Jeffo

Yeah I think you're right about him not have any mma fights, I think I might have misspoken about him having fights in a earlier reply, so that's my bad. I'm pretty sure he has amateur experience but I'm not totally sure, if you can find out that would be cool, but for now I'll just say he has no competition experience of any kind just for arguments sake. The next bit "his shit sounds like bro science. " Okay fair enough, it sure can, but just because something sounds like bro science doesn't make it so. As it is though I don't have all the answers and neither does any one else. Like I said in a earlier reply though the man's been around this game a long time, and in that time I'm sure he picked up a few things. As for the "classy words and sciencey language", the man's a philosophy major and I'm sure this is just how he talks. Personally I'm pretty dumb but I feel like I can follow along reasonably well. But okay, I can still follow you here, and believe you can have your opinion to dislike him. Just understand that disliking him because how he talks doesn't mean he doesn't have valuable fight advice lol. "beliefs about fighting and training aren't rooted in any real fight experience." Okay fair enough as I've said before I concede the fact he doesn't have any real competition experience. One thing though, I know that the man sparred regularly with GSP during his career. This might be a bit of a stretch but I'm betting that during some of these rounds the sparring ramped up to say 70/80% if not more at times. Now we will probably disagree here but in my opinion sparring GSP regularly during his prime world champ years at 70/80% is probably very similar to low or maybe even mid level pros going 100%, which is a fight. Personally I'd call this fight experience. This is generally why in my opinion dutch style fighters with fewer pro fights can still do well against thais with hundreds of fights, take Jonathan Haggerty for instance with 20 fights or so under his belt he beat Sam A who has more that 400 hundred and been in the game like 30 years. Why because Jon more than likely has 400 really hard spars that are like fights and I think Firas has had the same during his tenure. Like I said though this could be wrong but it's my opinion and I'll continue to have it until I'm proven wrong. In conclusion, you don't have to like this man, and as I've said earlier he's not the end all be all in my opinion but to act like this man has nothing to offer in terms of fight advice is just silly ( "Silly" in Joe Rogan's voice lol). You ever heard the saying you are the five people you surround yourself with, well this man surrounds himself with some pretty high level talent. What about this one, the best fighters don't always make the best coaches and the best coaches aren't always the best fighters. I didn't want this discussion to turn into a defense of Firas Zahabi but whatever, I like him (admittedly bias), and I think he has something to offer the fight world. As always thanks for the input.

That's to bad you don't train that much, it's fun lol. I get it though, Sylvie's lucky she's got you, I think you help her in her growth just as much as some of these krus. In some kind of weird way your perspective lends itself to her development. Don't know if that makes sense, but I think it sounds good lol.

Like I said I think there's a balance. I don't always think that the body finds the best technique when it's tired (not that it can't), but I think it can also look for the easiest technique which as I'm sure we can agree easy doesn't always mean better. Also sometimes when I'm tired I overthink things too, sometimes I even develop a progressively worse attitude which results in worse and worse quality in the things I'm practicing. Thanks for your input, I'm sure it's going to sound like I disagree with everything you said, just to be clear I don't. I don't have all the answers and I think there's a lot of grey area, I just like to argue the other side to as a means to explore this idea in greater depth. I think discussions such as this will someday lead to real fact and hopefully a more optimal and efficient way of training/improving, not just in muay thai, but in all things. Thanks again for your input.

I do agree that at times Firas can get a little ridiculous with this idea of "not getting sore while working out", I'm personally under the belief that some days have to be hard and you should be feeling it the next day, I believe in max days days from time to time. But being a guy who has personally and consistently done this fight sport stuff for the last I don't know 10-15 years (maybe more) both as a fighter and a coach ( to some pretty good fighters I might add) he seems to have a good idea what he's talking about and I don't think it's just a bunch of malarkey. That being said he's not the end all be all either. I'm sure like everyone else he has his biases and as a business owner I'm sure some of his beliefs perhaps get formed around theories that can be better for business rather than a theory that is perhaps better for the real fighter. Everyone has to pay the bills. I personally love what he does, and also love what the traditional Thais do, and as evident believe there's room for both. Thanks for the input Kevin, really enjoy the discussions. By the way when are we going to see you in one of these privates, I think it would be interesting to see a training session from your perspective. How long have you been training? from what I can gather it sounds like you've trained a good deal along with Sylvie, but I've never really heard much, maybe I missed it.

