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I've written before about the troubles I've had with a kind of Style (the post takes a while to load, lots of GIFs), and being forced into a style that wasn't "me", or at least that I had a really hard time bringing forward. I just wasn't an evasive, tricky, or dodge-y person. It wasn't until I discovered that there was a different style, a forward, space-eating style that I was set more free. I remember the beginning of realizing this was something that Andy Thomson said: "There is not one Muay Thai, there are 1,000s. Each person has their own Muay Thai." The yesterday I wrote about the Things I'm Working On and a lot of them have to do with my style, and how to best bring it out. These things involve body punches, overhands, clinching hips in, taking space, not rushing. I wanted to post here because a lot of us feel like we want to measure up to "a" Muay Thai. We want to do it "right". There definitely are right and wrong ways to do things, but there is not the one way to do a particular thing. You don't need to be a fighter to think about style. What is your style, and what are you doing to pursue it?
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Hi guys, -I wanted to know how is the lookboonmee gym for an athlete of medium level?the trainers follow you and try to make you grow or they use you only for money... -How is the accomodation and the promoters for some fights? Thanks :) P.S. sorry for my bad english
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The 2016 Awakening Awards are here. Nominate and vote for your favorite female fighters in Muay Thai and MMA. Here's last year's forum thread. The results for 2013, 2014 and 2015 are posted on Awakening's website. Nominations – Dec 26th – Jan 3rd Voting – Jan 8th – Jan 18th Results – Announced approx Jan 23rd
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I'm new here, and I'd love to get some reactions to my post on "Good toughness and bad toughness. Why combat sports are fun and good for you". (Emma kindly posted it on her blog.) It's my attempt to rationalize my love of combat sports with my dislike of violence. Although military metaphors are common in combat sports (and I've been known to wear camo shorts myself), the big difference is that you are fighting in the ring because that's what you really want to do. All thoughts are welcome.
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Hey everyone, So I've been training for three months and will be starting to train twice a day in the month of September. I'e decided to prepare for a fight in Thailand in February, and I wanted to know if it's okay to jump right into a professional fight, or rather should I fight amateur a few times before making the jump. I'm currently training at Khongsittha Muay Thai in Bangkok. Thanks!
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Lion Fight 31-9/2/2016 Iman Barlow vs Jeri Sitzes https://eroshare.com/k07csbaz Jorina Baars vs Angela Whitley Antonina Shevchenko vs Paola Cappucci
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Hey everyone, So I've been diving into a lot of videos, and I've seen alot of knockout kicks with shins, but even more so with the top of the foot connecting rather than the shin. Can someone tell me when it's acceptable to practice kicks on the bag with the top of your foot rather than the shin and does learning overall technique suffer?
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Just under 2 weeks to go until the big Muay Thai competition fight between England and Thailand at The 02 Indigo in London. The best seats in the house are still available so please hurry as tickets are selling quickly. This event is not only a boxing match but also a fun event for all the family so anyone can come and watch. The main fight will be between Charlie Peters v Saenchai P.K. This promised to be a thrilling and highly competitive fight Event Details The O2 Indigo, Peninsula Square, SE10 0DX London, United Kingdom September 11th September from 7pm Doors open: 3pm Tickets still on sale from £30, You can purchase your tickets below: Ticket Hotline http://www.theo2.co.uk/events/detail/thai-fight Check out our promo advertisement video giving you a sneak preview of what is going to be in store on September 11th, find out who will be fighting who on the night with a glimpse into the fighters stats and some past clips from previous bouts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6P-Wg4IHCE
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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.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfnZ-WdK4FI This is just a wonderful short documentary on the Petchrungruang star fighter PTT. It's very hard to encapsulate how sweet and kind a fellow PTT is - hey, he absolutely loves Jaidee - but he has an aura. Sylvie wrote about him and his story that is hinted at in the film - but the film itself in its very simplicity, and in how his words in translation guide the basic themes, I just find very moving. What a cool dude he is. It's only about 8 minutes, give it a watch.
