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finding a gym by MuayFarang

RamónRivera
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Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu Mentor

Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

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"Arjan" is a term used mostly for westerners or by westerners. The presence of a stick wielding "master" as a major sign of an organized camp seems absurd to me. Hierarchy is very important in Thai settings, but most Thai gyms are informally organized, and have a casual feeling to them. This seems like a fantasy scene out of a Kung Fu movie. There is lots of good training in Thai gyms without "Arjans" walking around barking orders. Sylvie's gym Petchrungruang is a wonderful family run Thai gym that raises Thai kids into Lumpinee fighters, there is no "Arjan" master correcting people left and right.

Sylvie's getting ready for a fight, cutting weight, don't think she'll hop on right now.

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Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu Mentor

Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

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ok, cheers, it was a set up scenario, but dont you think is important that someone is watching you as you are doing paos, for example? Formally or informally I mean.

 

Honestly, it isn't how most Thai gyms are. There is very little direct correction in Thai style gyms, either for westerners or for Thais. But I can see how as a westerner it is something you might want or need. Muay Farang has created a gym for westerners, so it makes sense to sell it that way. But to couch the whole thing in some kind of traditionalism feels wrong to me.

But hey, there are all kinds of flavors in Thailand, in a way it is just another one.

I wrote this guest blog post about the difference between the Thai way and the Western way.

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RamónRivera Nong

RamónRivera

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Anyways, I stayed in 7muaythai and the training is directed and done with thais (sparring, clinch, paos) maybe they are trying to mix both approaches... Adittionally when I met Sylvie in Petchrungruang, I felt that "family thing" that I love as well, by the way were you one of the farangs watching the training? ( :unsure: ) Thank you and chok dee mak to Sylvie!

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Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu Mentor

Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

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Anyways, I stayed in 7muaythai and the training is directed and done with thais (sparring, clinch, paos) maybe they are trying to mix both approaches... Adittionally when I met Sylvie in Petchrungruang, I felt that "family thing" that I love as well, by the way were you one of the farangs watching the training? ( :unsure: ) Thank you and chok dee mak to Sylvie!

 

I should have been more generous with this, but it irks me a little when Thailand is packaged in a fantasy tradition way, it's my hang up. Sylvie already recommends Master Toddy's in Bangkok and Santai in Chiang Mai when people coming to Thailand ask without much experience because they both put emphasis on technique and correction. Most westerners come to Thailand thinking that there is going to be lot of correction and technique and they just aren't prepared for the long, slow "do your own work" approach that most Thai gyms operate under. They can feel under-attended and ignored, and if they don't already have solid self-driven work skills can be left out of what is really happening. You can get correction, but you have to ask.

So places like Master Toddy's, Santai, maybe some Phuket gyms (don't know, haven't been), and Muay Farang's gym, if they too focus on technique and correction, can be really rewarding. It's just that that's not how most Muay Thai is taught.

But westerners don't have the years and years to take the long way, so especially if you are going to be in Thailand for shorter periods of time, they may pay off. I just take issue with the marketing of the article, as if it is proposing some kind of "guide" to Thailand gyms. Just come out and say "This is what is great about Club 7 Muay Thai".

 

I wasn't there when you visited Petchrungruang, but I indeed have been a farang watching training for a very long time. Learned a lot from quietly watching.

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RamónRivera Nong

RamónRivera

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I agree, we as westerners can´t appreciate the slow cook they use. Maybe, it is our menatlity or it is because we can only spend one month there... But as they say, "sabai, sabai" Such a good article on the topic, by the way. Thanks and very kind.

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Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu Fellow Traveler

Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu

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Im not saying that you have to join Muayfarang, (I am not working for them, I swear :smile: ) but just to pay attention to the points they say.

 

 http://www.muayfarang.com/en/how-to-chose-best-muay-thai-camp-gym-thailand-13715/

 

Hope, it helps!

Well this certainly reads like a long-winded advertisement for 7 Muay Thai, but I do think his points are at the very least things that westerners are keen to consider when choosing a gym. Cleanliness is something that I've heard mentioned by many people who write to me to ask about gym recommendations, but by and large what they actually mean is comfort, not hygiene. I've never trained in a gym with equipment that isn't thoroughly broken in and some of it falling apart, and I've never had a staph infection - proper personal hygiene is the best bet in that regard, although obviously a camp is a breeding ground for quite a few germs due to the turnover of people from all over the globe visiting and the tropical heat and humidity.

I've seen the head honcho (never, ever referred to as Ajarn unless someone is making a joke in the camps I've trained at) stand in the ring with a stick or switch to keep a fighter from backing up or quitting, but it's done almost as a throw-back to the "old ways," not as an every day training method. And I've never once seen it used on anyone over the age of maybe 10 years old. Having someone overseeing the training is obviously not a bad thing, but it's a useless thing if the people training don't have any recognizable goals. As western-friendly as some gyms can be, I have yet to meet an ex-fighter, now trainer who doesn't think it's a little baffling that westerners come and train without any desire or intention to fight. "Just for fit," they say, meaning they do understand the goal, but they then understand that correcting the same mistakes until the trainer is blue in the face because the "just for fit" guy training doesn't actually care to make the adjustments - well, the trainer is bound to give up trying. He'll just hold the pads and in my experience the relationship between these guys and the trainers end up being pretty good anyway. They do have a place in the gym.  But also from my experience, being able to go do rounds on the bag by yourself without a trainer holding your hand is not only standard, but is appreciated by trainers who don't have to keep after you (with a damn stick) to make sure you do the work that's required of you to be a fighter. Being left on your own isn't necessarily neglect in a gym - I've lived and felt that difference a million times.

