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

Guest Post: A Husband’s Point of View This post might also be called: “Why Female Fighters are More Badass and Brave Than Male Fighters”…but it’s not. It’s not because even though it talks about the depth of the hurdles of ingrained shame and non-acceptance that women in the sport regularly and repeatedly overcome, it really is about a single molecule of that problem, a small modular piece out of which whole fights, and training scenarios are built. I’m talking about a kind of “brick” in the mortar of a...

Sometimes in a Thai gym things can really go sideways in terms of health. This was one of those times. A few weeks ago, my trainer Kru Nu came down with a “man cold.” He gets sick very infrequently; in the 3+ years I’ve been at the gym I’ve only seen him sick beyond a sniffle maybe four times. And even then he always recovers really quickly and rarely even takes time away from training to do so. He’s tough, as you’d expect from an ex-fighter raised in a...

This is a weekly series of posts detailing my experiences as a participant in Niyi Sobo’s 12 week, 12 person Mental Training group. Week 6 of Niyi Sobo’s “Lucky 12” mental training group is all about steady gains. That’s basically the kind of stuff you can do every single day in order to inch toward your goal. Some stuff is big, like scaling a rock wall or machete-hacking through a jungle to press forward, but a lot of a journey is just walking. One foot in front of the other:...

https://8limbsus.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/episode-11-Two_Ladies_in_the_Kingdom-Aug_2017.mp3 above, listen to our podcast subscribe to us on itunes!    above, full podcast on YouTube Emma and I haven’t podcasted in a while, so there’s quite a bit to catch up on before we launch into some updates about recent female Muay Thai events. Some of the things we cover: After a year of searching, Emma has finally landed at a wonderful gym that she feels at home with (Attachai Muaythai Gym in Bangkok), and is back to fighting. She is about to have her second fight...

I’ve created two new Facebook Pages where I can curate content around these two passions of mine. Unthreading them from my main Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu – Muay Thai page allows a bit more focus and distinction for each category and I’m already enjoying dropping thoughts and posts into each of them. Muay Thai Techniques – Preserve the Legacy This is where I’ll be posting lots of clips taken from my Muay Thai Library, instructive pieces of techniques that exemplify Thai techniques, as well as photos and videos from the...

above, my spontaneous vlog on the connection between belief and technique Mentality Distorts Physicality In this vlog I was ranting at Kevin the other night, all amped up and excited about some realizations I was having about mental training, and in the process I referenced the lean into a kick that is emphasized by Singdam and Arjan Surat – a legend, and a coach of legends. I’ve been playing with this for some time and know the importance of it, but often find myself frustrated by somehow still leaning back on...

This is a weekly series of posts detailing my experiences as a participant in Niyi Sobo’s 12 week, 12 person Mental Training group. Time Blocks This week’s focus was getting time management under control. This isn’t like “buy a day planner” but more like mapping out what kinds of accomplishments you want by the end of the week and then working backwards to plan out how to achieve it, breaking it into repeatable or progressive actions to which you are responsible throughout the week. It’s a great habit to...

This article can work as a companion piece to my breakdown on the Joanna Jedrzejczk loss in Thailand to Dunnapa, Joanna’s last loss on record (2013). Below is video commentary on Japan’s Saya Ito and Thailand’s Faa Chiangrai, in Japan, fighting for the WMC 105 lbs world title. Saya was the WPMF 100 lb champion before vacating the title due to injury and some politics, and Faa Chiangrai is the current 105 lbs Northern Champion of Thailand. I’ve fought both of them, Saya only once on the Queen’s Birthday...

I’m sitting in front of the big mirrors at WKO gym in Pattaya. This is where I start my afternoons, there’s some terrible music blaring over the speakers but it’s a different kind of terrible music from what my trainer there, Kru Mutt, likes to listen to, so probably this is someone else’s playlist from their phone. I hear Den Siam, the younger trainer at the gym – a new hire in the past few months – call my name and I look at him through the mirror’s reflection,...

Kaensak was one of my first connections to “real” Muay Thai in the sense of the Stadium Muay Thai of Thailand. I trained with him for about a year before moving to Thailand and I knew that he was 2x Fighter of the Year, which I also knew was a huge honor, but not really. I mean, you know that winning the World Series is a big deal even if you’re not a fan of baseball but you don’t really know what that means unless you actually follow the sport...