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A lot of deserved attention is paid in the west to the scoring of individual strikes. Which strikes score, and why? Where did it land? Was it powerful, was it on balance, was it displacing? These are important qualities of Thai scoring which are not readily understandable to western eyes at times and Tony Myers has done an amazing job of clarifying these principles, leading the way toward more uniform and more Thai style scoring. I want to talk about an element of Muay Thai scoring that is less appreciated perhaps: How regularity works in relationship to reversal. Narrative Arc - The Proving of the Past I was watching Sylvie's latest fight against Faa Chiangrai, a Northern Champion she has now beaten 4 times in a row, and was thinking about the scoring in this fight. Faa has felt, more or less, that she's won most of these fights - or at least it is in her nature to protest - and this one was actually very close. What made the scoring really interesting to me is the role that early success and failure played in how later strikes are read. In a nutshell, Sylvie had taken a dominant lead with a power/knee game in the 3rd. Faa then started to control the distance better and landed kicks in the 4th to pull ahead. Starting the 5th Faa was well ahead in a narrative sense. She had been on top, but not dominantly so, when the fight was cresting in the 4th. All she had to do was maintain the impression of the 4th and she had it. The very pro-Thai, All-Thai audience of gamblers even had the odds 15-1, they were all betting on her. And then Sylvie landed this: Now, this is the interesting thing. In order to understand the role this moment played in the scoring of the fight one has to know what happened before. There is nothing in this move/event that dictates its inherent value. First thing to understand is that visually this was by far the most dramatic/impactful move of the fight. If the fight had been filled with throws or drops it would have meant something else. Instead, the whole fight Sylvie had been trying to finish Faa off in the clinch and put her down to the canvas; and much of the fight Faa was trying to stymie Sylvie, and in the 4th it looks like she had too some degree solved Sylvie's power with movement, and had begun to score a little. But when this throwdown happened the entire illusion of Faa's control of Sylvie's power was broken - Sylvie's physicality suddenly re-appeared. All of the dominance of the 3rd round clinch game came back into play. In a single moment of the fight Faa's 4th round recovery and lead-taking was put into a new context. This is the very un-western or at least un-modern nature of Thai scoring. Strikes are not blows that take away a fighter's vitality, like video game life bar points subtracted mathematically, which then are numerically compared in the end. It is instead a performance. A performance of skill, of heart, of Life. And as such story-telling is a significant part of the aesthetic and meaning of what is going on. A fighter can add points to his or her column throughout a fight. But there is a more important dimension to this kind of addition. The narrative of the fight must confirm the meaning of those added up points. The reason for this is that landed strikes are not numerical damage done (or, degree of difficulty wushu-like skill demos). They are demonstrations of dominance, the demonstrated control over the space around, and body of, your opponent. In fights you might very well show control over your opponent (dominance) through repeatedly landed strikes in a round, but if you are not able to maintain control over the space, the nature of that dominance comes under question. That is why later rounds are more important than earlier rounds, generally. In this particular fight Faa was able to cast some doubt on Sylvie's power game that looked so strong in the 3rd. She looked like she had come through it, began to control the space a little better, that it wasn't as effective as it appeared at the time. Only when Sylvie threw her to the ground in the final round did the promise of the 3rd round suddenly come to fruition. It wasn't an illusion after all. How Missed Strikes Help, and Landed Strikes Hurt - Potential Dramatic Energy So far I've been talking about a fight none of you have seen, so it probably hasn't been much help in establishing more universal principles or application. So let me take the counter-intuitive idea that missed strikes can help you, and landed strikes can hurt. One of the biggest focuses of attention in a fight in later rounds is looking for the reversal. It may be because audience gambling is so much woven into the fabric of Muay Thai in Thailand, but the shifting of fortunes (or powers) in a fight is really where the thrill or rush is for Thais, it is what raises Muay Thai up as a drama. Muay Thai at least in some buried, cultural sense is dramaturgic and thaumaturgic in nature. And because the eye is so sensitive to shifts in power or fortune any regularity that let's say is present in the first half or more of the fight is subject to meaningful and dramatic shift. When there is shift, there is emphasis. This means that if a fighter attempted to land a heavy cross over and over throughout the fight, and missed and missed and missed (the Thai fighter Thananchai fights like this), these are not just moments of ineptitude that count towards the proven impotence of the fighter, like so many demerits. They are also the build up of potential dramatic energy. In the very nature of narrative the questions begin to grow: Will the right cross eventually land?! If it lands will it be powerful, decisive? When the cross lands, heavily, late in the 4th round, suddenly everything comes alive. All those missed strikes grow into the promise that they implied. Now, a landed right hand after 15 misses does not win a fight, but it sets up a new context. The result of that excitement is that the fight can move into a phase of re-evaluation - it is in suspension. Suddenly everything that happened before that moment can be reconsidered. The onus on the cross fighter then is to suddenly prove the promise he just demonstrated. My rear hand just landed after all those misses, it was not a fluke. If he lands it again, and again, the tide of a fight can shift dramatically. Or, if he then suddenly brings in other weapons that indicate the aesthetic of power he was miming