by Gaz
Week of Martial Arts: Thursday Muay Thai
9:00 pm in Martial Arts by Gaz
Last night was the fourth night of my Week of Martial Arts, where I attend a different martial arts class at my nearby Gloucester GL1 Leisure Centre every night this week, and then pick my favourite to devote 6 months of study to.
There is no other martial art class at GL1 on Fridays, but I will call the Tai Chi class I tried to get to on Tuesday and try to attend a class next week so that I still have five styles to choose from when I come to make a decision.
Training Times
Muay Thai lessons are held every week at GL1 between 7 and 8pm on Thursdays, and 6 and 7pm on Sundays at a cost of £4 each. Between September and April an additional Winter only sparring session is held an Mondays between 7 and 8pm for advanced students.
Lesson Structure
Not unlike western boxing classes I’ve attended on occasion, the session started with a skipping based warm up to music — in this case uptempo techno — interspersed with traditional jumping jacks, press ups, crunches etc. The instructor warned that today’s class was going to concentrate on basics and would not be covering any of the fancy stuff from previous weeks, although his knowledge and enthusiasm shone through even as he demonstrated variations on the two basic drills that formed the bulk of the lesson. It was clear that Muay Thai is taught as a practical fighting style more than a sport, emphasising the destructive use of elbows, knees, gouges and shin kicks over fancy footwork, and complex kicking.
Students and Instructor
This was the largest GL1 class I’ve attended, and I was pleased to see a tremendous mix of people from all walks of life, including a few women of various ages. I had expected the class to be populated with doormen and security types, which would have been a shame were that the case. All credit to an instructor that can make this relatively brutal style interesting and accessible to students of both sexes and all ages, and keep them coming back for more lessons. After the warm up, students trained in bag gloves rather than boxing gloves which surprised me, as one of the things I found hard to adjust to with western boxing was actually holding up the extra weight of 14oz gloves after a few minutes of sparring. One student suffered a split lip towards the end of the class, but both his attitude, and that of the student that caused it were exemplary.
Style and Techniques
Although Muay Thai is a sport, competitors fight to knockout not for points, so conditioning and stamina are just as important as technique. In some respects, I believe that Thai boxing does less long term damage to fighters than western boxing: being repeatedly hit with huge padded gloves allows a boxer to withstand far more blows in a single bout than taking an elbow or shinkick to the head which will likely end a fight with the first good contact, either due to split cheeks or eyebrows, or plain knockout — sure it will hurt more at the time, but is far less damaging to the brain than the repeated pounding western boxers endure.
That aside, the instructor explained the reason that Muay Thai uses the shin bone as the point of contact for kicks: Despite the extra range gained by kicking with the instep or toes of a bare foot, it will likely cause as much damage to the kickers foot as the person being kicked, especially when kicking to the head. Similarly, using the elbows at close quarters avoids damage to the boxers hands.
For my Tae Kwon Do friends, I found some enlightening videos on YouTube. Which one do you think is faked?
