This is Day 1 with Yodkhunpon Sittraipum. A little bit of introduction, Yodkhunpon was perhaps the most feared elbow fighter of the Golden Age. His nickname was “The Elbow Hunter of 100 Stitches.” He had the rare distinction of holding both the Lumpinee and Rajadamnern 118 lb titles in the same year (1991), and had a fighting style nobody wanted to face. That style comes through in this session and the 7 days with him are meant to show as much depth as possible into that style. It’s a constant pressure style, focused on hemming in the opponent until cornered, and then he unleashes his systematic attack of elbows and knees – like a game of Wack A Mole. Kevin and I recorded two “watch with me” fights from his glory years, you can see plainly just how amazing he is. You can get a sense of not only how he was as a fighter, but how I see him:

This first session was already chock full of so many details, I can’t even begin to share it all. He’s unlocking the keys to his style. You can rent or buy this single hour long session here patrons get a substantial discount (see below). Most of the session is him just getting me more comfortable in the pocket, where knees and elbows can work together. You can see a basic form of that attack from southpaw in the 4 minute clip I provided. A really interesting elbows in the pocket teaching tool he uses can be seen in the GIF below. It’s just a constant trading of elbows into the forearms of a partner. Any Muay Thai gym could benefit from this and it teaches several important things. The first is: stay in the pocket. It forces you to just remain where you are under attack, building confidence in your ability to block elbows in a basic guard. The second is to counter attack immediately, learning to strike back. As soon as you feel the elbow on your forearm, you throw back. Third, and maybe most important for his style, is that this is a game of rhythm. If you watch how he does it in the full video, and in sessions that will be published soon, it’s a game of “You quit first.” Yodkhunpon, in his fights, was able to escalate the tempo of his elbow attacks, and basically overwhelm his opponents. In this drill he does the same thing. You can see this progression in the free video clip.

In the GIF below you can see a super important part of his style, his footwork. The Gallop. He’s a dern fighter, which means he is constantly coming forward, often chasing kickers across the ring. (He made a joke today about how if a Roi Et – where he’s from – dern fighter is going backwards, it’s because he’s stumbling. Don’t back up.) His footwork involves these deep steps as he gallops forward to cut off the ring. In the GIF you can see the small nuances of his rhythm, the way he drags his foot a little, the bit of bounce. This lightness of movement compliments, and contrasts with his crashing attacks.

It’s very interesting to pair Yodkhunpon with Karuhat because each of them were famed for their elbows. They threw them in very different stylistic ways. Karuhat would time his for dramatic cuts that would win rounds and ultimately fights, Yodkhunpon would overwhelm his opponents with them, paired with knees. Karuhat was a pressure fighter, but he has a kind of wave-like back and forth movement that made him both very difficult to attack, and unpredictable. Yodkhunpon on the other hand has very little backward sway. Everything is right in front of him, in a smothering fashion. The fighter Yodkhunpon might the most be like is Dieselnoi, in that he shares the same stalking, hemming tactics, and then the very violent, escalating tempo attack (with knees, instead of elbows).

This is Sylvie Study Episode 22, you can see it On Demand here. At top is a free 4 minute extended clip, but you can watch the full 64 minute commentary video of this session on Vimeo On Demand. Purchase of the video or subscription lends support to legends of the ring as the krus gets 55% of the net proceeds from this series, distributed; patrons get a substantial discount (you can purchase Episode 22 individually after the trailer below, or look to Episode 22 in the full list). You can also subscribe to the entire series, there are now over 28 hours of commentary training footage published:

watch all the free videos in this series

The Two Muay Thais of Thailand

A chain link fence makes up the outer wall of the gym, like that of a school playground, the kind of which I used to play on as a kid, or like an MMA cage of today painted black. The soot-gray of the metal, a tinniness you could almost taste is missing, as is the high-tone chime that would come when it shook, when a stray ball from the grounds would make it ring. But the infinite stack of triangles is still there, the inside and outside of it, how you could see straight through but were still bound, the way it tricked the eyes to thinking they were not still enclosed. That high, semi-transparent wall of firm metal link is at my back, and I’m watching Karuhat Sor. Supawan move through his permutations with the regularity and varied genius of Bach. It’s been a month of more or less coming to this gym every day, and meeting the man who earned the name “Yodsian”, great guru, top master, ultimate yogi, wizard in the woods, the potential translations feel endless. He is a ribbon in the ring, a shiny, satiny thin ribbon that twists with the turn of a hand reflecting differing light from every angle. He holds a mirthful smile at almost all times as he ballroom dances my wife Sylvie through a steady cadence of 123, 123, 123, teaching her to dance. These are not technical moves, not do this, then do this. This is pushing down into the music, the music of fighting. Nobody can really teach this, other than those who have felt it – and there are a lot of wonderful things that can be taught by many men and women – its the music beneath the code, its the Source Code, and you could spend an eternity staring at it and not know what it means.