previously, this too can convince. It is not enough to just land something you missed repeated, but when you do positively break from a regularity you have bought yourself a ticket to a reevaluation moment. You are half way there to victory, a victory born of a sensitivity to shifts in efficacy and momentum. I've seen big leads erased rather quickly through the intensity created by the emphasis on reversal. In this way a single strike landed, in the context of an already established pattern, can be far more potent in terms of dramatic narrative, then assorted strikes landed in a medley of attacks. It opens the door to a certain sort of perception and reevaluation. The role of repeated strikes can work in the opposite direction as well. If you repeatedly land kicks to the body early in the fight (one of the more dependable scoring strikes in Thailand), and then later in the fight you start to be unable to do so (they start to be checked, or you start leaning back and hitting air) in terms of narrative your earlier prowess can certainly work against you instead of just acting like points added up in a bank. When the regularity is disrupted, in either direction, dramatic form calls everything into reconsideration. If you start landing those kicks again, let's say in the 5th round, all those earlier strikes can come right back into play - they have not been permanently erased. But the onus is on you to renew that regularity, to prove the dominance that they were previously indicating, or to provide a new regularity that redeems the previous one in some way. Because the build up of potential dramatic energy works anytime there is a regularity, it can manifest itself in many areas of a fight. In fact it can manifest itself across fights when a fighter becomes known. A fighter like Thanonchai enters every fight with a "bank" of power punching regularity that can work for or against him in terms of narrative. A fighter like Yodwicha has the same in terms of clinch fighting. In a sense each fight for these fighters is a play off of that regularity, the attempt to produce the story of their dominance. The Benefit of Legible Fighting Styles Much is decried about the softer first two rounds of a Muay Thai fight in Thailand, but much of this is a play the fighters are having either with their own reputations (regularity) or with establishing expectation in the fight. When it is done right both fighters are setting up their independent stories, stories which will battle each other to be the "true" one. But I want to think about this entire narrative force in terms of strikes or styles chosen. It's not just "who is in the lead now" and "will they be able to hold it". It's what regularities are being set up, how is the principle of reversal being observed. A lot of western Muay Thai fighters in Thailand - at least that I've seen - do not have very legible fighting styles. By this I mean they do not seem to feel the importance of demonstrated dominance through repetition and readable tactics. Instead they often attempt to demonstrate their skill, the quality of their techniques (or their power) in a variety of fighting approaches. They may start out with a basic approach, but often by the 4th round it looks more and more just like "fighting" - drawing on whatever weapons that occur to them from their arsenal. The reason for this, if my observations are sound, is that the mentality is more one of scoring, and in scoring, often it is scoring as "damage done". It's a math of damage. Or, in some cases, western fighters are trying to just "demo" various techniques, showing how "Thai" they are in their balance and form. But often western fighters don't have a legible fighting approach, a sense in which strikes produce expectations. You want judges and audience to perceive regularities. Yes they are showing heart, yes they may even be showing sound technique, but it cannot be easily read from a perspective of reversal. Thai fighters on the other hand, just to generalize, have a much more legible approach. You can see where the early regularities are in a fight. As a striking tactic is attempted over and over its potential dramatic energy is built up. Will it succeed? I think for this reason there is a benefit for fighters to repeat strikes or tactical approaches, to increase the legibility of their fighting for judges. The Change in Tactics - Reversal of Fortune Due to the nature of regularity and reversal the power of reversal does not just play out in a single element of a fight. It is not just whether a cross lands after multiple misses. One of the more common narrative plays is the change in tactics. A fighter fights in one way for let's say 3 rounds with only middling success, and then in the 4th changes tactics and becomes dominant. This is for instance how clinch fighting is often used, to demonstrate dominance and power that was only promised previously in other ways: something to create the reversal from the regularity before. It isn't just the case of: "well, that didn't work, let me try this". Most of the time this is a narrative approach, one that builds up a regularity for the benefit of reversal. One of our favorite fighters JR (who fights in China) would start out Orthodox for two rounds or so, and then switch to his more natural, powerful Lefty - perhaps just a gimmick, but for him it is about narrative fighting, building in a reversal from a switch. If you are not fighting with regularities you may be missing out from some of the dramatic potential that is essential to Thai scoring. Of course you can try to fight without pattern. If you are a virtuoso you can play above the fight, and let the regularity of your superiority become the storyline, but appreciation of pattern fighting is most of the time an essential component of Thai aesthetics. Because of the importance of legibility if you are fighting and you've missed your last 10 strikes, you are probably in a much better position if most of those strikes were of an identifiable approach, than if they were 10 different kinds of strikes with no readability. The first builds up potential dramatic energy, ready for the reversal, the other just looks like incoherent impotence. The first invites either the future cashing in on those kinds of strikes (will they eventually land?), or a change in tactics that calls attention to a moment of reversal, the second allows almost no firm dramatic way forward, no quality of contrast.
