Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu

My experience with that deeper breathing is that it also slows your breath, which helps keep your heart-rate down as well. When you're "red lining" as they call it when you panic, your breath becomes shallow and your heart-rate rockets and you can't respond to anything. So the deep breaths not only get oxygen to your muscles where it's needed, but it also helps you focus and stay relaxed... as well as you can relax while someone is trying to hit you in the face, haha. Everyone mouth-breathes as they become stressed or tired. Obviously, you get better with this as you become more comfortable and experienced, but watch ANY fight and you'll see people mouth-breathing in later rounds. Or in the UFC after 2 minutes because those guys gas like crazy. What I'm saying is it's normal to EVENTUALLY be breathing through your mouth as you fatigue and you will never totally get rid of it, so don't have unrealistic expectations. It's not being a beginner so much as being an oxygen-breathing mammal.

I also use a youth size and it helps with the very back cutting into your mouth. I trim the back with scissors to make it fit as well. For a couple years I used an Under Armour guard that was great. The one I have now is from a local shop and I don't know the brand. It was the Fairtex shop so I could maybe assume it's their own brand but there's no label on it, which is unlike them - they put their name on everything. I put the mouthguard in boiled (not boiling; take it off the heat) water for about 40-60 seconds, lift it out with a fork and let it cool for about 10 seconds, then put it in my mouth and bring my bottom jaw forward a tiny bit before biting down. Then I suck all the water out while it's on my teeth and use my fingers to push the front against my top teeth. I grind my jaw back and forth a very little bit to create a good mold, then pop it out and stick it in a bowl of cold water for a couple minutes. Probably 1 minute is fine but I just leave it in there for a while and do other things.

Just make whatever noise comes out of you. There's no benefit of one sound over another. There's a guy at my gym who growls, most sounds are a kind of "hae! hae!" sound. I know a young guy in Chiang Mai and two trainers down here who make a kind of "huh, huh, huh" sound that's really fast, like panting almost - it's a little scary and makes me super aggressive when I hear it. If you go on Youtube and watch videos of famous Thai fighters training (Buakaw, Sam A, Yodsanklai, et al) you'll hear them and probably people in the background as well. Those are the typical sounds of a Thai gym.

I'm loud. I make the shhhht, shhhhht sound on the bag most of the time but in pads when I'm feeling free and powerful I'm always yelling. I didn't used to do it because I was self-conscious, but now I don't know whether I'm doing it or not. Generally, if I haven't been yelling I get more tired. The boys do all different sounds and make fun of each other for if those sounds are higher-pitched, which is how I know they pay any mind to it at all. But the padholders make sounds too. They're all ex-fighters so I don't know if it comes from that but they do it for their own pace and stamina as well. It's all in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth on strikes but you can do short bursts back out through the nose while you're between strikes. Master K always told me to do that.

If you can find this trainer on Facebook you can always just send him a quick thank you. I did that with one trainer who was an "assistant" at a gym I left in the US that I was only at for a minute. But he was nice and the owner was a dick, so I wanted to let him know he'd been a good aspect of the gym for me.

Thanks for posting these. I'm gonna watch the Varga fight.

Okay, you need to be really proud of yourself for this fight. You look GREAT for a first fight. And don't worry so much about the "lazy" slowness; that's a thing that you see from the outside and you'll always see it, even when it's not really there anymore. When I watch this video, I can see that your mind is racing but your body is waiting - so the actual experience of standing in the ring is like you're going fast and it's a blur, you're just trying to react, but when you watch yourself when you're calm it's like, "GO ALREADY!" I still see this when I watch my own fights; my own padwork. You showed a good range of techniques and when you attacked you weren't flailing. Your spacing was nice. Those are really hard to accomplish in your first few fights because it takes so much to just get yourself to calm down and focus, but again you did great. What I'm really impressed about is your description of how you prepped yourself for this fight, mentally. Go back to those same exercises now that you've fought already, picture the fight in your mind and correct the "mistakes" you see in your mind. Think of it as recording over your memory of the fight and fixing all the things you see as mistakes with things you wish you'd done. Imagine your way through a perfect fight - being active, fast, breathing, doing all those moves you thought of beforehand. (Those were great, by the way. I'd recommend taking it down from 8 to about 3, and choose 3 moves that no matter what happens, you KNOW you can affect someone with those moves because you're great at them.) I've got a lot of fights by now and I still think, "I could have finished her if I'd done X" or whatever. Just bring it to your training. If you backed off or didn't smell blood and go for the finish, work on that in training. If you don't train it, it won't come to the ring with you - but if you do train it, you'll make huge progress before you know it.