It’s a remarkable moment, out here at the edge of Bangkok. Chatchai Sasakul, one of the great western boxers in the history of Thailand, and perhaps it’s greatest boxing coach, moved his gym from the middle of Bangkok’s Ramkhaemhaeng commercial district to the far North of the city near Rangsit. It sits at the edge of a great and open lot that 3 times a week hosts an enormous market in the evenings full of stalls, and mats strewn with wares, and wandering families. In the day, and all other times, it’s just a cement savanna across which dog packs trend toward movement, or signs of other dogs, and lone dogs keep to their own company under awnings or overhangs as if in a post-Apocalyptic film. Inside the gym is well-appointed, beautiful. Outside the sunlight blares. With Karuhat dancing and shifting in his soft-shoe Muay Thai, it is an oasis cut across time. We feel like we are “way out here”, on a beach somewhere, the oceans of water, time-water, washed from the 1990s when Bangkok was blasting with the greatest Muay Thai that ever lived, and we are rafted in this gym, on it’s great cement wasteland, Karuhat dictating the truth to his ever-faithful, and ever frustrated scribe. And I am filming all of it, because I don’t want to miss it, we don’t want to miss any of this. These are the wisps that get lots forever, that never come back. The wisps that make the life of what happened back then when big mafia bosses were banging against each other with their champions, and the boys of Isaan rose up to fighting heights far above their villages, coming to possess incantational powers captured in their styles.

The moment is this. A bright, fuchsia pink taxicab rolls up right next to the black chain link wall, parking half-way in the shade of it, and stops. We are out here on our island on the cement, our cloistered new-gym of shiny mats, and hanging bags that have not started to bow or split, and Samson Isaan arrives. Out of the driver’s door steps a big smile, and I’m sure that heavy amulets were dully tickering in his shirt – I don’t know this to be a fact, but he felt like that kind of man. He’s barrel chested, his eyes were twinkling. He’s not physically large so much as radiating with a powerful manna. He doesn’t really know where he is, in the sense that it’s an entirely new space to him, or even completely why he is here. But it’s his cab and he can go anywhere he likes.

The gym is completely empty but for us, and Karuhat after a brief hello just continues on with this 123,123,123, transcribing his greatness into the reflexes and perceptions of his scribe. Samson Isaan – and his fight name means what it sounds like, maybe something like “Strongman of the Farmland” – wanders through the big gym space looking at what Chatchai has done for himself. It’s just us. Two farang with a camera, and two great fighters of an era.

By the time Sylvie is training with Samson nearly half an hour has passed. She’s just come off of more than an hour with one of the more silky fighters of his generation, to now training with its strongman, Fighter of the Year in 1991. Now, there is a basic divide in the art and sport of Muay Thai in Thailand. On one side are the “artful” fighters (muay femeu), and on the other side are the “power” fighters (this goes by many names: muay khao, muay buk, muay mat). Artful fighters, like Karuhat, look down upon the more brutishly styled fighters of the Muay Khao class, with a kind of wrinkling of the nose. Muay Khao fighters like Samson look down (from below) upon the prissyness of artful fighters. In the ring they are essentially bull and matador. Sometimes the bull wins, and if he wins a lot can be much praised, but always the matador is protagonist, the hero. Very complex relations between fighting styles and techniques become cartooned in this over-simplificaiton that honestly has strong class associations. Bulls, in the stereotype, come from rural Thailand, the 1000s of villages that cover its agricultural and economic womb. Matadors also come from rural Isaan, but their artfulness expresses a liberty from their roots. There stands in the center of Thailand a beacon of royal ascension. This was expressed, for Muay Thai, at the heights of the National Stadia (Lumpinee, Rajadamnern). For fighters converging on this center to win and dominate in these stadia was to, in a certain sense, transcend. The artful, femeu fighter represents and expresses a kind of ascension, taking the most brute of human action, The Fight, and raising it up to a glorious form, and to do so artfully. This involves taking all things base, and elevating them. The instincts become purified and refined in techniques. The emotions recoded into moments of control, and displays of careful ardor. This is, Muay Thai is, a kind of social alchemy, and the Bull Fighter, even undefeatable ones, lie closer to Lead than Gold, in this pyramid of esteem.

