Journaling - Readings, Muay Thai, Concepts and Articulations

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

"their misunderstanding of me was not the same as my misunderstanding of them" (Roy Wagner, 1981)

In approaching Thailand's Muay Thai, both as "Thai", but more importantly perhaps as a subculture, the above is the abiding North Star. You will misunderstand, and you will be misunderstood...in incommensurate ways. Keeping track of this dividing line, this faultline, and feeling its edges is of the utmost importance...long term.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Noting the other day, there is a generation in Thailand of 12-15 year old farang, which I consider the children of the Muay Thai Library, who fight in the Thai style in Bangkok stadium shows, making the effort to permeate those social orders, and refuse the lure (and the absurdity) of Entertainment Muay Thai. "Muay Thai" is being done, reborn in a certain way, from that commercializing blight that struck momently with COVID onward...but, its a shame that they face a highly reduced Thai fighter pool, many of whom have lost the ability to fluently fight "Thai", often themselves delinquent in defense or overburdened by the combo, or saddled with the inherent conservativism of this decade's gambling Muay Thai, those foreign boys not having the mountain to climb even of the 2000s, let along the 1980s and 90s. There is muay being done, being spoken, being practiced, but there is no home, no breast really to draw it to...at least at this point. The well-spring resides in the countryside, in the provinces, in the features of the depleted kaimuay and festival seasons, but it is not known how long it will remain.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This will not be for everyone or even anyone (perhaps one day this will be a productive line of investigation), but an Anthropological Deluzian-Guattari reading of Sylvie's (Shamanistic-Warrior) path of Nak Muay of Becoming, in particular as it relates to filiation and alliance, transversals. One cannot stand in filiation without being confined by the strictures of that filiation and culture, by gender and elsewise. By forming an transformative alliance outside of filiation, with the stem-roots of filative branches that have been forgotten or denied, she creates a hyper-filation Becoming.

citations from de Castro's CM.

 

This framework has strong (homologocal) descriptive resonance with Peter Galison's theory of Trading Zones, discipline languages and trading "agents" in his explanations of Science (without recourse to metaphysics).

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

An interesting phenomena is older Muay Thai coaches in the West having to confront the growing CTE fear, which they view as alarmist. People just don't want to join gyms, spar and get CTE. These coaches view this worry as alarmist and exaggerated, and cutting into the potential of the sport. I'll just say that when the sport is sold as hyper-violent, all about the KO (marketed through endless KO highlights, promotions hyping "KO rates", and visibly changing the rules of the sport and how it is fought to generate head-hunting and knockouts, this is the shadow side of all that aggro-marketing. People just don't want CTE.

It's one of the hidden ways in which the "modernization" or "globalization" of Muay Thai is likely undercutting its deeper, long term potential. The sport being turned into a commodity for entertainment, an entertainment thirsting for fighters going unconscious, may actually do well in a digital, short attention span environment...but, people like their brains, and increasingly don't want to be a part of the "will sparring give me brain damage?" experiment (the truth is, nobody really knows the boundaries on this).

This hidden long-term marketing failure runs parallel to a second problem, which is if you change the sport into a clashing, defense-less KO fest, you are actually going to give brain damage to the Thai fighters who are the foundation of the sport, including Thai kids. It was the defensive prowess and capabilities which truly separated out the great muay of the past, just not as sexy a thing for the casual doom scroller or sunburned tourist. It is possible to market the deeper meaning and support the past capacities of the art, but this takes longer term thinking. In the meantime Western coaches will be answering CTE concerns.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Lessons in Narrative

 

I love this fight from January New Power soooo much. It explains why in trad scoring you can't just add up "points" or count "damage". It's almost entirely symbolic control. Dodo starts telling his "story" right away, and its the same story the whole fight: "Your strikes don't matter, they have no effect on me, I'm coming". He doesn't rush, he only ups the metronome in a few decisive points in the fight, he is entirely dictating, and it doesn't stop. And the fight is very easy to follow in terms of dramatic narrative: Will he break through? Will he do "enough"? When he reversed direction (after getting his head snapped back by a punch in the 5th and giving a bit of a humorous head shake), after so much stalking...and Blue follows giving chase, his few moments of femeu slipperiness swing the scoring hard. After landing endless strikes Blue is suddenly out of it.

