tao of Boyd: How to Master the OODA Loop The Art of Manliness

This is the germane section of the Machado discussion of Rickson Gracie, in particular I'm focusing on his discussion of both the defensive time advantage (defense is always "short") and how Rickson Gracie would work to overcome the offensive time deficit by leading his opponent into predictable positions, chipping away at that time disadvantage until the opponent no longer had the time to defend themselves.

This post is going to touch on something really interesting found in Machado's description of what made Rickson Gracie's BJJ so special and undefeatable, something that he fears is being lost in this generation's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which I write about on 8limbsus.com. Go to that article if you want to get the full context of what I'm discussing here: What High Level BJJ Can Teach Today's Muay Thai For my purposes though, I want to concentrate on the OODA Loop theorized by John Boyd, a fighter pilot who had an almost untouchable kill ratio, and took his experiences in dog fighting to his study of military tactics in general. He became very influential in making the US Military much more mobile, communicative and dexterous, rather than just massively powerful, bigger and stronger. The verity of his military design applications can be debated, but what I'm really interested in his his OODA Loop, and the way that Machado described Rickson's ability to create time deficits in his opponents. I'll be adding to this post, but first John Boyd's graphic:

Ran into this little bit of history in support of the role of the rich in Martial Arts, much like Karate in Japan, Brazilian Jiu jitsu was initially (?) only taught to the wealthy in Rio, as told by Jean Jacques Machado, up unto the 1980s or 1990s:

There is a loose theory floating out there, to which both Sylvie and I subscribe, which is that the arrival of shin guards has really changed the level of fighting even in Thailand. In the Golden Age, and certainly before, there was no such thing. We reason, and I think Karuhat helped support this if I recall, that the absence of shin guards produce far more control and balance in Thai fighters, across the board. Just something to keep in mind.

That is incredibly beautiful Kristen. I just read the whole post aloud to Sylvie. There is nothing more that a podcast could mean. You are right on it.

The podcast #8

8limbsus.com is Sylvie's blog which she has been blogging on for maybe 10 years? It has over 1,000 articles and it's kind of a general archive of her thoughts and experiences. Sylviestudy.com is a website that was put up specifically to focus on the Sylvie Intensive videos on vimeo, and additional indepth material we might create outside of the Muay Thai Library. The Muay Thai Library is an archive of sessions Sylvie films all over Thailand. We add two sessions a month to the archive and it's available by tiers to patrons. The $10 pledge gives access to the full archive. The Intensive Series on Vimeo is PPV and is focused on videos made in a series. For instance an entire month of training with Karuhat is up there, and a week with Yodkhunpon. The vimeo series allows us to present really indepth documentation, sessions covering multiple days, but because it is focused it also allows us to divert sales directly to the legends, 55% percent going to them. The discount code that can be used by patrons on the Vimeo material for individual purchase I believe can be also used for the subscription, but only for the first month purchase (I believe). I'm happy to answer any questions. There is just a ton of material that we put out and document, and it's on different platforms so It can be confusing.

The very first recorded fight in a fixed stadium ring in Bangkok (1921) was between a man somewhere in his late 50s (muen muay Kueng Tosa) vs a 22 year old (Phong Prapsabok, the son of an opponent he once defeated).

Maybe I'm not following exactly where your reference is here, but in the Kleist, and many other myths of the Amazons the breast is removed for efficacy in archery, not to "fit in" anywhere. Did I suggest above that there was a kind of fitting in that is involved in alteration (if so, can you quote it)? (I mean, there are ways that this definitely has been done by Sylvie, but I'm not sure I made that connection). The case can be made that women need to "castrate" themselves, in some fashion, in order to enter a male order, and that this ritual was part of the fantasy of the Amazon as imagined by Athenian (male) Greeks. As to whether the removal of the breast was some kind of Christianized influence I think that is pretty doubtful. The name "Amazon" is literally taken to mean "without breast" in the Greek a- (ἀ-) and mazos (μαζός). It has been linked to their mythology from the very beginning (though in vase paintings they were never depicted as self-mutilated).