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Interview With Z1 Female Muay Thai Champion Miriam Sabot Always great to see interviews with female fighters.
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http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/nextrondarousey-british-teenager-inspired-ufc-7086817 Article about up and coming Muay Thai amateur Dakota Ditcheva. She's considering switching to MMA because she is having a hard time finding fights. Dakota's most recent fight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWwFOmVLFw4
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Before I started getting to know the Thai culture, more specifically the Muay Thai culture I never knew why the Wai Khru was performed and what it even was. I even though it was a bit funny. After learning a LOT (mostly thanks to Sylvie's insightful posts on her blog about Thai culture) I know and understand the meaning of the Wai Khru. So this is a topic for those of you who train/had started training Muay Thai in the "West". I'd like to know when and where did you learn your Wai Khru in the Western gyms? Is it as important as in Thailand to perform it? Who taught you the Wai Khru and who initiated it (in other words: did someone said "now you will learn the Wai Khru" or was is you asking to learn it?) Who do you learn the Wai Khru from if your trainer doesn't want to teach you? Is it wrong to learn a Wai Khru from youtube? How long does a Wai Khru has to be in the West?
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Dana Hoey aka threeoaks has a video installation of Muay Thai sparring opening at Mass MoCA this weekend (5/23/2015). It's part of an exhibit called Artists' Choice: An Expanded Field of Photography. Another photo still of the exhibit: threeoaks casually mentioned this in the training and work thread and she private messaged me after I asked for more details. I was super excited to find out this museum is close to where I live so I can go see her installation in person. I asked threeoaks permission to start a thread and also checked with Emma and Sylvie find out their policy on promotion/self promotion of forum members and they both agreed that self promotion is a good thing.
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Rare fight footage. Very little video of Erika Kamimura is around. Japan's Erika has been thought of as the best low-weight female Muay Thai fighter in the world until she retired about a year or more ago. She has unusual power for her size. Here she fights Loma Sitajou who is probably a weight class under her at the time. Erika held the 105 lb WPMF title, Loma easily fought at 100 lbs. I've fought and lost to Loma twice and she is very difficult to deal with in the clinch, the best clinch fighter I've faced near my weight, by far. In this fight it's basically her clinch vs. Erika's power combinations. Loma is currently on the Thai National team. Round 1 Round 2 Round 3
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Lion Fight 23: TIFFANY VAN SOEST vs. MARTYNA KROL via Martyna's facebook page. Super excited for this fight as I follow both fighters on social media. They have very different styles so it should be an interesting match up.