 

There's no "KO", there's no highlight reel moment. He's taking head kicks glancing off the dome and high scoring mid-kicks. It's all tempo and imposition.

 

Dodo Kor. Sakpairin (red) vs Liam Petch Captain Ken Boxing Gym (blue)

 

watch it here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/muaythaiphotolifeideas/posts/3432943350176138/

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Watched Sylvie's padwork today, something new I really have encouraged to happen and that she has been doing daily for a few weeks (?). Tons of in-the-pocket rhythms and improvisations, space management. I can see lots of growth, creativity, enjoyment. Good, good stuff. Unfortunately just like everyone else who has trained her for maybe 4 years now, they all want to take away her clinch. Nobody likes her clinch because it feels reductive. Hey, nobody respected the muay of Samson, Langsuan, even Dieselnoi either, this is a long story with the style. They don't care that she can beat 60 kg girls with it, and is hell for pretty much anyone to face, and has won nearly 200 fights with it (almost every win a direct result of her clinch), its an anti-style especially to the contemporary eye (which has been shaped by Entertainment Muay Thai). This is really good work, but its been years since she's trained with anyone who loved her Muay Khao stalking style and developed her into a clinch demon. All of her clinch dominance in the last several years, pretty much since COVID, has been pretty much kept on life-support by her alone, every clinch partner much bigger than her, stronger, Thai, so she just is managing controls, never being able to experience dominance in the grab, that taste of blood in the water with the lock, every kru in their own way discouraging her from the one thing she has been the best in the world among female fighters at. This is just the morphing of the opportunities of muay in Thailand, and something that has to be lived through. I'm excited for the in-the-pocket work, it fits nicely with what she's been developing with Chatchai. It's very good stuff. But ideally, all that pocket work should be used to pressure and punish the pocket so her clinch is even more unstoppable. Not sure how to get there, giving the state of Muay Thai and the place clinch has within it now. It's been sheer willpower from Sylvie that she is even the clinch fighter she has been over the last several years. Clinch is a vulnerable skill, it erodes quickly, and true clinch requires all kinds of rhythms and set ups to make it effective in the later rounds. It's a very complex, systematic approach to fighting. It's not just about winning clinch positions. It's the culminating persistence of them, using fatigue as a weapon so mistakes get made, positions neutralized too slowly, a bit late, windows getting bigger and bigger. I'm hoping this all comes together. If it does, and Sylvie can regain that late locking effectiveness, watch out. It will be quite a combination. This difficulty though, in the wide view, is that proper Muay Khao training likely does not exist as a whole any longer in Thailand, and that we've had to piece together elements of it even to get this far. There is an incredible bricolage to training in Thailand if you want to reach back into what the Golden Age was, because so much of the methods of muay have changed. Not only is the sport fought differently, and trained differently, its also thought differently even among Thais.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Muay Khao in Padwork

- note a little bit advanced stuff

Talking a little more about Muay Khao training (and padwork), beyond some basic things like the padman doing rounds of "latched on" work where you trailer hitch and continuously knee or work into knees, there is a shape to Muay Khao that involves building up the fatigue in your opponent, which involves continuous pressuring and tempoing early on, nothing rushed, importantly with the mentality of depositing fatigue. Even if you don't have a padman aware of this, you can do this on your own, of your own device. People do not think much of manipulating or effecting your padman, but taking cue from David Goggins trying to mentally break his SEAL Team trainers, you can use your padman's energy managements to become aware of their fatigue, tempoing up or displacing them when they start to manage. This builds up your own sense of perception, becoming acutely aware of its signs, and developing responses, things that will serve you well in fights. This doesn't mean going HARD, like 200%. It means managing your own fatigue while you work that edge and tax your padman. The purpose of this is to slow reaction times and decision quality in later rounds in fights. You don't win fights early in Muay Khao work, you prepare the material so you can work late. A great padman will see and help you train this shape of the rounds, even as they manage their own fatigue.

