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Meet the Moderators - Sylvie and Emma

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emma Nak Muay

emma

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Hello, everyone! Welcome to Muay Thai Roundtable. 

This forum is Sylvie's brainchild, I am here to help moderate. For those of you who aren't familiar with either of us, I want to offer an introduction, so you know who we are, where we come from, what we're trying to do, and all that jazz. The quick, easy to digest version is in the picture below, which breaks it down pretty succinctly. You can scroll down to see a more detailed explanation.

Meet-the-moderators-Muay-Thai-Roundtable

Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu

This forum is a part of Sylvie's site and blog, 8limbs.us. She's been running the site for 3 years now, starting at the very beginning of her Muay Thai journey since moving to Thailand and sharing its most intricate details along the way. She's from Colorado, US and first discovered Muay Thai while living in New York after her husband, Kevin, urged her to watch Ong Bak with him. From there, she started training with Master K in 2008. She trained with him in his basement and started filming her private sessions with him as a way to study and track her progress as well as to preserve and share Master K's teaching. There, her Youtube channel was born, which now has more than 2,000 videos! The following year, she went to Thailand for the first time to train, with Kevin in tow. After returning, she went on to train at Chok Sabai gym and also with Kaensak while saving and planning to make her way back. The original plan was to be here for a year if possible, but hoping to stay long enough to have fifty fights, but she's still here, has been for three years now, has had more than one hundred fights and is planning to keep going for as long as she possibly can. Her and Kevin sustain their stay here with a combination of income from Kevin's work, personal savings and a Go Fund Me campaign, by which lots of generous supports donated money to help keep her here after following her journey. This allows her to maintain a full-time training schedule. You can see what a day of her training looks like in the video below:

Sylvie spent the first part of her Thailand fight journey in Chiang Mai fighting out of Lanna gym, but now lives in Pattaya, training at two gyms, Petchrungruang and O. Meekun, which are both very Thai. O. Meekun is also the home of PhetJee Jaa, who is quite possibly the greatest female fighter on the planet. To say that Sylvie fights regularly would be a massive understatement. She not only takes fights whenever and wherever she can get them, but is constantly seeking opportunities to fight more, with the best competition she can face. She has already gone up against some of the best women in her weight class in the world, often with a big weight disadvantage. Her huge wealth of experience in fighting along with her insight into Thai culture and social dynamics and her desire to build and share as much as she possibly can makes her invaluable, and I'm grateful that she has created this forum as a way to share more of that. 

Emma Thomas

I'm a 26-year-old Brit, who first dove into the world of Muay Thai at the age of 22 while on a solo backpacking trip through Thailand after graduating from university, having absolutely no previous athletic experience or knowledge of combat sports but a huge passion and desire to get into it, which emerged almost out of nowhere. I was hooked from the start, not only on the sport but on the country, and after a month of full-time training in Chiang Mai, immediately changed my plans, cancelling the last leg of my trip so that I could stay in Thailand long-term and commit to Muay Thai. I then took the steps to be able to work in Thailand as a teacher, getting qualified while training in Chiang Mai before being sent to Bangkok for work. There, I found Master Toddy, the man who turned me into a fighter. I stumbled upon his gym never having heard of him before (which shows how out of touch with the Muay Thai world I was at the time) and planning to leave after two weeks, but have now been living and training at his gym for three and a half years (living in Thailand for over four years in total so far) with no plans to leave as of yet. This is my home now. Meeting him was a huge turning point for me, as he instilled the confidence I needed in myself in order to believe that I could fight. Since then, he's continued to be a wonderful teacher to me and a driving force in my life. I had my first fight after eight weeks of training with him and have now had twenty. Halfway between those two places, I set up my blog, Under the Ropes, which was born as a way to create more Muay Thai content for women as well as to share my experiences. I continue to work as an English teacher, which is something that I really love as well as something that provides a visa and a continued source of income. It means that I constantly have to balance my training and fighting with my work schedule, but it's wonderful.