It's good that 7 Muay Thai has regulations about sleep times and that alcohol isn't allowed on the premises, but I will also say that I have met some truly incredible trainers who are drunks. It's a pain in the ass for the owner, yes, who has to pay these guys and get them to come to work on time. But as someone learning from them there is still a lot to be gained. Sober is better, but a heavy drinker is not uncommon even at very successful camps. Keeping alcohol away from the Nak Muay is grand - these guys who come here and party at night and barely make training in the afternoon are wasting their own time, but seeking out a gym that regulates this FOR YOU is only necessary if it's a problem FOR YOU. Which, for young men on the quest for "authentic" Muay Thai experiences might be more common.

So, I guess my takeaway is that this advice is meaningful for guys who want a kind of regimented, hand-held training experience that performs some aspects of traditionalism and yet still has a "comfort" level of western-ness. But there are hundreds of very good gyms to choose from that will provide great training and great experiences that aren't at all like what's described here.

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    • Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu
      Capitalism and What Traditional Muay Thai is Not - the concept of labor and wages misapplied to what fighters do

      By Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu · Posted

      There can be no doubt that Thailand's culture is a hybriding culture, a synthesizing culture that has grown from the root weaving diversity from influences around the world, reaching well back to when the Ayuthaya Kingdom was the commercial hub for the entire mercantile region, major influences stretching in trade all the way to China and all the way to Europe, if not further, while - and this is important - still maintaining its own Siamese (then Thai) character, a character that was both in great sympathy towards these integrative powers, but also in tension or contest with them. This being said, I think there is a rather profound misunderstanding of the nature of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai and the meaning and value of its underpinnings in the culture, when seen from the West, and this is the (at times) assumed majority of thinking of fighting as "labor", and the rewards or marking of that labor as some kind of "wage". This is often the conceptual starting place from which Westerners think about the value and possible injustices of Thailand's Muay Thai, often boiled down to the question: Is the fighter getting a "fair wage"?  I do think there are strong and important wage oriented justice scales that can be applied, but mostly these are best done in the contemporary circumstances of Thailand's new commodification of Muay Thai itself...that is to say, to turn traditional commitments and performances INTO labor, that is to say, to capitalize it. It is then that the question of labor and wage holds the best ground. But, the question of wage or payment fairness really is doing another operation, often without intent, which is by reframing traditional Muay Thai in terms of labor and wage, along with the strong normative, Capitalist sense that such labor should exist freely in a labor market of some kind, one is already deforming traditional Muay Thai itself, and in a certain sense perhaps...adding to its colonization, or at least its transmutation into a globalized, commodified humanity, something I would suggest the core values of traditional Muay Thai (values that actually draw so many Western adventure-tourists to its homeland), stand in anchored opposition to. To be sure, Capitalism is deeply interwoven into the fabric of Thai culture, and has been for much of the 20th century, but this weave is perhaps best understood terms of how Siam/Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is of the threads of greatest resistance to Capitalism itself (along with its atomizing, individualizing, labor/wage concept of human beings). When we think of the values that not only motivate fighters, but also structure and give meaning to their fighting, at least across the board of the Muay Thai subculture, we really are not in the realm of individualizied workers who sell their labor within a labor market. (This mischaracterization is perhaps most egregious when discussing Child and Youth fighting from a Western perspective, where it is very commonly repictured as "child labor" (ignoring the degree to which such terminology completely recasts the entire question of the meaning and value of fighting itself, within Thai culture). We are instead within a realm of traditional pre-Capitalist values (which themselves have morphed with tension with Capitalizing forces), a world of craft (not "work"), composed of strong social hierarchies that are in constant agonism with each other, where fighting is probably best understood as struggle over Symbolic Capital (with some modification to Bourdieu's concept). The traditional Muay Thai world is primarily not a world of labor and wage - anymore than, to use an even more traditional example, novice monks should be considered to be doing "labor" in wats and monestariess, for the (some would regard as false) "wage" of spiritual merit. Instead, the meaning and value of such commitments and performances are embedded within the traditional frame itself (a frame which can be examined or challenged for ethical failures, to be sure), and to extract them from that embedded value system and its attendant, inculcating motivations, is to subvert the very nature of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai.  It doesn't mean that Thai Muay Thai fighters don't fight "for" money, or that money's paid or won do not matter, in fact in a gambling-driven sport - gambling driven at its very first roots, both in terms of history and in terms of apprenticeship - money amounted indeed matter a great deal. It's just that the labor / wage framework is a significantly inadequate, and in fact destructively transformative in its inaccuracy (even when well-motivated).  This conceptual misunderstanding from the West is even made more complicated in that today's traditional Muay Thai is fast adapting to new "labor" style economic pressures, in the sense that fighters are increasingly working more - in a hybrid sense - in the tourism economy, both in gyms were they have to train and partner Westerners, and in the ring where they have to fight in a transformed way in Entertainment tourism vs Western tourists (tourist who may be viewed as both customers purchasing Thai services and also as discounted laborers), all with the economic view that the Western visitor holds a certain degree of economic priority. Traditional Thais are pressed now in towards becoming something more like laborers, while still maintaining many if not most of the customary motivations and the embedded values of Muay Thai, kaimuay subculture, leaving analysis perhaps best to a case by case basis.     
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