It goes without saying this involves not just "following along" with called strikes, which I believe is detrimental on a deeper level, because what you are training in those cases is "being dictated to". Lots of fighters have this problem, they have spent countless hours of (unconsciously) learning to be steered, so when their opponent looks to dictate timing, space or rhythm they have years of being comfortable being dictated to. This though is a subtle line to walk, and it depends a great deal on the experience of the fighter and the quality of the padman. Ideally, you want padwork to gravitate towards a dialogue, a back and forth, which mirrors the dialogue of fighting, accepting dictated tempos and spacing, modifying them, shaping them in return. Good padmen (who aren't just burning you out with kicks or holding combos over and over, largely ex-experienced fighters) will recognize this dialogue dimension, and you'll bring out more of their "fighter energy" and creativity, which is Golden stuff. Lesser experienced padman, or padmen who are just grinding, may not respond well, but you want to get into that zone of your 5 rounds being shaped like a fight...and for a Muay Khao fighter that means depositing fatigue in your padman early, if you can. Even if you can't, the aim of recognizing stalls, energy management, gatherings, and working on them yourself (not being passive) is a perceptual skill set you want to develop.

For Muay Khao fighters though, you want to get to that clinch, or those finishing frames in the later rounds. You have to feel those angles of dominance, the cherry of what you built in previous rounds. Great padman know this, and develop pathways later where your body can sense, can experience those finishing elements.

Femeu fighters, other style fighters, have other shapes in their fights. This is specific to Muay Khao.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

There is a Right Wing problem in adventure tourism in Thailand. This is very difficult to talk about because everything is heavily politicized/polarized, and the manosphere has long dovetailed with and supported combat sports, but this is far more pervasive than one would expect or even believe, occurring on several fronts. There is no easy way out of it, or even to avoid it, but becoming more aware is probably a good thing.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

The Art of Producing Time

When discussing the nature of Time and historical revival, Campagna speaks to the Art of producing Time that is preserved in epic restoration, the very frame of the world. This is why I emphasize the temporal mastery of Golden Age Muay Thai. A small seed of Time, a kind of Time, on the subject and solve of Violence.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Campagna on Time leads into the idea that we are all producing Time (what he calls "Worlding") in each of our days, our existence, and that we also live in "a Time", a shape of things. This makes of Muay Thai's trad "Art of Producing Time" a certain marvelous imperative. I regularly emphasize the temporal nature of Golden Age fighting, that in a certain sense these were Time Battles between two elevated agonistic arts-of-time. In this sense, in the Campagna sense, the (rite-oriented) aspect of ring Muay Thai captures pure elements of Time creation.

As he forwards the idea, the facticity of events in Time, in the past, are not what matter. You can get everything "wrong" about past events, even inverting outcomes or perhaps to some degree values, but the core of what "was" is its particular "art of producing Time", which is to say its unique, substantive way of placing events in relationship to each other, the qualitative expression of those events in narrative, the temporal changes and internal relations of those facts/events, basically...their "unfolding". The nature of their time. In this way, by analogy, in Golden Age fighting it is not the strikes, it is not the techniques, as isolated elements, that need to be passed on, it is their art of producing Time...because the art of producing Time is the fundamental fabric of our reality. How things unfold, much less than "what" is unfolded (though certainly there is some relation).

*     *     *

There was a minor event in the stadia last night where Naksu, Sylvie's training partner at Rambaa's, was knocked out (rather spectacularly) be a bicycle knee right up the middle. The immediate temptation is to "solve" this problem at the technical level. What was his guard like? What was his strike-choice? "How did that get through?" --- but the problem happened at the temporal level. The pace and rhythm with which Naksu was fighting, and the way that he would stall on the porch, resetting some, before an "attack"...lacking in Doh, created this knockout, a 15 year old against a seasoned 25 year old. Before the knockout you could see that the distances were all wrong, that his opponent was fighting in "his Time". In the battle of Times, Naksu was losing. The fight was early, the odds were mostly even, but Naksu was in a bad spot...in regards to Time. Its not always or even often that the mismatch of Time dominance results in such a clear and decisive blow. He could have easily missed and the fight could have gone onto a more complex femeu control, largely uneventful...or Naksu may have recovered his sense of Time, and begun imposing it upon his opponent in later rounds...but this knockout came almost entirely out of Time. The opponent was given their own temporality, and out of that they were able to draw out one of their more rare techniques...perfectly timed.