Yes, I say that annoying MAAAA-WIN! on repeat every time I use it. There are a few commercials like that, actually... so memorable in the worst ways.

I'm sorry you're experiencing this P.Evi, I know how frustrating and confusing it can be. There are times in my training when I fell like a damn rockstar for a couple days and then out of nowhere, even though I feel good, I come to training and just can't put it together. Even my trainer will look at me and frown, saying, "you better yesterday." Yeah, I know... but he also says that the body isn't the same every day. Any number of things can make your power go up and down, things you don't necessarily have a lot of control over: how well you slept, what you're eating, if you have different levels of hormones in your body in natural changes throughout the weeks and months and years... the body changes and you can only help direct it, you can't actually keep it in the same state all the time. I feel like I have more "tired days" in the past year than I did ever before. I'm getting older - we all are - but it's not a "I'm too old" kind of thing; it's just changes in the body. On days when I have no power, I take it way down and still do all my training but I focus on details in technique, or breathing, or footwork or whatever else isn't power. That's okay. Not every day is a power day. Keep in mind, the way you wrote your post implies that you've recently increased your training because you're fighting - so more sparring, more running, more rounds on the pads, etc. If you're doing more, you're going to be more tired as your body adjusts to it. I train hard all the time, but when I change my training - like when I stopped going to O. Meekhun, which was an hour of clinching, and started going to Karate, which is kind of an hour of shadowboxing and some stuff kinda like padwork, I'm exhausted. Just from the change. It's not more work, it's just different work and my body is adjusting. In your own opinion, what does it feel like you need? Do you feel like you need more rest? Does it feel like you're mentally hitting a wall? Are you feeling really good but physically just not what you're expecting from yourself? What are your trainers saying?

Wanna talk about gross: in high school biology class my teacher was explaining what pus is and one of the boys in my class says, "wait, so you shouldn't eat it?" Blech, barf.

I like that, from the gym's perspective, it becomes more clear that sponsoring fighters is an investment with unknown returns. This is talking about western fighters, which is a different game than taking on Thai kids. It's a shorter-term investment and because of the interest in putting westerners on cards to sell tickets, less-experienced westerners are able to be presented on bigger shows in a shorter period of time. So investing in an 18-24 year old western guy for two years is reasonable, whereas investing in a Thai kid is generally starting much younger and waiting much longer before he's on the same type of shows, due to what's expected of Thais vs. expectations for westerners. So, the western mentality of business relationships and sponsorship/support from a gym is influenced by this "growing up at the camp" romance that we envision about Thai culture, without really touching on the realities of those relationships. There is a MUCH bigger investment in Thai kids who may or may not become great fighters, versus the investment in westerners who may or may not become great fighters and then go home.

I agree with Emma, be sure to put it on when you're cold. If you warm up first the pores open and that's when the burning is intense. As well, I only really use the liniment before fights. In Thailand the warmup before a fight isn't hitting pads and skipping rope as it is in some parts of the west, but the massage with the liniment warms up all your muscles and you do some light shadow to stretch out, then you're good to go. So if you're going to use this for training, rub the liniment in (if you really rub it into the skin and don't use so much that you're shiny, it won't get on your clothes or car or whatever else) and then do your warmup. The Thai kids use it in the morning before the run as it's pretty much straight out of bed and onto the road, so they put it on their calves and sometimes quads. I put it on my legs if I'm particularly sore in the morning training, There's a "cooler" version (this liquid liniment is a "hot" version) that's green and called "Marwin." That one doesn't burn and is better for massaging your muscles when you're at rest rather than to warm them up for training. It's also amazing if you have a chest cold to rub some on your chest before sleep, like how Vic's works.

This is an anchor post for any discussion on my 101 on Getting Stitches in Thailand blog post which attempts to cover everything from getting cut, to how to handle the ref, to getting stitches themselves, aftercare and socailial consequences in Thailand. if you have running questions or experiences you can post them in this thread and if you need help the community will try to answer. This post and conversation aims to be a foundation for a chapter in the book Emma and I are writing A Guide to Female Fighting in Thailand.