But, in the anthropological sense, if one is to appreciate Muay Thai as a language – let’s say – and a practice, in order to strip away as much of the ideological as possible, the techniques of femeu fighters, great historic fighters, did not come from Bangkok itself. It’s not that Bangkok, as if a great OZ, held the treasured keys of how to become a Matador. The Land of Muay Thai, the 1000s of villages where endless laboratory fights churn for generations, like a mad AI self-learning through iterations, this is where techniques are born and die. Bangkok is but the flower of those roots. And what is obscured by the ideological cartoon of high and low, is that Bull has many techniques, and is in fact quite artful. It is not that there is the Art of the Matador, and the Heart of the Bull. The Bull is a magician in his own right. He plays with the magic of the illusion of strength. He dallies with space and time, no less than the Matador, a matador like Karuhat. And this piece is about one small part of that. The Pulse.

After the session Karuhat, one of the Princes of Muay Thai history, would make fun of Samson’s style and techniques, in fact, during the session they each would make fun of each other. Samson would laugh in his bellicose, infectious wide-toothed grin about how he would never dance off a 5th round as a Nancy-boy like Karuhat might, Karuhat would imitate Samson’s knuckles-to-the-forehead punching style, as if it were a Caveman’s. We are talking about some of the greatest who ever fought deriding each other in absolute jocularity. What I want to capture in this moment is that cutting across all technique, the vast reservoir of fighting experience and knowledge, is this divide that splits everything into higher and lower. And the fact that there is likely no difference in the density of technique in the higher or lower forms. This high/low permeates all techniques, and the hearts of all fighters. Dieselnoi, remembered as greatest Muay Thai knee fighter ever (and thus ever in the danger of being classified as a Bull, a fighter who expresses only incredible heart or power) is very insistent that the knee and clinch fighters of today lack technique, that they are dumbed down versions, while in the same breath laughing that Samart, a fighter often thought of as the Prince of Princes, “hit like a girl”. If we are to see into the techniques and arts of Muay Thai in Thailand, we have to gasp with two hands. In the left we hold the ideological pyramid of ascension, in which any particular fighter is escaping the brutality of his origins, through technique, placing the Matador above the Bull, a position that is ever threatened to be shown as unreal, over-refined, and un-manly, and in the right hand we hold all the techniques, realizing that high level power fighting is brimmed with techniques, their own dark art of control over space and timing. Because fighters fight along these two planes – what something means, and what something does – high level fighters on both sides of the divide have come from lineages knowledge that operate through the conversation of both. Ultimately, in the eyes of the judges, the Muay Khao fighter is working on the ideological plane to assert the positive half of the binaries he suffers from. This takes technique. Techniques of the heart and mind, and of also of the body, no less than any other assertion on that plane. Herein lies the art.

All this is to say: the Bulls know what the fuck they are doing. There was a particularity of standing in that gym, cut off from so much of what is Muay Thai in Bangkok, with two absolute legends who themselves live at the periphery of the the Sport they once reigned in. Karuhat has no gym, he is an itinerant wizard who lives his old gunslinger life through a cadre of friends from the glory days, a circle of generational badassness, of which Samson is a part. These older legends are (almost) all friends now. Samson cheerfully drives his taxi. He is in no gym. He recently beat the once feared Weerpol in an Old-Timers throwback match at Lumpinee, which is the fashion today, as Muay Thai sees its devoted demographic aging, and longing to see the faces of those they adulated in their youth. One could not help but feel, as Samson joked with Sylvie, asking: “You trained with Karuhat, it’s different with me” (paraphrased), broad-grinned, that we were sitting in a vortex of technique, of men…and of time. I’m captured by the idea that the Bull has his own magic, that the Bull allows the Matador to think that he has no technique.