The agonism of Time.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

- diary

Trauma directs us to liminal spaces [Campagna, 2] because trauma is the breakdown of our metaphysical view, our "frame". These liminal spaces and practices can work to carry for the truths (loosely stated) which the trauma could not coherently bear...that is, the mark, the eruption, the break in the Timeline bears it, as a fissure. These are fractures and rifts of personhood. A liminal space such as Thailand's (trad.) Muay Thai, liminal in its trans- or intercultural nature (Westerners practicing in another culture, re-tuning their bodies to new modalities and their values - not only that -, liminal in the way that its Muay Thai works within violence and fear, threats to the breakdown of the body, in impact, psychological agonism, in Ruup, but also the breakdown of the body in training, and with that the person, all of it gathered together in an art, importantly an art, because only an art can successfully carry the truths of the Traumatic, forward into a post-apocalyptic (end of Time) future.

The Littoral Zone.

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

The Campagna reference for the above in Prophetic Culture, writing on the liminal.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Campagna's Prophetic Culture, here on the "shaman" who negotiates the created world between kinds, preserved only by her strength. This is close to my experience of Sylvie who had been in a constant endurance of negotiations, presenting the marble figure to the god of Fear. It's hard to describe how continuous and arduous these negotions between kinds have been. The final note on selectivity is on point as well. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

The Apex of Babble, The Stammer of Muay.

Campagna writing how the imperfect speech of the prophet allows an ineffable to show through. The Prophetic as the imperfect, as everyone seeks the perfect.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This was just a really wonderful performance by Barbara, on so many levels, for the RWS Raja belt. You could feel her training in her fight, the way she stays within herself, at surface a very basic approach in terms of weapons/style, but underneath it all is a very important thing that not a lot of Westerns understand. You fight WITH Space. And she persistently denies Marie the space she wants, it ends up blowing up the fight, especially because she brought with her a beautiful very deep, head-sink clinch lock that Marie had no answer at all for (and that Raja let her work from, thank goodness). I have to watch the 2024 fight where Marie upset her in the clinch, but in this one Barbara was loaded for bear. This is the same recipe Sylvie used to beat so many, especially bigger opponents. You fight the Space, not the opponent. And you fight your fight with the belief "If I fight my fight, my way, the right way, you are going to have a very difficult time".

I also loved Barbara's 20% - 40% power hands, just using them to touch and semi-pop Marie, to stress the space. No mindless, 100% power combos, actually seeing one's way in the space, and touching the opponent. This is just glorious controlled dern Muay Thai.

Barbara's lock was so pure, so good - with a very deep head sink. She also had something that a lot of locking fighters fail to do. Once locked you walk your opponent. Not only do you pivot, or pull, you drag and also literally walk them so that their feet cannot set, so you tangle them, breaking the line of counter control. This is advanced, developed stuff and great to see. A lot of Thai stadium fighters of today don't even do this, its part of the eroding art of clinch. She also was very aware to drag Marie off the ropes so the ref break doesn't come and she could paint longer pictures of her lock dominance. Small touch with big awareness and effect.

I don't really understand why Marie decided to fight this fight as a pure femeu fighter, back to the rope. I have to watch their first fight, but this plays exactly into Barbara's closing style. I imagine this is something trainers have been moving her toward? I'm not sure. A very cool, very worthy victory.

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This was their fight back in August, where Marie pulled out the upset. I believe Marie was a last minute replacement in that fight. Useful to compare the fights.

 

[Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu]

The championship fight was such a perfect illustration of "basics make champions." Not fancy, not showy, just incredibly solid foundations.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This Andre Gide aphorism for Thailand's Muay Thai...

"Ugliness is beauty at rest."

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

9 hours ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:

This was their fight back in August, where Marie pulled out the upset. I believe Marie was a last minute replacement in that fight. Useful to compare the fights.

 

Well then, after a rewatch its really clear what the difference was. The first fight was reffed with a VERY "entertainment" ref style, the clinch broken almost immediately about 80% of the time. Reffing is huge shaper of Muay Thai fights for clinch fighters and the ref just took the clinch off the table. The belt fight reffed in a very different, traditional way (thank goodness). Also, Barbara didn't sink her head in at all in the August fight, which also added to the reffing issue, because Marie could get a handle for her various cross-faces and stalls, giving the ref something to respond to in his breaks. Barbara wasn't allowed to work out of those positions. In the title fight she sank her head in so beautifully, so adeptly on the grab, it completely eliminated the cross-faces and stalls. So, much more traditional reffing, and much better (in fact beautiful) entry techniques, and a hugely different result.

I'd also say that Marie was much more forward in the August fight, especially the first rounds, which kept Barbara a little off balance, instead of just seeking the rope with her back. It prevented, or at least deflected Barbara's stalking, where she's in charge of the timing of exchanges. Also, Barbara was much more proactive with her hands earlier, in the title fight, incorporating them into her stalking, which complexified the pocket.