I have alcoholism in my family and I can see the ways in which each of the four kids in my family have dealt with that inheritance. We've all thrown ourselves into things that are microscopic on a scale of general interest but we've each blown that single line out to become the whole frame. And I know exactly what you mean about the empathy of physical contact that isn't, from the outside, "embracing." I cannot tell you how many times my trainer has put more pressure and pain on me when I'm in a difficult place and it feels exactly as comforting as a hug or shoulder cry... complete with about as much snot. I'm sorry about the years your family went through the insanity of an undiagnosed illness. I reckon doctors really hate not being able to give answers and the more asshole-ish among them turn that into the patronizing of patients, and mothers. Glad your son is doing better now. My cousin had undiagnosed Lyme for years. It was a nightmare for the whole family.

That's a very different kind of "fitness," one that I think a lot of people who are outside of these experiences simply don't understand.

I like this question, but it's also a really difficult one because I think it depends greatly on the particulars of each circumstance. I don't think it's ever easy and "no big deal" to the gym that was left behind, even if they weren't giving the person appropriate attention. I may be a bit cynical, but painting "Loyalty" in huge letters on the wall of a commercial gym feels like it has far more to do with business security than the actual ethic of devoting yourself. The reason I say that is that the message appears to be directed toward the clientele, without putting importance on the gym management being loyal to their clients as well. I've never had an easy change of gyms. The difficulty stems from my own hesitation in moving - because I feel more than one thing about any place at any given time. I KNOW it was the best thing for me to leave the gym I just left, but it wasn't ONLY bad there and so there was a lot of pain and guilt involved in making that decision. Before even that, I left my gym in Chiang Mai; leaving the gym I was at for 2.5 years to move to Pattaya was hard because I felt loyalty and filial bonds to the coaches there, but ultimately I felt that I wasn't being taken care of; loyalty isn't a one-way street. And having left O. Meekhun now, it's pretty awkward for me just now because not only are the gyms in the same city, but the one gym came out of the other gym and I was at both gyms at the same time for a while. I often made the joke that it was like having the first wife and the mistress, which is only a joke because it's not literally true but otherwise the dynamic is pretty damn similar. I think I only got away with it because I'm an outsider anyway. The Thai kids who split themselves between these two gyms (there were a few who bounced between, basically just using each gym for having sparring partners) didn't belong to either gym... they were trained by their own fathers and kind of came in as guests but couldn't call themselves members of either place. In your case, the gym telling you that you have to wait until you're ready and only they can decide when that is bothers me because it sounds like they weren't very invested in paying attention to when you were ready. That makes it a power trip. Absolutely there is reason for having people wait, but being clear about what you're waiting for or what is needed on your end before you're ready shows that they have a thought-process behind it and that they're paying attention. Just saying, "I'll let you know" is a brush off. It's interesting you mention Buakaw as well. In the west there was an outcry against his contract with Por. Pramuk and basically the "free Buakaw!" social media campaign. Every single Thai trainer I've asked about this has admitted that Por. Pramuk was being unfair to Buakaw, but that Buakaw was wrong for breaking his contract with them. Even though he was being taken advantage of and stepped on, his status and position at that gym was such that he shouldn't have gone against the contract... that's the bottom-up loyalty that gyms want. And I get it in his case. He was literally raised at the gym and in Thai culture kids kind of owe their parents for having raised them, so they take care of their parents (financially and otherwise) as soon as and for as long as they can. It's merit and karma. It's being a good kid. It's the same with the gym. They take care of you and you pay them back. In the Por. Pramuk case, the father who had run the gym as Buakaw was coming up passed the gym on to his son, who was closer to Buakaw's age and probably didn't think much of him, so this son screwed Buakaw over pretty badly on his fight money. He's pulling these huge numbers for fights and sleeping on a cot in a crap room; he basically got none of his money, the way we see in child-actor stories of kids being robbed by their parents. In the west, we're like, "yeah, that kid should be emancipated and given all his money back from his greedy parents." But in Thai culture that's not how it goes. So Buakaw leaving is breaking loyalty to the father, even though it was the son who was being such a dick. But Banchamek is Buakaw's own gym and he's doing really well. So, right or wrong, it worked out well for him. The reason I go into all of that is that the gym situation in the west is not the same as the gym situation in Thailand. You going to a different gym in the same city because the training is better is within a capitalist ethic that drapes itself in this old-school loyalty romance. I think the bonds you develop with your gym are absolutely real and so leaving one for another can have very real emotional consequences. But "I haven't seen you in almost a year," is not the kind of response you get from a place that was worried about you. If you were dating someone who stopped calling you for a year and then you see them and find out they have a new boyfriend, you clearly didn't have a very close bond to consider that a betrayal. Kinda uncomfortable, yeah... but it's not disloyalty. If your previous gym had really invested in you and then you took off, that would be shitty.