Dictating Space and Tempo – The Art of the Bull

While the Matador wants to give the illusion that he is orchestrating his opponent, pulling strings, waving his hand to the instrument hearts of the crowd, letting things play out with the “pause” or “delay” perhaps his greatest signature weapon, the Bull uses tempo. While the Matador want to create accents and redirections in order to lay the foundation for dramatic narrative moments, framing positions where an exchange, a round or even an entire fight can be overwritten by a gesture, the Bull builds a powerful frame of tempo itself. In Samson’s case he is driving a hard and powerful baseline, one that is designed to over-sum any play the Matador attempt. This is not just shouting over softer voices. This is systematic and technically adept disruption. No less disrupting than stinging jabs, or off-beat and delayed striking. This is creating a firm and fixed tempo upon which all variation must bend. If you watch the full-session with Samson you can see it. There is veritable glee in his technique. He relishes its efficacy, no less than a maestro with a paintbrush hair might turn the edge of a rising microscopic oil paint dollop. This pleasure, is the pleasure of an artist. The one who creates.

Ultimately, a fight is a battle of tempos in which the tempoless fighter is lost. This is one of the beautiful, an irreplaceable things about the Muay Thai Library project, one can see tempo being taught in almost every session. Normally you can only find tempo by watching fight video, but you seldom can see it taught in the way that a music is taught, or a language. By letting the camera run for an hour or more you can see the instruction of tempo unfold. Yes, there may be techniques being shown, but their meaning and efficacy are buried in the fighting tempo, and the tempo itself is an expression of the fighter’s character, their Being. This is why Andy Thomson told us years ago: “There is not one Muay Thai, there are thousands. Each person has their own Muay Thai.” And this is, in part, why fighting (and not just practice) is an intimate part of the art itself, because the pressures of fighting – its fear, pain, and humiliation – are essential for bringing forth character, the quality and kind, which then expresses itself in The Real of the tempo of a style. When you watch legends like these teach you are seeing a tempo forged in fires, something that is irreplaceable. I’m still taken by the surge of heart, which some call thymos, I felt when filming these techniques, especially Samson’s Pulse. Standing there I could feel myself swept up by the beat of it, the fast undulations, no less than if it were pounding base in the heart of a big speaker. It’s a drum beat, and it goes right to Samson’s heart and character, his smile. It’s a technique of heart, but no less a technique, in that it systematically steers both time and space, and imposes itself, aesthetically, on viewers. It has hand positions, variations of attack and defense, a body posture, and a natural cadence. It is style no less than Samart’s lazy-boy side teep, just of a different tempo and rhythm. Think thrash metal rhythms, think Baroque intensities.

In the session, if you watch it in its entirety, Samson extols the use of disruption. At one one, in answer to how he liked to fight punchers (muay mat), he laughs about how intermittent jabs will snap the head back and keep them from starting their stack (a term Sylvie and I use following the analysis of Greg Jackson (http://8limbs.us/muay-thai-thailand/lessons-rousey-grappling-stacks-and-sylvies-muay-thai-clinch-game)). What is key is that Samson is thinking, technically, about disruption as a main tool. Samson’s Pulse, part of a kind of Juggernaut attack, is a close-range, space dictating attack which principals disruption. And it is beautiful.

Vibrational Muay Thai

Here’s his internal tempo, expressed in a non-technical form. This is the metronome of his heart, what he’s feeling when he’s using the Juggernaut pulse:

And here he is laughing with Karuhat (off camera) who he knows thinks not much of his style, reveling in his forward “dern”, traditional Muay Khao rhythms, just churning up the space in front of him. The joy of it, the Bull of it, almost celebrating the “simple man”, the farmer of rural Isaan. This is technique, a close and systematic dissolving of opponent opportunity, the elimination of flourish.

And here below you can read the rhythm, as Sylvie reaches to express it. Yes, you can see it a bit in her, but you can really see it in how he holds back his own pulsing, allowing her imitation to push forward. He absorbs and receives it, when in a fight he would rhythm up against what she is doing, and impose his own answering tempo. There is really something beautiful here for me. I can feel him beating forward even as he silences himself, it’s like unheard notes of music that a musician might not play, or an unused rhyme from a poet, forcing you to hear them nonetheless. He’s laughing at the start of this GIF because Sylvie just told him how beautiful this forward-pressing technique is, something I’m sure he has probably never heard in his life.

It’s part of a whole system of attack and defense (in the full session you can see the range of his use of elbows), some of which you can see below – he was a Thai boxing champion and his use of uppercuts, hooks and crosses fit in this close-quarters style. In this GIF below he is not only displaying his own variety of weapons and rhythm in his press guard, but he is also inviting Sylvie to counter fight on beat in the same pulse guard he is teaching. He experiences these are battling tempos, in conversation.