But really none of these things were more important than the reffing, and the sink on the lock. Those differences completely transformed the result.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Sylvie and I talking today about the 20 minute adrenaline arc, and how that plays out in fight experiences, and fighting style. And why boxers fight the way they do over many rounds, the narrative structure to Thailand's trad Muay Thai. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Instinct and the Thai Principle of Tammachat (ธรรมชาติ)

This will remain somewhat obscure, as it's hard to fill the gap in my recent reading, but thoughts on the nature of Tammachat (natural), which is one of the more essential, basic yet obscured qualities of Thailand's Muay Thai - and one that non-Thais most deeply struggle with. How can something be "natural", which is trained? They seem a contradiction, or at the very least in strong tension. Into the gap Westerners try to place concepts like "muscle memory", as if you can create a new causal chain, a new "memory" in your body which then operates with something like "naturalness". This supposed manufactured "muscle memory" is often trained with great tension - a very high degree of unrelaxed, biomechanically precise constant correction. It does not really solve the problem of Tammachat, and instead inserts a mechanical bridge between between what I'll call Instinct and Thought.

I'm drawing from these two passages in the excellent book Deleuze and the Unconscious (2007, Christian Kerslake) discussing the influence of the philosopher Bergson. Bergson is concerned with how matter and memory work together. In a certain sense we all have a powerful inheritance of memory, something which includes not all of our conscious experiences, but all of our experiences, much of it unconscious. This is not just things that we can recall to our mind, but rather the very large raft of causes well below the threshold of our awareness, including our biological instincts. Instincts are wisdom, skills, reactions, frames of perception which have been developed through not only 10,000 years of ancestry, but also 100s of millions years of life itself, well below our species. All of this is inherited, in a way, in "memory", the form of the matter of which we are made. When "memory" is acting, this by default is read as "natural". If someone fakes a punch and we flinch...this is natural. It is speaking from our memory. It flows, seemingly, without thought. But Thailand's Muay Thai has a concept of developed naturalness, which is to say the qualities of physical expression which also can flow with the ease that memory has.

The temptation is to create "new memories" (that's why "muscle memory") is a thing. If we can train and cram-down memories back into our causal shoot, far enough in, then they too might come out some what "natural" in the future. You see a great deal of this in the proliferation of the "combo", a fixed pattern of strike that is trained over and over again, trying to force it back down into the causal chain, so it can come out "natural"...though it almost always, when trained like this, comes out "forced" and far from Thai Tammachat.

The reason for this failing is identified in the passages below (though, this is just a note, and the passages themselves may be hard to decipher, I'm drawing out a line of their thought). The point or idea is not to create new memory, or new instincts (they will never be as strong as those inherited by the instincts of biology, or of those learned deep in our forgettable pasts), its to put Instinct itself in relationship with Thought (or, in the text Intelligence). The ideal state, the Tammachat state, is one in which Instinct and Thought alternate and affect each other. Not only does Thought shape Instinct, Instinct shapes Thought. In some sense the great history of our Being, our personal Unconscious (all things experienced, most of it well below our threshold of awareness) and our collective biological Instincts, all the causes of how we act, is placed in communication with Thoughts, Intelligence, Ideas, in the sense that there is dialogue and mutuality, and no priority of either. In "flow states", presumability, this communication becomes utterly suffused. This is why "play" plays such an important part of Thai training and development, it approximates in a low stakes way this suffusion.

Aesthetics and Thought

The role of Intensification. In the philosophy of Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) there is emphasis on speeds. The exposure to speeds (sometimes in an absolute sense, sometimes in terms of changes in speeds) produces an intensification within oneself. Something that is too fast, but also something that is too slow...intensifies. In this framework I'll position this as that-which-challenges-thought, or that-which-is-where-thought-cannot-follow. This is to say, using Intelligence to keep track, plan and react is no longer sufficient. Intensification is what puts Thought in relationship with Instinct. (And keep in mind, here Instinct isn't just animal reactiviness, though it includes that too. It is the sum of our Unconscious causations.) Intensifications produce a dialogue. Muay Thai active training, aside from drills and conditioning, is thought of as "getting used to" certain speeds and intensifications, things that would just throw you into pure instinctive reactions if you were untrained. But, it is much more than that. The "getting used to" is not just exposure therapy, it is actually putting Thought and Instinct into communication with each other, by degrees. You want both dimensions, otherwise you will never receive Tammachat. This is how Thai aesthetics - to which a non-Thai must submit and be shaped by - work to sew together these two aspects of our Being. The over-arching picture of what the art of Muay Thai is, is what allows the space in which Instinct and Thought can develop together in unanticipated, experimental ways. Each must shape each...within the Aesthetic, held together by the Aesthetic.