YES!! I love reading this. So often women's narratives are handed to us as what's wrong with our bodies, but the "my body is gong through changes so I'm going to turn it into a monster that's on MY SIDE" is just awesome. You've totally inspired me today.

So sorry to hear about your parent, Cilla. And the trouble at work sounds awful.

Check out the thread on FA Group (lots of clinching!) and I know a guy at Tor Pran49 who is an epic clincher, so they must be doing something right.

I've been meaning to write a blog post about this for a while and recently, as I think it's an amazing topic. A lot of folks who become dedicated to Muay Thai find it to be a form of therapy, out outlet, a time for themselves away from the pressures and stresses of family/work/school. Muay Thai is empowering, but it can also tear you up; but for most of us, Muay Thai is something that has forever changed us and keeps forming us the more we work in it. I came across this post from a woman who has found her experiences at her gym (Onyx MMA in Singapore) to be helpful in dealing with her Depression. For whatever reason, I think Muay Thai beckons to those of us who are struggling with ourselves and gives us a set of tools and a process through which we can translate that struggle. This thread is to share our thoughts and experiences on the usefulness and challenges of Muay Thai as therapy. For me, Muay Thai is an incredible outlet. Physically pushing myself is, at times, a very real necessity in dealing with my personal demons. But it's also difficult because all the things about Muay Thai that make me feel empowered and strong and capable, ALSO make me feel useless and stuck and self-critical. A mirror is just a reflective surface - it's YOU that interprets what you see in it. Muay Thai is like that - some days it shows me beauty and some days it shows me a monster. But I do feel that I'm able to work through things on a personal, emotional and psychological (even spiritual?) level through the language and art of Muay Thai that I wouldn't be able to address otherwise. It gives me the courage to keep trying, I think. And I can see improvement; it's measurable, whereas being a more stable or happy or good person is harder to gauge. But man... sometimes it just crushes me, too.

Hi Gaby, I have some clinch footage with Sakmonkol teaching me, way before I knew how to clinch at all. There are several "parts" but here is the first installment. You can also search around my blog and on Youtube.

Hey Freddy, I was vegan for 10 years, but before I ever trained in Muay Thai. I just read this book by famed ultra-runner Scott Jurek and he's vegan. Lots of good recipes in here: "Eat and Run"

My friend Nell came out to visit me a couple years ago and spent a day or two in BKK before heading up to Chiang Mai to see me. She's a very independent type, lives in New York City and doesn't take nonsense, but she decided to pay a Tuk-Tuk driver to take her around to various locations all day. Like, basically hired him for the day. She had no problem with it and wasn't ripped off, but taxi and tuk-tuk drivers can get "kickbacks" from businesses or coupons for petrol if they take tourists there and the tourist buys something. So they try to get you to go to jewelry shops, tailors, etc. My friend said, "no" to a million of these offers and he dragged her to one or two anyway. She ended up having a man's suit tailor made for her and it arrived in Chiang Mai before she flew home - it was a beautiful suit! Anyway, the point of that story is that my friend isn't naive and she still got put in a somewhat uncomfortable situation of someone trying to sell her something. It wasn't a huge hassle, but a minor inconvenience. But she ended up getting something she loved out of it. It's VERY easy to not buy gems or gold if you don't want it, but maybe a little more difficult to convince the person trying to sell it to you to leave you alone. It's not dangerous, just annoying. So, I don't think you should feel that you're in danger. When you arrive at the airport in BKK there's an information desk on the "pick up" floor, down some escalators from arrivals. There's a big "i" on the sign for information. They'll direct you to which exit you want for taxis. I think it's Exit 4. And out there you'll find a queue for metered taxis and someone who speaks English asks where you're going, prints you a ticket with the price and directs you toward the taxi. That's the easiest way to not pay more than you should.

What is the progression like on these K-1 style shows, like Kunlun and Enfusion? Do they have standing champions or tournaments, are there fan favorites with sponsorship deals? Do fans follow the particular fighters?

Now that we have a Patreon account set up if anyone would like to pledge to move the Roundtable to a proper server - we've had problems with the current server sending out email notifications, which prevents momentum on topics - let me know in a note (or here in comments) that your Patreon pledge is designated for moving the forum's server. If this is fully established we can go ahead and make it happen. This dovetails with my attempt to just make my writing sustainable, a much larger goal, but I'd like to upgrade the server as well.