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I wanted to post my guest post here: Broken Tusk: Breaking the Body and the Art of Fighting because I think this is a really deep topic and possibly there is a lot to be talked about here. The idea is that the fighting arts compose a kind of graphic system that can be used to express an inherent beauty in violence, and that the pursuit of fighting arts, in that they are arts, and in that they verge towards a real violence, can be used to restore bodies and spirits that have been broken. In fact, through fighting the body can be built as a "higher" body, and higher house, a higher vehicle, by analogy. An excerpt: ...Sylvie’s “house of the spirit” doesn’t really exist any longer, not in any sense that we often assume someone to have one. Her house of the spirit, her body, was broken that day of multiple violations. Her spirit has no dependable house, no real protective shell. Since she was 11 she has been living in the ruins of her body-house, and as the human spirit is both beautiful and adaptable she has learned to live in those ruins. She can hide in them, in the broken pieces, use the shadows, the crevices, the places people don’t think to look. She learned since that young age to be in the ruins, of a kind. What Sylvie is doing in Thailand – for all those who don’t get (or worse, approve of) what she is doing – is building a higher house, or one can just as easily say, a higher body to replace the broken house/body she has had for all these years. This is why she strains and breaks herself over and over and over, reaching up to the promise of calm in the onslaught of violence. And like Genesha she cannot stop until the epic is written. This is why the Art of Muay Thai is a salvation and even a duty, the calm she sees in the bodies and faces of so many Thais that have fought since a young age – the poise, the balance, the grace, the ease – it calls her. This attempt is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I'd love to hear the experiences and thoughts of others. So many focus on the violence of the real fighting arts and imagine a motive of something between aggression and rage. But to me the fighting arts, when pursued, are something so different. They compose a base language, and a writing system that uses the broken edges of the body as its instrument. In the article I draw the analogy of the myth of Ganesha, and his broken tusk:
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An excellent interview of Anne Lieberman who conducted her Fulbright research in Thailand, in part, interviewing western female fighters, including myself (back on my first visit in 2010). She's a great voice for female fighting and is a Muay Thai fighter in the NYC area now. One of the first people to inspire me to research and study Muay Thai and not just live it. https://www.themuse.com/…/fight-like-a-girl-the-role-of-wom… an excerpt: "...But there's another layer to training as a woman in Thailand—one that is more controversial—and that's about the sexual politics at play, especially between male trainers and female fighters. Few farang female fighters come and live in Thailand for extended periods of time. I had the opportunity to interview several of them, as I felt that their experience was integral to how female fighters are viewed in Thailand and how they constantly negotiate their place in a male-dominated sport. Many of them expressed that they felt some kind of sexual pressure from their trainers. The intensity varied: One woman I interviewed was almost raped, another was verbally harassed and made uncomfortable by a trainer's advances; several ended up dating their trainers. In some cases, if a woman wouldn't sleep with her trainer, this affected the kind of training she received. This is not unique to Thailand, though—these kinds of sexual dynamics take place everywhere. (The story of the woman raped by her Jiu-Jitsu instructors in Maryland is a prime example of this.) But what was unique to Thailand is that there seemed to be this perception that farang women were promiscuous partiers and that white women would (and wanted to) sleep with almost anyone. This is one of the many ways the fraught relationship between tourism and sex and sexuality in Thailand bubbles over into the Muay Thai world..."
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MTG: The Curious Case Of “The Phantom Casual Fan Offensive” in Muay Thai and Kickboxing Interesting article about growing casual fans of muay thai in the west. I became a casual muay thai fan via feminism and women's empowerment. I stumbled across a bjj blog, Jiu Jiu's BJJ Blog. Started reading that, she linked to Sylvie's blog, 8limbs.us and the rest is history. I've also started following MMA. I'm not particularly interested in any of the male fighters though. Came for the bad ass women, stayed for the bad ass women. I'm the kind of bad fan that isn't gonna make anyone any money though. I do my fight viewing via youtube/reddit gifs. I don't buy PPVs or merch. I do feel slightly guilty about that but I'm not hardcore enough to need to see a fight live. Especially since most fight cards only have one women's match which is what I'm interested in.
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(I hope this is the right section) Today a friend of mine accused me of being a fitness junkie because I train four times a week. I suspect it was because I said I couldn't do something with her because I had training. My question is: are we all endorphine junkies or people who don't train regularly perceive us as such because we have different priorities? Is there an actual addiction to endorphine problem when you train almost every day? What is the reaction of the people around you (family/friends) to your training schedule?
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Fightland: JOANNA CHAMPION'S STRIKING CLINIC We were discussing Joanna's loss to Duannapa Mor. Rattana Bundit at World Muay Thai Angels in another thread and how styles, rules and judging make fights.
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This short film is pretty incredible in how subtly Muay Thai and women are being put together in a VERY middle class way. I would have to think that this was unthinkable even 5-10 years ago. I love that there is not just one female story, but three. For those that don't know, Muay Thai has a rather low-class image in Thailand and in many ways is not only ultra-masculine, it is of older generations, and has an appeal to rural Thais. It is not "modern". Seems to be put together as a student thesis supported by Rajadamnern Stadium/Singha.
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