Yep i feel this way too, although after listening to a recent ask me anything episode with firas zahabi I'm not sure that it's the best even if it feels right intuitively, his thinking is that we can also create poor habits in our state of fatigue that can actually have a worse effect. I'm sure there's a balance though. Thanks for the response, I thought the discussion about this was just fascinating and wanted to explore it further. Something I've recently realized is a big factor for me in creating these grooves is the idea of how we as people hold on to more negative things that have happened in our lives, this is weird to explain but let me break it down as to how I'm trying to apply it in muay thai at least in some sense. So I've heard that people in general are far more likely to be able to accurately recall events and details surrounding those events if the memory had some sort of negative connotation linked to it. Like if you went to the beach and were stung by a jellyfish and it was painful and thus created a somewhat negative memory. Well this is far more likely to stick in your brain (at least in greater clarity) than say a good day at the beach, because we're wired this way to avoid danger and pain essentially. Anyway the other day in sparring I'm making the same mistake over and over and getting punished for it, nothing too bad, but enough for it to bring about enough pain that in the moment it became a negative thing for my brain to remember I guess, and I've created this association between throwing a crap body jab and getting hit with a cross in the face. Now before i jab at the body i remember the pain and either think about a way to feint so i can then go to the body or find some way to defend the incoming shot so i can throw the jab and in the meantime I stopped dropping my hand and don't get beat up. It's funny but in a weird way a quick lesson in pain can be just the thing I need to fix a mistake I'm making and it also creates this kind of deep groove in a way. sometimes failure is our best training tool (i fall into this camp a lot lol I gotta make all the mistakes i'm warned about lol). Hope that make sense, not sure if I don't know how to ramble lol.

While I was listening to a MTB podcast an idea came up that I thought was very interesting and that I thought warranted further discussion. Sylvie was talking about ways to implement something into her game and she spoke about how her brother said she should pick 3 things to work at developing during fighting and training. Sylvie and Kevin then said that she just couldn't do this, this wasn't her style. Eventually there was this moment where Kevin mentioned Dieselnoi and how he would train super hard and at the very end when he was tired he would then practice standing tall and smiling (ruup I believe) so he could better ingrain that into his system creating what Kevin called a "deep groove". Of course this got me thinking about records and while I'm not from that era I've seen one, heard one, and to some degree understand how they work lol (just barely though haha). So the idea is generally that the more something is played, or in the case of Muay Thai, the more a technique is practiced the more ingrained it will become thus creating this "deep groove" which you're more likely to fall back to in the times of stress or pressure like in a fight for instance. So I guess I'm just curious as to how aside from repetition alone can we develop these "deep grooves"? Also how do you work on something you're interested in working on in sparring or fighting when you're like Sylvie in that you kind of just forget the 3 things you were going to try/work on? Sorry if this sounds crazy and honestly I don't totally know where I was going with this, it just feels like there are some nuggets of wisdom that could be mined from this particular topic and I'd like a deeper dive into it. So even if you can't answer the questions that I've posed (because they're not the best questions lol) I'd still be curious to hear everyone's feedback regarding this topic and would maybe like to follow you down the rabbit hole with whatever you come up with. Thanks.

I'm beginning to see this lol. Do you think this is a good thing? Even despite the years of doing athletics, running has always been kinda rough on my body and it gets harder as the years go by. I don't mind doing it but I look at someone like Valtellini who says he never really ran but did cardio in different ways. Granted he was a kickboxer, so a different sport, but he found pretty good success pretty quickly and if it wasn't for concussions may have had a long and successful career. I wish the thais were more into swimming for longevity purposes, but I totally understand why they run. Thanks for the input.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he just considers it a variation of the hook. If you want to check out the private with sylvie i'm pretty sure it's episode #44 with ponsaknoi sit chang.

