Documenting my journey as a female Muay Thai fighter in Thailand, sharing techniques, culture and personal perspective - over 250 fights fought

A few years ago I was listening to a podcast of a bunch of East Coast dudes talking about Muay Thai. They were laughing about how people who don’t know anything about the sport will ask what belt grade a fighter is (for those who don’t know, outside of individual gyms there are no grading systems of colored belts, prajaet, shorts, etc.) and concluded that for western boxing the mark of a fighter is Cauliflower Ear, but for Muay Thai it’s scars on the eyebrows from elbows. At the...

On August 23rd at 9pm EST the Travel Channel airs Driven By Food with Andrew Zimmern, the Bangkok episode. I was one his hosts in Bangkok, showing him Muay Thai and Sak Yant in the city. In December of 2015 I had the opportunity to film with a new show on the Travel Channel, hosted by Bizarre Foods’ Andrew Zimmern. The new show was under the working title “Meter’s Running,” now called “Driven by Food,” and Andrew explores locations and cultures via taxi cabbies as guides. My bit was mostly...

In the world of sports, there are always wins and losses. I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that losses are ultimately good for you, because competing is a chance for feedback and only ever being told, “that’s good enough,” which is what a win tells you, doesn’t make very fertile ground. You need the disappointment of loss to push you and you need the feedback of a loss to focus your progress. Losing always feels shitty, but it’s a necessary part of the whole process. But then there...

Rambaa Somdet M16 is a world renowned Thai fighter who was the first Thai to hold an MMA world championship title. I’ve been training with him the last 10 days, leading up to some important fights. In these videos he shows me some escapes, counters or attacks against two “under” positions that are pretty common in Muay Thai. You can read about Rambaa’s gym in Pattaya here. Counter in the Over/Under Clinch Position This is a clinch position with one arm over and one arm under, those positions being relative to the...

The cloth training wraps that are so common in the West aren’t necessarily all over the place in Thailand. You can buy them at virtually any shop that sells equipment, sure, but they’re not used by all the Thais training at the camps. A lot of Thai boys don’t wrap their hands at all. Those who do, in my experience, often favor these cloth “fight” wraps that are more like gauze-linen and don’t have a thumb loop or Velcro. The western boxing style training cloth wraps we’re used to...

The Toughening Let me say first, the training video below is NOT typical Thailand training, nor is it training that I would recommend in most situations or for long periods of time. But I came to Rambaa Somdet M16 with a unique request: help me prepare for my next fight against Loma Lookboonmee, the best female counter clincher in the world. The hope was that Rambaa, who is pretty close to me in frame but much stronger and heavier, would toss me around every day after my regular morning...

Making Your Elbows (Hooks & Crosses) Fast, Direct and Accurate This is a pretty simple technique and you can find a wall anywhere, so we can mark this down as one of the most accessible tools there is. Basically, I have been alerted to the folly of how my arms launch away from my body when I throw strikes, which is detrimental to both power and control. Sagat is the one who really explained trajectory to me ,...

if viewing in email click through to the post to listen to the podcast subscribe to our podcast on on itunes https://8limbsus.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/episode-6-2ITK_-_ep6_-_Why_It_is_Difficult_to_Fight_Female_Thai_Fighters-comprressed.mp3 Things We Covered In our Podcast Emma is still looking for a gym and that’s awarded her the opportunity to try out a few different places, most recently the Yokkao gym in Bangkok. She really enjoyed her pads with Manop, the padman of Saenchai for a million years, but the price tag of the gym is limiting and rules out any kind of regular training for her...

Below is a 12 minute video segment of a private I shot for Nak Muay Nation. The full hour and a half, with audio commentary, is available for Nak Muay Nation members. What follows is a walk through of this 12 minute segment, and a discussion of the core principles of Sagat’s fight philosophy, illustrated through GIFs of various strikes. Sagat currently is instructing out of TBM gym in Bangkok. Map to where TBM gym is is found at the bottom of this article. (Above) 12 minutes of the...