The commentary version of Sylvie 244:

To me a super key to switching is getting the footwork down. Here's a public clip of Yodkhupon's galloping footwork. He's a southpaw fighter, but his gallop contains the element of being able to just switch in the cut off. It's part of his strike from any position. You can find his sessions in the Muay Thai Library, or watch detailed sessions with him in the Intensive Studies (I think 6 hours are up there). Yodkhunpon told Sylvie to practice this footwork 20 minutes a day. I think that it is core to a flexibility in switching. Ideally you don't want to be "now I'm orthodox, now I'm southpaw", you want to be fluid, and access the advantages in each, when appropriate. You need a basic footwork, and Yodkhunpon's is pretty damn beautiful.

I think it really matters if you are talking about taking a few private sessions, or you are just talking about training at a gym. The Thai way does not really involve constant and repeated corrections (that produces stress and lack of flow which is not conductive to fighting), but there are krus that can and will be corrective in a private, as that is what westerners want, and it happens to be how they in particular think. The Krus Sylvie lists are pretty precise. Of all of them I would think that Manop is the most precise. He has a lot of experience training westerners as the head trainer at Yokkao, and now with his own gym it seems that he brought a lot of that precision to his approach. In Sylvie's session with him we were shocked at some of the very tiny details he brought out (timing on when the heel came down for instance, after a kick, made a huge difference). You can watch the full 90 minute session as a patron here: #55 Manop Manop Gym - The Art of the Teep (90 min) watch it here You can see beautiful slow motion of his technically beautiful teep here: You can watch a segment of a session with Chatchai here: #64 Chatchai Sasakul - Elements of Boxing (72 min) watch it here Here is a segment with Burklerk, you can watch his session here: #17 Burklerk PInsinchai - Dynamic Symmetry (82 min) watch it here

For my thoughts on this it is best to read Sylvie's post on the Silhouette Test and Muay Thai: Becoming Yodmuay and the Silhouette Test, that will introduce the basic ideas of making yourself visually definable as a fighter. The above video is a breakdown of the animation techniques and strategies used to expressively tell the story of Spider-Man in the off-the-charts refashioning Into the Spiderverse. What is germane to Muay Thai is for me how the techniques and strategies of the animation (frame rates, textures, timing, composition, even design elements) in the film really reflect upon one of the least thought about aspects of fighting technique and fight winning, especially in the west. Almost obsessively we think about the body as if it is a lifeless, nearly mechanical doll, whose limbs were are trying to put into positions, and into specific actions. I've written a little about this in my guest post: Precision – A Basic Motivation Mistake in Some Western Training. There is very little of that in Thailand's Muay Thai, even though we admire Thais for how precise they are. The thing is, they don't get precise by trying to be precise. Rather, and Sylvie has talked about this, they get that way by thinking about Ruup. Ruup is the bodily form. It's the overall composition of what you look like, what you are expressing, and how you are formed. Thinking and feeling about ruup is what gives you grace or power, what bestows balance and timing, and it's also what eventually gives you what Sylvie calls the Silhouette. Fighters in the western tradition of learning don't think enough about their Ruup, their Silhouette, which is compositionally how they appear in space and over time, no less than the animators were thoughtful how each character would be portrayed in the Spiderverse trailer (which the video goes into great depth on). In Muay Thai of course there are templated ruup, which is ways that bodies express archetypes of, let's say, the femeu fighter, the Muay Thai dern fighter, the Muay Maat puncher...yes. But fighters ultimately develop their own Silhouette. Fighters should always be working on their Silhouette, because at the end of it all, this is how you are visually made understandable. By judges. By audience. By gamblers. Everything is a passion play, a Marvel comic. I invite you to watch maybe the first 15 minutes of the animation breakdown above, and then watch one of the most Silhouetted fighters of the Golden Age, in highlight: Don't watch his techniques, watch his Ruup, his outline, his form. The outline and form is what really is expressive of your character, and at most, your soul. We in the west are often preoccupied with inflicting damage, like damage points. Things that you almost add up on a calculator (or literally CAN add up on a calculator). In Thailand, at least traditionally, it is instead a story of each fighter's Ruup, and as a fighter what you are doing is trying to break your opponent's Ruup, their Silhouette. The purpose of pain, or "damage" is only served in a larger project, that of breaking the Silhouette, and for that reason other things like timing, tempo-change, posturing, dis-balances can be even greater tools than simple pain (a landed strike). What the animation analysis at top does for us though, is open the eyes to all the ways in which a fighter can work on, and train Ruup. Do you land softly, do you land with a thud? What does that say about you? Are you striding? Are you hunched? What does that express? What it does is unfurl and enormous canvas of artistic choices you can make, infinite combinations of how you are composed, as if animated into a character. It isn't just what "weapons" you use, or which guard (crude video game concepts of character). It's things like: How close do you stand? How do you respond or recoil from a strike? How does your Ruup react to its own off-balance? How does it self-portray determination, or the reaction to fear, or dominance? You are always and ever training yourself as a 3D animation character. Everything you do on the pads, on the bag, in sparring and clinch, is the sketchbook of a Silhouette animation, filled with powerful, important character expressions. A great deal of this, if you do not attend to it, will simply become unconscious. You will accidentally create a Silhouette, one that embodies personal psychological strengths, but also weaknesses, but...if you attend to it, it can become an artistic fashioning, an exploration. What does your Ruup look like when you are exhausted, nearly defeated, proud, threatened? How do you get off the bench at the gym? How do you pick up your damp, smelly gloves? All of it is in the creation of a character that is to become visually readable, and ultimately admirable. The fighter in you should find your highest values, the poetry of yourself, and be given the clay to become real, under the fire of duress. If strikes land on you, the real test of Ruup is: How does your Ruup respond to strikes landing. They can land endlessly against you, and if your Ruup shines through there is something nearly divine about that, because it's the composed soul that is shining through. But, if a strike lands on you in training, and you stop, you break Ruup, catching a moment to self-critique, you have violating the prime directive of animation. You are losing Silhouette...or, worse, you are creating a new Silhouette, one you do not intend. Think about all the choices pointed out in the first 15 minutes of the analysis at top, and then think of all the choices you can make in training, in every moment of who you are, and, how those choices can eventually find their way into the ring, even if you never plan to fight. That is Ruup. That is why we love things like comic book characters. That is why we love Yodmuay.

