Muay Thai

Yin must have it’s yang. And the ahimsa — non-harming — studied at the yoga retreat is more meaningful when the non-violent person has the capacity to be truly effectively violent.

With that half-baked philosophy and much encouragement from my Karate sensei McClearen, I signed up for some Muay Thai training to serve as the endcap for my time in Pai.

Gym

The most highly-regarded gym in Pai is Charn Chai. I didn’t go there.

Rather, I selected my gym purely on convenience. There just happened to be one walking-distance from my guesthouse, Sor. Wisarut. Of course there was. As it was meant to be.

The gym itself, like most buildings in Thailand, is not an enclosed structure. A roof protects the ring but otherwise it’s open to the adjacent farm fields and houses. Hens with chicks and cute blond dogs and their adorable puppies wander around the gym as they please.

Other than a few light weights, a set of heavy bags, gloves and pads — and some mysteriously tractor tires — the gym consists mainly of the ring.

Before we get into the ring, however, we need to warm up. Surprisingly for such a hot tropical country, warming up takes a lot of work.

The Session

All the sessions started with a warmup and followed the same rough progression of activities, with different aspects emphasized or reduced.

Warmup

The warmup began when the trainer turned on the music. First yoga now Muay Thai: these Thais really like their dance music. They play it everywhere they can it seems.

A re-mix of Wrecking Ball. Time to jump rope.

Skipping rope used to be a fun pastime in school. Now it’s all grown up, and it is mean. We start skipping. Sévrier (I think, French fellow student) and Mattias (German fellow student) and I begin. Five minutes pass. Then ten.

My gate shifts from the infantile right-foot-hop-then-left-follows to match the synchronized bounce on calves the other students favor. Breathing gets deeper and harder. Sweat beads. My rhythm gets disrupted and the rope slaps my bare feet. Start over. Each run of metronomic skips gets shorter and shorter as I get more and more tired. Each run ends with the same painful slap.

Fifteen minutes. I look anxiously at my peers, searching for signs this might be over soon.

Finally, at 20 minutes the trainer calls an end. Mercifully.

Or not. For the next “warm-up” exercise (sweat pouring off me, I’m already as warm as I get), we’re directed to those tractor tires.

Our task for the indefinite future: bounce on the tires, one leg back and one leg forward, alternating at every hop. It later became evident that this was attempting to train the muscle memory to keep your feet at 45°, the key stance in Muay Thai.

Hopping on the unstable tires was arduous, prone to slipping and loss of rhythm. By the end of the ten minutes we spent on it I was eyeing the skipping ropes with a new fondness.

So tired. It’s time to go home I suppose. A nice shower, a warm breakfast…

But no, that’s just the warm up.

Preparation

After the warmup, the trainer wrapped our hands. This is unfamiliar to me, used to bloody knuckles from Karate. It’s a nice, strong feeling to have your hands bound. Then on go the gloves. The gloves felt light, at first.

Knuckle joints properly protected, it was now time to stretch the other joints of the body and their muscles. We went from the head to the toes, mobilizing shoulders, hips, knees and the major muscle groups.

This was a peaceful time in the gym. Recalled with affection later on, and anticipated with hope in the future warmups.

The main trainer while I was at the gym was Pots. He’s an older guy and clearly very experienced. He’s also amazingly patient in taking countless farang students through the very very basics before they leave and/or give up. He told me explicitly what the pricing structure implied: you need at least two weeks to get any lasting benefit. To begin to develop competence.

You see, the prices went like this: 300฿ for a half session (two hours) 400฿ for full session (two two hour trainings). 2000฿ for a week of full sessions and 8000฿ for a month. For 10000฿ you get a month and meals. Muay Thai is meant to be studied intensely, the physical conditioning and the technique training going hand in hand.

With only 3 days, I’d only get a taste.

Technique!

The next part of the training was technique. Pots ran through the basics with me: feet at 45 degrees, front foot angled in. Arms always up in guard. Always. Even when shoulders and back ached under the weight of the now-heavy gloves. Helpful head taps were provided generously to aid my memory.

Rotation in every attack: shoulder forward and front knee inward in punching, arm backwards to counterbalance kicks. Even when leaning back to avoid a hit, one guard hand goes down to counterbalance to weight.

This is exactly opposite of my karate training. Pretty much every move breaks your structure. When kneeing, you even come up on your back foot! Not to mention the jumping punches. This style clearly favors speed over solidity.

Despite my being unaccustomed to it, it felt natural. Some of the punches and kicks felt strong, though much of the time I had far too little weight in them.

After learning the basics, Pots moved on to drills. “Jab! Jab! Punch! Right kick! Left below! Spin Elbow!” as he moved the pads to the right locations to take the impact. Translating from the words to the movements felt glacially slow. And then my usual difficulties with left and right were compounded by his use of repetition as correction. “Jab! Jab! Jab!” could mean three jabs or it could mean I was unconsciously punching with the wrong fist and he was still waiting for my first actual jab.

Pots never got frustrated. No matter how many times we repeated it, his affect was positive. He’d get enthusiastic when I hit well (some times very enthusiastic, he really seemed to enjoy getting hit hard), and patient when the technique was wrong.

After this came the partner drills. I was paired with Matthias and we’d go trough a few sequences. Kick, block, hold leg, throw. Punch, spin, elbow head. These were good fun, since we were both marginally competent there was little pressure.

After this, we’d alternate more drills with Pots while the others went to the heavy bags. In between rounds we’d be advised to take “little water”.

Finally we spent 10 minutes with clenching practice. The aim was to get your hands on the inside and bring the head down to knee-kick level or throw. All the while preventing the same from happening to you.