But I don’t want to lose track of the under-music of the whole. Whether he is fighting another close-range opponent, or a more artful Matador, it is this under-music of a disruptive, space-eating tempo that grounds his efficacy, itself an expression of his character. The entire system is built up through the Muay Khao marching rhythm and control of space/time. And more technically, what is particularly beautiful is that from Southpaw it exploits the natural advantages of mixed stance opposition. Because the power side is shared, this means that the fight can be localized just to one half of the body much of the time. This is well recognized in distance Southpaw fighters who like to kick for instance. Many Thai Southpaws are big left kickers, blasting through the open side of Orthodox fighters. But at close quarters this shared power alley becomes even more extreme. Pulsing through and against your Orthodox opponent really deprives them of almost any Close Side attack other than elbows and an occasional uppercut. The lead hand helmeted guard takes much of that away. It then becomes an Open Side war, which which Samson’s uppercuts, crosses and rear elbows become quite dangerous. The pulsing rhythm is constantly dis-balancing the timing of the opponent, while power hand weapons repeat themselves with variations on a theme. It is a Baroque battering ram.

Sylvie’s Take on The Juggernaut

Above is Sylvie’s take on what Samson was teaching her, and what she’s taken with her as a fighter, in a quick one minute vlog. She’s calling this technique The Juggernaut, maybe for obvious reasons. In it Samson is employing classic Muay Khao rhythms and dern energy, but what makes The Juggernaut interesting is how it uses very close proximity with that tempo. The hand is high up on the forehead (from the Southpaw stance), so the forearm and deep chin tuck defends against the lead hand of the Orthodox fighter. The palms are to the skull, not turned out as some Muay Khao longer positions assume, and the forearm literally bangs into the lead side of the Orthodox opponent. Fighting at very close range like this, without collapsing into clinch, can put your opponent at a disadvantage if they aren’t used it it. Fight where you are comfortable and others are not. For Sylvie this kind of head-banging attack can lead to open side knees and of balances, and eventually could develop into the kinds of power side boxing attacks Samson used.

Continuity and Rhythms

At the end of the session and after Samson left the ideological components of Muay Thai took over. Karuhat, the deft manipulator of space, consummate narrator of dramatic moments, laughed with Samson over his He-man style, and Samson shook off Karuhat’s fancy-boy pedantry. Karuhat the next day joked about how easy it would be to fight Samson (remember Samson had just beaten Weerapol in an Old Man match), making him suddenly trip, as if he were falling over his own feet, and I’m sure that Samson felt like he could just walk and tempo through the paper tiger of Karuhat’s art. These are two boys from Isaan, Samson from Roi Et, Karuhat from Khon Kaen, playing on opposite sides of the fence, but artists in every way.

It’s another morning and Sylvie is opposite Karuhat who is working with her on continuity. The coffee is starting to take effect for me, and I am leaning into the ropes of the ring steadying the camera as best as I can. The hypnotic elements of Karuhat’s Muay Thai can lull you in their grace. — You can read our vlogged thoughts on Continuity here,and my more philosophical thoughts on it here. This could be any morning of our 30 sessions we filmed together, attempting to capture the innerworkings of one of the most praised stylists of the Golden Age. You can watch over 25 hours of footage and commentary here. — Karuhat is almost on skates in these sessions. They are sleepy and relaxed, and in a very real way he is trying to transfer this relaxed, sloping energy to Sylvie, get her to see it, to feel it. For over 40 hours she swam in those warmer waters, adding its perceptions to her advancing Muay Khao style. What watching Samson and Karuhat in the same space did for us I think was to emphasize just how much of fighting is tempo. Karuhat slows things down, dissipates, so he can create a visual change of direction or intensity. He is looking for punctuation. He is taking away space by taking away angles, and by focusing on the open side. Much of this website is devoted to his lessons in space contraction. He delays, in order to accelerate. A Muay Khao, or Muay Dern fighter like Samson is a vibrational fighter. He is insisting on vibration to shake things loose. He creates openings, not only by imposing fatigue, but by repeatedly contracting space into a compression of time. One of the most interesting things about his style, something that Weerapol discovered, is that while he compresses everything, he had an incredibly long cross. I’ve never seen a cross that extends like his. It may have been his secret weapon, in the sense of how much unexpected distance it could travel. You can see it below. He had long arms, but he also achieves great extension with his hip and shoulder rotation. Out of his pulsating crouch he could reach out and touch you with power at distance (below). What the rumination on Samson Isaan impresses on me is that all styles are manipulations of time and space, this is what makes them techniques. Without the context of distance and timing, they are nearly meaningless.