The use of intensification - there are many aspects of intensification, but we can stay with solely the quality of speeds - is to unseat Thought and place it into community with Instinct (your Past). If the intensification is too strong Thought will be forced completely down into Instinct, too light and it will operate over Instinct. The key to Tammachat is that they suffuse, the "wisdom" of each in combination. This is why Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, its very high level of command over the fight space, is an art. Fighters develop within a sphere of progressive, integrating, creative intensifications, and the fight is conducted at the level of a Tammachat suffusion of Thought and Instinct. This is what the great legendary fighters of Thailand's past exude an extraordinary degree of being "at ease", which is why they are so "natural" in their speeds and relations. One is not simply "getting used to" speeds and intensifications. Your Past (the full causal panoply of what you are, reaching much further back than even your person, into what you are as an organism) is being synthesized into an Aesthetic, a certain kind of creative completion, or some variation thereof.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

There is a compelling line of development in my thought, a new/different way to relate to the past which is not reactionary. More in the piece on Bergson. This joins together the psychodynamics of our personal history to even thoughts about Muay Thai's past, the relevance of the Golden Age and it's own past, a fundament of how we perceive the value and resource of the past.

When we have championed the Golden Age of Muay Thai for instance a few have pushed strongly back seeing this as "nostalgic" (refusing "growth" or "modernization"), even some intelligent ones pointing out that we don't want to return to a time of repressive social structures, power-abuse, deep income disparities across the nation. All worthy ideas of critique. But what fails to come across is that the past has deposits of tremendous knowledge which was born out of the distress, just as experiences of personal trauma produce lessons and guidance, capacities. It does not mean that one should live in constant distress. It is rather that the richness of experience, the attainment of new capacities (in the past), may powerfully inform the present.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

What people don't really appreciate is that Nabil says he trained 13 months for this fight...and Superlek probably trained for two weeks. Good on Nabil, but the fight (and the promotion) just doesn't "mean" the same thing to each fighter, as much as there is enormous social media hype around these kinds of matchups. It's "entertainment" Muay Thai. In many ways it just isn't "real" for Thais (it lacks the social risks that gambled stadium fighting has). Fighting in the stadiums when Superlek was 18...that was REAL, because the social conditions of shame and pride and the cultural network of status struggle was infinitely at risk. One can't force it to be real.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

how to use head movement in Muay Thai:

https://x.com/Egokind1/status/1906268431315280261

The highlight brings in general the thought that everyone has gotten spam-the-elbows happy in Thailand. This has happened quickly, and you could pretty much see the change start in real time because of COVID, beginning when they briefly banned clinch in paranoia (and with Entertainment Muay Thai). It feels like the Yodkhunpon template (which itself as an extreme outlier, and not well-esteemed in its time) got oversimplified. A lot of Muay Thai is just becoming Muay Elbow. As defense significantly erodes in Muay Thai though, the elbow is becoming a more and more effective go-to. It becomes chicken and egg. More elbows, less defense, the less defense, the more elbows are effective. The elbow may become the iconic cliche strike of Muay Thai, when at its height Muay Thai rather rarely featured elbows. They were seen as both "low" and largely ineffective.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

We were up in Khorat last night, 9 hours of driving round trip, just to see two quick fights (maybe 20 minutes), and it was totally worth it. After watching Rambaa's festival fight card the night before. #muayThai

There was something about spending the hours standing in the crowds til 11 pm in Pattaya, to watch the temple fights, and then the next day to drive out to Khorat to see these little daughters fight, the overall keeping of the flame of the birth of Muay Thai, attending to that, that filled us with meaning. It's like you are watching Muay Thai's heartbeat, when you watch the Muay that isn't made for export, and you see it living and breathing in families, in heritage...in this case from Khaosai Galaxy (famed as a boxer) now in his 60s, now in his little daughters.