This is a part of a series of planned posts sharing my thoughts and experiences as I participate in a special mental training group of 12 designed and lead by Niyi Sobo. This week is the one I’ve been most afraid of since starting out the 12 week program. It’s the week we start stating and finding strategies toward our goals. It’s actually the next couple weeks, because it’s a huge task. I don’t consider myself a “goal setter” in any real sense of that word. I hate making...

When I had my first fight in Muay Thai, I’d sparred exactly 3 times prior to stepping into the ring. The way I trained with Master K, just him and me in his basement, I’d had very little actual contact in what is unarguably a full-contact sport. The thing about getting hit in training is that it conditions you to being hit under pressure and being able to respond, building up callouses both mentally and physically to be able to withstand that kind of impact. What I loved about...

I’ve lived in Pattaya for 3 years now and finding good quality, reasonably priced equipment has proven a little difficult. There are a few different shops around, but they’re not very easy to find and the quality can be all over the place. There’s Fairtex over on North Pattaya road, right out in front of the resort complex where the gym resides. I do like the Fairtex brand, something I turn to for things like shin guards, but the shop is very small and everything is, of course, only...

Snowflake belongs to the recycling lot across the street. His owner is a nice man who likes to blast American music from the ’60s and ’70s. “Smoke on the Water” is a particular favorite, although he cranks the Beatles sometimes, too. At around 9:00 at night when I take Jaidee down for the last walk of the day and I’m fiddling around with Snowflake’s chain, I can always tell when this guy is about to come out and feed Snowflake because suddenly I’m not that interesting to him and...

An upside down world where going forward can mean you’re losing, and retreat means dominance. More people seem to be aware now that the first two rounds in Thailand aren’t so important, that scoring really begins in round 3 and the most important round is 4, speaking in a very general sense of the narrative structure of Thai scoring. The first time I saw a fighter “dance off” round 5, I was utterly confused – why are they not fighting anymore? I wasn’t aware that one fighter was ahead...

I’m in a terrible emotional state at the moment, starting maybe 2 days ago but really reaching a crescendo today, and Kevin asked me to look at my wall of Extreme Mentors and pick which one of them could help me through this. “None of them,” I very unhelpfully responded, but then I gave it some thought anyway. “Lewis Pugh,” I said. Pugh is an extreme guy. Not in his persona – he seems pretty mild in disposition – but he undergoes extreme experiences in the name of his...

above, a video walk through of the new Hongthong Gym in Chiang Mai w/ some fighter interviews When I did my first private session with Joe Hongthongnoi at the gym several months ago he and his twin brother run in Chiang Mai, he mentioned that they were planning a new gym location in the next six months. It was still kind of unannounced as the planning wasn’t finalized, but what Joe described sounded great. The existing Hongthong gym was beautiful as it was, surrounded by these enormous trees that...

This is a part of a series of planned posts sharing my thoughts and experiences as I participate in a special mental training group. Read my week 1 post here. There’s this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that goes, “…Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.” This quote was one of two that I used as my Senior Quote in High School, God only knows what...

This is a part of a series of planned posts sharing my thoughts and experiences as I participate in a special mental training group.  Some things seem, on their surface, to be really simple. Answering the question: what is it that you want?, for example, seems pretty straight forward. This, for me, is incredibly difficult. Identifying a desire in the sense of a goal is something that is so difficult for me that I begin to wonder if I’ve in some way been conditioned to avoid even thinking about such things....

above, 17 minutes with one of the great elbow fighters of the Golden Age, Yodkhunpon. Yodkhunpon Lead Side Attack One of my favorite things about Yodkhunpon (and there are a lot of things I really like about him) is how alive his mind is when it comes to working out a strategy, technique, or solution in Muay Thai. He’s a pretty quiet guy to begin with, but sometimes he’ll fall into a silence and turn into himself, where you can see his calculating it out – if it’s a...

my vlog from this morning, above Years ago, Kevin and I watched a documentary on Muay Thai and there was this talking head of a dude (some kind of scholar/academic) who was saying that Karate and Tae Kwon Do experts in the past would come test themselves against Muay Thai fighters in Thailand and just get destroyed. It wasn’t that Muay Thai was “better” technically, he explained, it was that the sport versions of Karate and Tae Kwon Do (and whatever other Martial Arts were involved) had lacked the...