Tempos create expectations for the pattern-seeking mind, expectations that you can deceptively diverge from, but they also reach out and dominate the music of the other. This is what military analyst and philosopher John Boyd called “getting inside someone’s OODA loop”, which is essentially making your opponent re-active. What Samson Isaan’s pulse is about is getting inside the perceptive and adaptive loop of an opponent, through up-tempo cadence. It’s using the same boxer’s “busy fighter” tempos we know in the west, but at close, pulsing range, and doing so as a power fighter known and celebrated for his strength. People think of power fighters as using big-gun tools like explosive hands, or thunderous kicks, but Samson makes use of the classic Muay Khao vibration as a set up, disruptive tool, the grounds for his power. Great match ups, ultimately, are clashes of music. Seeing which music will prevail against which. The techniques of high level Muay Khao fighting are equal in art to the more celebrated Muay Femeu to the degree that they commit warfare on both Time and Space.

Snuffing Distance Against a Puncher

above, full fight, watch Samson work against a powerful, adept puncher. He starts in Orthodox stance so he can use his knee on Dor’s Southpaw open side. Then he switches back to Southpaw, Southpaw vs Southpaw. His Juggernaught helmet does not have the same natural resting place as it would against an Orthodox opponent, but he still manages to unleash his rear elbow.

Exploiting the Power Alley

above, watch Samson’s famous 2nd round vs the very dangerous Lumpinee champion Weerapol (who would go onto become WBC world boxing champion for many years). Early in the fight he is already in “dern” mode, pulsing forward, until he is able to land his big right hand down the power alley he shares with an Orthodox opponent.

Pulsing with Dern Into Clinch

above, watch Samson’s Round 4 march against Lakhin Wasantasit. It starts with pulsing openside attacks, especially with knees, which is then pressed in clinch. It’s the high tempo rhythm that pervades throughout.

If you are not a patron supporter yet you can easily join. The full session with Samson with Sylvie’s commentary can be seen here. 

Filming this session and then editing it for the Library was personally moving to me. This is what I wrote on Instagram 

“I just got through putting together and burning the Samson Isaan session which should be up soon – hopefully it will upload by tomorrow when we hit the road for Sylvie’s fight – but I’m going to tell you that it has a bid for my favorite session of all time. This is just my personal feeling, and there are already so many personal, wonderful sessions in the project so far, but this session is what the Library is all about. Not only is it full of Samson’s personal style – a Muay Khao, Muay Buk, Muay Dern power style that is seldom taught or examined, but Samson Isaan is a god damn (excuse my language) taxi driver in Bangkok. He rolls up to the gym in his taxi, is a little confused about what we are asking him to do, and just ends up having so much fun just showing his style and getting into Fight Space. Part of this Library is about not just capturing the techniques, but also the men, and he just fills me with joy. The session blows me away. I’m smiling right now, 20 minutes after having turned it off to burn it. The Muay Khao/Dern/Buk style is not esteemed, it’s not beautiful. This man is a taxi driver, and this is some of the most beautiful Muay Thai capture I’ve experienced.

Thank you to all the patrons, and the sponsors of this documentary project SMAC, Chikara Martial Arts and J Su & Family for making this stuff happen. That this video exists is because of you. And because of you people 20, 30, 40 years ago will know something about Samson’s style, and his incredible joy, that otherwise could not be known. This is what this project is about.”

These kinds of session in particular are what make the Muay Thai Library like no other. Samson Isaan’s techniques are ready to disappear from Thailand. He’s a taxi driver, he has no students, he’s no longer in Muay Thai, per se. But, as you can tell from the video it is alive and thriving in him. Documenting his technique as he would teach it is a big part of the effort of the Muay Thai Library. You can see the nearly 50 hours already documented in the Library so far, many of these krus & ex-fighters, some of them very great fighters, leaving no permanent record of their muay other than a few fight videos. When you pledge on patron, you not only can study their techniques, but you help ensure that they will be preserved for posterity.

You can directly support the krus & ex-fighters filmed in this project by donating to the Kru Fund (PayPal – sylvie@8limbs.us), funds to be divided between all filmed krus & ex-fighters, or to Samson Isaan himself – just write “For Samson Isaan” in the PayPal transfer.

You can follow my near-philosophical thoughts on Instagram or read my Sylvie Study Training Notes.