After the technique instruction was over, we were directed to the corners for 10 minutes of knee kicking practice against the pads. This was frustrating: getting the rhythm right was very challenging. At the moment of impact, both sets of toes should be pointed: your attacking leg pointed down, rising up on your back toes. It left me thoroughly winded and with bloody knees.

When the time for the stretching came, I was very ready for it. It felt wonderful.

Then a simple Thai bow in a circle closed the session. Khap khun krap

Day Two

After the first days’ session, I got a premonition of the future, one I didn’t heed: the other students were rubbing various balms and oils in their skin. “Boxing oil” and other tiger balm relatives. Pots was giving Mathias an aggressive Thai massage, mostly by standing on his legs and back. Why such intense therapy? Why do Thais have an entire line of herbal unguents meant to reduce pain and ease inflammation? It didn’t seem like such a demanding workout…

On day two I was given a new trainer, one closer to my skill level. Enter Low Fung Win. He’s 7, but almost 8. It was never clear how he’s related to the gym, but he lives next door and just wandered over. He immediately introduced himself, grabbed my phone and showed me his Facebook page. Said we could be friends. Told me how he’d just come back to Chiang Mai where he and his mother had renewed their visa (she’s Singaporean, evidently).

But enough chit chat! It was time for him to teach. His English was great and he pointed out a bunch of details I’d missed the previous day with Pots. Arms should be lower and straight. When Pots said 45° on the kick, he didn’t mean the knee joint should be at 45°, he meant the back leg should start from and return to the 45° position but the leg should be straight. And you should swoop upwards in the kick to avoid hip problems. Pull your upper body back to counterbalance knee strikes.

A great little sensei.

Day Three

By the second day, I still had my stamina. My right shin was bruised and too painful to kick with, but my knees and left shin was fine. I still felt strong.

By the third day I was a wreck. I could feel my baseline stress levels rise from their vacation lows. That edgy feeling waking up in the morning. Getting up an hour before my alarm. Tense and anxious for the day to start when I wanted and needed another hours’ sleep. My muscles didn’t hurt very much but my shins were so bruised they hurt to touch. My knees were scraped raw.

So I wasn’t in the best position to take the first instruction: see the Buddha statue up at Wat Phra That Mae Yen? Run there and back.

It turns out that the usual schedule is to focus on conditioning in the morning half-session and technique in the afternoon. So I got the worst of it taking two morning sessions in a row, and even the lesser technique covered in the morning was enough for me.

After arriving back 40 minutes later, winded, and having experienced the lactic-acid driven urge to vomit while running up the temple stairs it was time for a small water break before skipping and the tire exercise.

Day three brought a new character to the gym, a young Thai trainer, Jing, who looked every inch the Muay Thai practitioner: lean, but not shredded. Fast. Huge tiger tattoo on his right chest acting as the centerpiece to various Thai cultural and Muay Thai-specific artwork decorating his flesh.

He focused on Sév for a while before working with me in the last 20 minutes. Pots and I covered the techniques yet again. Yet again going over the basic movements, the twisting, getting the feet back into position. We spend a good long time on a heavy bag exercise where three circles were drawn in chalk behind the bag. Two in front for the front foot in left and right orientations one in back of the back foot. You’d jab and punch from the left position, kick twice, then move to the right. So winded after the warm up and Pots’ exercises I could barely manage a few combinations before resting.

Then came the main event: my drills with Jing. They were like those with Pots before but with more energy and more fake attacks. Orders barked. Then inevitably “too slow! too slow”. Blocks would be checked by gentle taps with the pads. Taps which bashed my own gloves into my head. Better protection than none, but a hit nonetheless. And not just he head, the sides and the torso got their punishment. And not just when I was slow: I realized that this was just the start of training for real boxing. Real hits coming in all the time. You need to think even while the blows are coming in.

Jing was altogether unimpressed with my bruised shins. My kicks still needed a lot of work. He generously removed his shin guards — soaked in sweat from his and countless others’ legs — and handed them to me. The simple disgusting pressure of the guard was painful but it spread the force of the blows enough so that I could practice my kicks.

In the end I was barely able to do the final knee-kick exercise on the corners of the rings and collapsed into the stretches, exhausted.

Riding Off

True to his bad-ass fighter look, Jing hopped on his motorbike, his lady friend climbed on in back and he rode off before I could ask for a picture. Shirtless in Muay Thai shorts, he drove off into the chilly Pai morning.

On the other hand, I hobbled back to my guesthouse for some green curry breakfast and grateful shower.

Final Thoughts

My brief experience has left me with two strong impressions.

First, the training is brutal. Even the watered down training they give foreigners in this off-the-map little gym is brutal. If there is a next time with Muay Thai, I won’t do 3 days in a row to start. I’ll need a gentler introduction. Talking to Sèv that sounds right. After 3 days he took two days off. In his second week, he’s already adapted enough to go every day.

My second impression is just how well matched Muay Thai is to the Thai people. It doesn’t rely on massive bulk and power. Rather, the style focuses on speed and the ability to withstand punishment. Everything is sacrificed for speed: stance, structure and energy. This last because basically every moment involves the whole body. The upper body is counterbalancing to give the kicks more speed. And vice versa for the lower body.

This art comes from the terroir, the people. It uses the natural strengths and hides the weaknesses. Light and incredibly flexible bodies are trained to be whip-fast. Training drastically increases endurance so that these these fast attacks can be delivered in volume. And even when not attacking they’re still always moving.

Not only is Muay Thai with its exuberant movement a lot of fun to practice (once you have the physical capacity) but it’s a great lens through which to see the culture and people who created it. The bruises will heal and the aching muscles get stronger.

The lasting impression for me will be the sheer joyous energy of the sport.