Andy is a legend in the Muay Thai community of westerners who come through Thailand. His gym in the north, Lanna Muay Thai, seems to have influenced countless gyms and the folks who trained under Andy over the past 20+ years often cycle back to work with him again. He is as close to the “Guru on the Mountain” as many come in terms of a trainer and mentor. Certainly Andy has had an enormous impact on my own Muay Thai. He was my first trainer when I moved...

image credit above: Dimitri Otis, Getty Images I made this Vlog the other day in response to a realization I had. In short, I had a really good sparring session against a young man at the gym who I don’t really know. Because I don’t know him at all – I’ve seen him training for a month or more now but don’t know anything about him and haven’t talked to him or worked with him – I don’t have judgments about how we ought to match up together. When...

J and I were arguing over the date that establishes the gym, Petchrungruang. Neither of us know for certain, I’m basing my number on a T-shirt that says 1986 and J is actually part of the family, he’s Pi Nu’s cousin but nearly 20 years younger so he didn’t live it first-hand, he says that the accounts for the date differ and he’d written 1982 on the new website he is putting up (still being worked on, but completed very soon). So, of course, we have to ask Pi...

Loma Lookboonmee is ranked as #1 in my listing of best female Muay Thai fighter in the world, 48 kg and under. She’s incredibly slick, has a very high ring IQ, and is very difficult to fight. It’s just hard to get anything in on her – she snuffs most of your strikes with perfectly timed blocks and counters, then you somehow end up on your back – usually under her – on the canvas when you try to clinch with her. This past month (July 9th, 2016) Loma flew...

Karuhat is so awesome. Everything he does is slick and confident, maybe a little (a lot) cocky, but just awesome. I’ll be writing more about this move when the 1 hour private for Nak Muay Nation comes out at the start of August, but here’s a “sneak peak,” of sorts. Karuhat rolled this out as a surprise when we were teach-sparring together; it must have been a nightmare to fight him, but in this context I was laughing pretty much the whole time. His body language and swagger really comes...

I train full time at Petchrungruang, which is my “home gym,” but I also have a short session at WKO for pads in the afternoons and will return after all my training for Karate classes with Sifu. There are aspects of Karate which are totally alien to me (tumbling, for example) but the lessons in balance and focusing the mind on movements which aren’t easy for me are something I find very valuable. But mostly, I just like learning from Kancho Sifu McInnes. He breaks technique down to the...

Below is meant to be a helpful guide, something that I wish I had when I first came to training Thailand. These are just things I’ve noticed in my 4 years of training and fighting here and are not hard and fast rules to follow. If you want to be polite in Thailand gyms, in a culture that is different than your own, these are just a few things to look for. There are of course a wide variety of gym experiences in Thailand, and things that are impolite...

The last time I was up in Chiang Mai I worked with Pi Daeng on what I’ve called the “Dracula Guard” (see that video here). It wasn’t my first time with the guard – the incredible Dieselnoi had showed me a version of it in a session previously, and way back Den gave me some pointers too – I’ve always been fascinated with it as a Muay Khao, advancing fighter because it has natural clinch entry advantages, but my session with Pi Daeng was the first time I really...

Muay Thai legend Kaensak Sor. Ploenjit was the first person to ever teach me the importance of “play” in Muay Thai. In our sessions he wasn’t so much interested in showing me techniques, or holding pads for me, so much as trying to get me to change my approach first. He would spar with me for an hour straight in the morning heat of the New Jersey summer or the cold of winter, and over and over again he would remind me that I needed to relax and have...

Occasionally I’m alone at the gym. Like, totally alone, usually because one of the boys is fighting in Bangkok and so my trainer – Kru Nu – and a bunch of the boys leave before dawn for the early morning weigh in and then stay all day for the fight in the evening. For many, this is a day off. For me, it’s a day of solo training, so I’ve developed some things to do in these events, and in cases like this if they are good I then incorporate...

What follows is just an expression of what I’ve personally seen in the two gyms that I’ve trained at in the last four years: Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai, which is a western-oriented gym but with Thai fighters who have been raised in the gym; and my current gym, Petchrungruang in Pattaya, which is a Thai-oriented gym which focuses on raising Thai boys to become top stadium fighters. There’s an wide-spread assumption in the West that all sparring in Thailand is light, controlled and technical. Some of this...

I’ve been working over the years on not freaking the f**k out when someone catches my kick. My balance has gotten much better and a large part of that is to do with Ajarn Surat of Dejrat Gym teaching me how to train the caught kick without actually having to get someone to catch my kick. Because I’ve gotten a bit better at it now, Pi Nu in padwork actually does it more. When I was just toppling over from panic he kind of just shook his head at...