I think a lot of fighters can have intermediate success because of the combination approach. They learn fixed combinations that they can just commit themselves to. This is a form of forced continuity. After the combo, there’s the break. Combination fighters grow and learn to extend their combinations, longer and longer, to stay in forced continuity, and then to get out of range. But combinations are something very different than the Reading Continuity that Karuhat is asking for. Sylvie, as I’ve mentioned before, has been both cursed and blessed by the fact that she just can’t throw a combination. She will not commit herself to forced, memorized continuity. This has left her looking behind the curve in terms of using things that easily work in intermediate fighting, but it has also forced her to develop a control style at distances other fighters might not – and lead to her Muay Khao clinch style. In training with Karuhat we uncovered though just how much Continuity – a reading continuity – was missing. The requirement to stop and comment on oneself imposed itself at every turn. The habits of self-criticism made her very knowledgeable about technique, but much less capable of expressing the breadth of it under pressure. The ask, from Karuhat, was to let go and just surrender to the movement itself. To let the movement forward – once the principles were understood – correct the error that just happened, to let the movement itself build on the success that just fell out. To let the next note played as the redemption or the meaning of the note that was just played. To be continuously composing.

The esoteric part of this though is this: If we conceive of the body as more or less continuous with what I’ll call The Great Chain of Being, that is, that the knowledge of the body – the way it perceives and organizes space, the way it rhythms itself, is ever exploring and finding balance, the way it even signals and symbolizes dominance, or guards itself, all of that of its greater instincts and reactions, its animal self – is in continuity of the world around itself. But the Mind…is the Edit, the unique way that the Mind cuts the flow of Being – Sartre called it the Nothingness of Consciousness – somehow painfully diseased when it stands above the body? I say diseased in the component sense dis-eased, ill- or not- at ease. There can be no doubt that much that is magnificent and great has been created by the incisions of Consciousness, cutting into the rhythm of Being, the way that the Mind can hollow out a moment and insert a comment as if it is writing notes on software, or like post-it notes on a refrigerator. But one of the things that we love about fighting, and making and art of and sport of it, is that it is Primordial. It returns us to other truths, truths that may have been lost and that we are in need of. In the exploration of a fighter’s style, reaching toward the fluidity of expression, and having the beautiful spectrum put before me, Karuhat and Sylvie-reaching-for-Karuhat, It struck me just how much Sylvie’s mind interrupts. It interrupts everything. There is a habit of insertion, that may very well be a condition of the Western mind, something I definitely share in. Perhaps even a pathological condition. The world is full of edits and editorials for many of us. And for many who come to Thailand in order to learn technique they become frustrated that Thais (at gyms not overly tailored to western fight tourism) do not seem to be wiling to break things down and explain things to them. This is because “technique” is not the product of edits for most Thai fighters. It is much closer to what many will just call Nature. Technique is learned by lots of watching, and even more doing. Angles, positions, conditions are not cut out from the flow of movement very often. You can see this most in Thai clinch training. There is just continuity, and the adjustment that comes out of that. I sense that the depth of this continuity in Thai fighting is already diluted from the Golden Age fighters, and fighting becomes more phrased and compartmented, less like an on-running dialogue. I may be wrong about that but when you watch a Golden Age fight you can see that it is just different, there is something you can’t quite put your finger on. The Golden Age of Muay Thai reminds me of the basketball of the 1970s and 1980s (having grown up as a basketball fan, of that generation) when players moved differently in space. Gervin, The Doctor, Kareem or Frazier. It’s like they were suspended in air, or had a tempo that escaped time. These were born in the playgrounds of their time, just as the 1980s and 1990s in Thailand the Thai village and Bangkok gyms produced fighters of equal limpidity. What we’ve learned from this intensive with Karuhat is that it is not just a difference in style. It’s not just you do it this way, I do it another way. The style is an expression of a kind of comprehension which probably flowed out the informal but very real pedagogy. It’s a way of seeing and dictating space and time. And for Karuhat this comes through the keyhole of Continuity.