 

Where our paths cross - Similarities and differences

I met Sylvie for the first time via her blog in 2011 and later on, as mine started to grow and we both shared our stories, we noticed similarities. as well as the obvious factor of both being women carving our places out in a male-dominated space, we both have rather introverted personalities and are feminists who are passionate about sharing and creating as much as we can for the benefit of other women. 

Sylvie and I have rather different lifestyles, and for that reason, our collective stories and experiences here can give a broad view of what it's like here. We also have rather different training experiences, as I train in a very Western-friendly gym which is just generally a very different setting to the one she trains in. We have been able to meet up and train together a few times in the last year and intend to keep doing so. Our difference in schedules means that for the most part, we maintain our friendship and collaborations online (and what better way for a pair of introverts?) Here, we hope to make it possible for others to make similar connections as they continue to share and discover. We thank you all for signing up to the forum and look forward to meeting everyone in it.  

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  • 2 years later...
Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu Mentor

Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

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Is there a place on this forum where you post your "upcoming fight schedule", Sylvie? 

I just got back to Chiang Mai and would be so stoked to see you fight live in your post 200-fights era :)

 

Just answering for Sylvie, there is no one place where Sylvie's schedule can be found. She'll be fighting in Chiang Mai on November 16th as of now though. The best thing to do for really anyone who has a schedule and wants to see her fight is message her on FB, and she can fill you in on what she knows. Fights are always shifting.

m.me/sylviemuaythai/

or

https://www.facebook.com/pg/sylviemuaythai/

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  • 3 years later...
Daz Nong

Daz

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Hi Daz from Manchester UK, been learning Muay Thai from home Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Learning from home using online resources plus have an online coach, and just joined a gym for bag work as classes aren’t running.  Here to read up and meet new people.

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    • Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu
      Why I'm Obsessed With Golden Age Muay Thai and Its Fighters

      By Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu · Posted

      Many are curious or questioning why I’ve become so focused on fighters of the Golden Age, if it might be some form of nostalgia, or a romance of exoticism for what is not now. Truthfully, it is just that of the draw of a mystery, the abiding sense of: How did they do that?, something that built up in me over many years, a mystery increasing over the now hundreds of hours I’ve spent in the presence of Golden Age fighters - both major and minor. Originally it came from just standing in the ring with them, often filming close at hand, and getting that practically synaptic, embodied sense that this is just so different, the feeling you can only get first hand - especially in comparison. You can see it on video, and it is apparent, but when you feel it its just on another order, an order of true mystery. When something moves through the space in a new or alter way it reverberates in you. How is it that these men, really men from a generation or two, move like this. It’s acute in someone like Karuhat, or Wangchannoi, or Hippy, but it is also present in much lessor names you will never know. It’s in all of them, as if its in the water of their Time. I’ve interviewed and broken down all the possible sources of this. It seems pretty clear that it did not come to them out of some form of instruction. It was not dictated or explicitly shown, explained (so when coaches today do these today they are not touching on that vein). It does not seem sufficient to think that it came from just a very wide talent pool, the sheer number of young fighters that were dispersed throughout the country in the 1980s, as if sheer natural selection pulled those movements and skills out. It did not come from sheerly training hard - some notable greats did not train particularly hard, at least by reputation. It’s not coached, its not trained, its not numerical. A true mystery. Fighters would come from the provinces with a fairly substantial number of fights, but at a skill level which they would say isn’t very strong, and within only a few years be creating symphonies in the ring. Karuhat was 16 when he fought his first fight (with zero training) and by 19 was one of the best fighters who ever lived. Sirimongkol accidentally killed an opponent in the provinces (I would guess a medical issue for the opponent, a common strike) and was pulled down to Bangkok because of this sudden "killer" reputation, but he’d tell you that he was completely unskilled and of little experience. Within a few years he was among the very best of his generation. We asked him: Who trained you, who taught you?, expecting some insight into a lineage of knowledge and he told us “Nobody. I learned from watching others.” This runs so hard against the primary Western assumptions of how Knowledge is kept, recorded and passed, but it is a story we heard over and over. Somehow these men, both famous and not, developed keen, beautiful (very precise) movement and acute combat potency without direct transmission or even significant instructional training. The answer could be located nowhere…in no particular place or function. Sherlock Holmes said of a mystery: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.. All these things that we anticipate make great fighters, these really seem to be the impossible here. They were not the keys, it seems. Instead it appears that it was in the very weave of the culture, and the subcultures of Muay Thai, within the structures of the kaimuay experiences, in the richly embedded knowledges of everyone in the game, in the states of relaxation of the aesthetics of muay itself, in the practices of play, in the weft of festival fighting, the warp of equipmentless training, in endurance, in the quixotic powers of gambling, the Mother’s Milk of Muay Thai itself, which is a very odd but beautiful thing to conclude. It does pose something of a nostalgia, because many of these cultural and circumstantial elements have changed - some radically altered by a certain modernity, some shifted subtly - so there is a dimension of feeling that we want not to lose all of it, that we might still pull some substantial threads forward into our own future, some of that cultural DNA that made some of the greatest fighters ever what they were. It's not a hope to return to those past states, but a respect for what they (mysteriously) created. As we approximate techniques, copy movements, mechanize styles, coach harder and harder, these are all the things that make up a net through which everything slips out. Instead, this mystery, the how did they become so great, so proficient, so perceptive, so smooth, so electric, so knowing, stands before us, something of a challenge to our own age and time.
    • The Bongo
      Muay Thai career or college