Definitely allowed in Thailand Muay Thai. You see in western boxing, especially in mixed stance crowding.

Tim's Vlog #7 - Day 16

Tim's documentation in raw video capture continues: Day 14 Day 15

Tim's Vlog Day 14

This is something Namkabuan teaches, and in fact was a master of. And the Rambaa Patreon session also has a version of it. Both of those fighters use it offensively. But, the next Patreon session, up in a few days, with Kru Gai, teaches this precisely, used to thwart knee and other attacks. Even as a shorter person it works. I"m not sure where Sylvie has covered it in a technique vlog, but I"m sure that she's done so.

If you can count on low kicks, especially early, the Low Kick Destroyer that Sylvie talks about here, can be a fight changer: There are not many things that you can just learn quickly, but this kind of check of the low kick can feel pretty natural to do. Any fighter who has low kick in their arsenal has a good chance of starting out the early rounds with low kicks. It's an intimidation technique. A single check like this can really change the fight. It will not only discourage low kicks, it might even alter how they kick and even check for the rest of the fight.

The biggest question in a match up like this is whether you have a big clinch game advantage or not. If you do, build your attack around that. If it's unknown, or only a slight advantage you can't count on it as the solution. It also sounds like you are fighting a Thai, in Thailand (which makes a difference). If you are fighting an accomplished Thai female fighter it's generally a big mistake to try and out kick them. And, counter intuitively, it's also a mistake to try to out punch them (because they will just wait on you, and out score you by counter kicking). Everything is about moving them off their post - posting is when they get to set up in their stance and kick on their own timing. The best weapon against posting is the teep. Teep, teep and more teep (if you are comfortable with your teep - if you aren't, don't build an attack around a weapon you "might" use). Any time you see them settle in, teep. Also, as a shorter opponent she will be susceptible to elbows. Without knowing the particulars, a good long range weapon like teeping, and a good short range weapon like elbows makes a formidable combination.

As far as it has been explained to me, more or less all strikes are legal in Thailand, with the exception of knees to the groin. For instance, elbows to the back of the head...legal. Teeps to the groin, legal. There are social codes that make certain strikes feel dirty, so if you did them you are crossing a bit of a line, but the general feeling is "protect yourself".

This would definitely be legal in ring Muay Thai.

Day 13