I'm not tall so I'm not the person to ask for advice on being the tall person, but as a shorter guy and one who has a bjj background, I really love double under hooks. There's this sweep where you have your lock around the opponents hips and you just bulldoze your forehead into their chest (don't know the name of the sweep) but it's awesome. I'm sure there's some pitfalls in muay thai to this but so far its worked like a dream. If the opponent tries to elbow or hit me i just shrug my shoulders and really bury myself in their chest. The toughest thing about this is sometimes it's really hard to basically bulldoze them down so typically they shoot their hips back and it just sets up a great knee to the body, and then after that they tend to push their hips forward in response so they don't get kneed again in which case i go right back into trying to bulldoze them down only this time they're usually a bit weaker and easier to break down. I can't remember the private but someone shows this in the muay thai library. Another thing i was going to mention is because I'm short i basically just end up in this double under hook position usually my opponent can easily get the "plum" position. So i would think this type of clinch position would be good for big guys. Since I can kind of anticipate my opponent going to this position I've started looking into a lot of escape stuff and counters to this, which is awesome because it gives me this clear cut thing that I have to work on. So if I can get good at countering and defending the "plum" and chaining this with my under hook game then i think my game will really flourish (my A game anyway). It took me a long time to realize this but the best people are the ones who can chain things together in such a way that they can almost predict your response and from there they give you less and less options until your out of options and in the case of bjj you get choked out and in the case of muay thai you get knocked out or battered or thrown lol hope that helps somewhat

I totally get what you mean here, sometimes i do the same thing. the thing is there's kind of this line we tow in training. We don't want to go to easy because we're doing our partner a disservice by not allowing them a real look, but if we go to hard we do them a disservice by not allowing them a chance to really practice. on a side note, I also had another little moment watching a video in the muay thai library. One of the trainers says there's only three punches, straights, hooks, and uppercuts. While this isn't a big deal for most people, I'm still new and needed to hear this, it reminds me that hey just cause punches can come from all sorts of angles and at times look different, they really aren't. Thanks for your input.

Yeah that's interesting, I can definitely see the parallels, funny but I guess I never even thought about the idea of disengaging in a muay thai setting. That's something I have to remind myself I tend to sit in that range where I can get punched and kicked constantly, if I were to literally take two steps back that would force my opponent to close that distance if they want to hit me. You're definitely right about the ref's being one of sylvie's biggest opponents lol, watching some of her fights can annoy me because she often gives up a weight advantage, and an experience advantage (at least in terms of years having trained), and I know sylvie would never dwell on that stuff, but then you get a ref who completely seems to favor the opponent by not allowing sylvie to do the thing that she excels in (the clinch), its like damn. but it really makes me appreciate the good refs, some do a great job of popping the fighters off the ropes and allowing the clinch to develop which is great because so much of muay thai is clinch work, and it's actually the thing that attracted me to muay thai in the first place. As a bjj guy who felt comfortable in the clinch, it was humbling to get my ass kicked when clinching in muay thai class, but it was cool and now I'm excited to learn muay thai Thanks for the reply, hope to see a new muay thai bones soon, i'm just about through all of them and i need something good to listen to on my late night drives. As much as i enjoy joe rogan, i'd personally rather listen to you and sylvie discuss muay thai and orcas lol

So I've been training bjj for sometime now and early into my blue belt I had a light bulb moment that took my guard game from a level that felt terrible to a level that got me thinking "I'm not so bad at this." As dumb as this is going to sound, that light bulb moment was when I realized that I didn't have to play guard if I didn't want to. I didn't have to stay stuck under my opponent or try for sweeps and submissions. I could if I wanted to go another route and just disengage, find a way out and get back to my feet. As ridiculous as that sounds I suddenly found myself with a whole other world of options and suddenly my game flourished (at least my bottom game). Well now that I'm venturing into muay thai I'd really like to hear from everyone else about their "light bulb" moments within this sport. I'm not looking to sidestep the hard work involved in getting good at muay thai, but if I can avoid even one pitfall because someone gave me some advice, than the question would have served it's purpose. But yeah, anyway what's your "light bulb" moment, was it a concept? a technique? a tweak in your technique? a change to your training regimen or recovery regimen perhaps? Anything at all, if you felt it helped and could be of use to someone else at any stage of their muay thai development I'd really like to hear about it, even if it seems small and insignificant like in my story. Thanks. Also just wanted to say to sylvie and kevin, really love the content, the muay thai library is awesome and I think I might be addicted to watching your fights with commentary, it's awesome to hear your thoughts about the fights I feel like I gain a whole new level of insight watching those.