      By The Bongo · Posted

      I guess you're in the UK?  If so, do college.  At your age it's free.  As for after college, do what youth allows.  Have a go at fighting.   You pay for uni whatever age you are.  Nothing wrong in doing something in uni in your mid -20's+.  I did a second degree in my 30's.  I would not have been held back by a career as a fighter earlier on.  As you get older, you begin to regret the things that you didn't do, far more than the things that you did.     Good luck in your fight career!
    • Wewarm
      Muay Thai career or college

      By Wewarm · Posted

      I am soon to be 17 and I’ve been training Muay Thai for nearly 3 years now. I also happen to be doing quite well in school and plan to go to uni. However, that all changed when I went to Thailand last summer to train for a few weeks and fight. One of the trainers, with whom I have developed a close connection, told me not to go back home and stay in Thailand in order build a career. “You stay, become superstar” to quote him, as he pointed at the portraits of their best fighters hung on the gym’s wall. After realizing he wasn’t joking, I told him I couldn’t stay and had to finish my last year of high school (which is what I am currently doing) but promised him I’d come back the following year once I was done with school. Ever since, both these words and my love for Muay Thai resonate in me, and I can’t get the idea of becoming a professional fighter out of my head. On one hand, I’m afraid I’m being lied to, since me committing to being a fighter obviously means he gets more pay to be my coach. But on the other hand, it is quite a reputable and trustworthy gym, and this trainer in particular is an incredible coach and pad holders since he is currently training multiple rws fighters including one who currently holds an rws belt. And for a little more context, I don’t think this invitation to become a pro came out of nowhere, because during those few weeks I trained extremely hard and stayed consistent, which I guess is what impressed him and motivated him to say those words. Additionally, I was already thinking about the possibility of going pro before the trip because of my love for Muay Thai and because a female boxing champion who has close ties to my local gym told me I had potential and a fighter’s mindset. Therefore, I have to pick between two great opportunities, one being college and a stable future, and the other being a Muay Thai career supported by a great gym and coach. So far, I plan to do a gap year to give myself more time to make a decision and to begin my training in order to give myself an idea of how hard life as a pro is. This is a big decision which I definitely need help with, so some advice would be greatly appreciated.

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