above, the simple grace of a teep counter-parry

via GIPHY – The George “The Iceman” Gervin 

It is perhaps more than coincidence that Karuhat does not like to hold pads. It makes no sense to him. You already know some of the language, let’s have a conversation. Let me guide you into some of the better ways to say something. He does hold his body in positions that could be very much like a padholder would, exposing himself to where a strike would land, and one could hold a pad there as many expert Thai padmen do, but he wants Sylvie to read the shape, to see the turn of the body, where the weight is. I think part of it is also is that dropping the pads lets him move the experience away from the “strike and then stop” mentality. Or the idea that the strike or score is the point. It’s about reading without edits, and I think the art of this drills all the way down into the very structure of our thought and our experience of ourselves as persons. One of the biggest aesthetic enjoyments of the Art of fighting is that for the audience member the fighter weaves the beauty of movements while in physical states that would paralyze an average, inexperienced person in fear. The fighter is sculpting themselves out of the clay of Fear. The agitated state of duress, and the discovered calm and continuity that grows in the elevated state, is the Art. Ultimately, that is what makes it meaningful. To act as another might not. It’s why fighters at the top of their game can feel otherworldly. They skate on ice that we mere mortals could not even stand on. I believe that in these 30 sessions Karuhat showed Sylvie the hidden secret to just what that is, to ever push yourself back down in the stream, to not take your head out, to stay submerged in continuity. What is really remarkable about this is that this rather immense metaphysical conclusion comes out of what may be the most pragmatic fighting martial art tradition and practice on the planet. The things that survive and largely thrive in the Muay Thai of Thailand have been born out of 100,000s of thousands of actual full-rules fights, for decades and decades. I do believe that some of the knowledge of the Golden Age has been lost, but that is largely due to a change in learning path, that’s why this intensive with Karuhat is probably of extraordinary historical value.

It’s pretty amazing that this lesson, which occurred over 30 training days and 40 hours, has been preserved and recorded for others. The path is there if anyone wants to study it and walk it.

For more on this you can watch our long discussion on Continuity:

Watch a Karuhat highlight video, if you are unfamiliar with him.

I’ve written about differences in western and Thai conceptions of motion and learning.

You can learn from watching Muay Thai’s legends by supporting the Muay Thai Library documentary project.

You can see all the free videos in this training series here

watch the full sessions On Demand here

I don’t have the time to exhaustively detail these, but I will be adding to the article as more games reveal themselves over the month. I’m hoping that they will help those watching the videos, and also that they will creatively trigger thoughts for fighters and practitioners at all levels. Perhaps the most foundational principle of all these games is learning how to see or read the Open Side. The Open Side is the direction the belly button faces in your opponent’s natural stance. If your opponent is an Orthodox fighter the open side will be to your left when facing her/him. But, the Open Side will change throughout the fight, if only for a moment. If you finish a round kick, your Open Side has changed. If you bring your rear foot far enough forward to check, your Open Side has changed. If you walk forward for a step, or you miss with a teep, your Open Side has changed. Thais track and see the Open Side wherever it is, and strikes landed to that side score higher (unconsciously in the aesthetic) than they do on the Closed Side. A significant part of these games is in tracking the Open Side, and because these Games are organized here for Southpaws much is about bringing the power side into it’s natural attack to the Open Side that sits opposite it when facing Orthodox fighters. As a Lefty much of your style concerns itself with this. You have to defend your Open Side against your opponent’s natural power, and deliver your power to their Open Side.

Karuhat switches a lot against Sylvie in these sessions. He’s a natural switching fighter, but I think he’s also training her brain to track the Open Side, which on him will move back and forth. All these games are transposable to Orthodox fighters, all that is required is quick lead leg switch steps, or walking into favorable stances, but for the sake of clarity we’re just talking about Opposite Stance match ups.

Game 1

Most of these games are most effective with the opponent on the ropes, but they can be played anywhere in the ring I supposed. The reason why Karuhat chooses the ropes is that they limit the opponent’s degrees of freedom. With her/his back to the ropes there are only three fundamental directions to move: left, right or forward (I won’t talk about the lean back over the ropes which is also available, something you’ll see Karuhat use against Sylvie very frequently). The Side to Side Game makes use of the core Southpaw advantage of having power opposite the Open Side. It is used to funnel the opponent into your power. It’s as simple as using your lead side weapons and cut-offs to give your opponent only one avenue of escape, then anticipating this and punishing it primarily with a high scoring mid-kick. It’s has lots of subtlety too because you may start off harrying your opponent to your right (away from your power) so you can properly begin the funneling in your own due time. If your opponent is square to you, you may force them to your right just so you can start the Game with a cut-off or outside kick. One of the advantages of the eventual forcing of your opponent to your left is that you can easily back-foot them for second, depriving them of the rear leg check on your rear kick. The timing of this back-footing can create easy kicking opportunities, and it is one of the things that comes with reading.

Game 2

When you aren’t pushing your opponent along the ropes, side to side, you will often find yourself fairly square with them. It may happen in the corner, or just mid-rope, but this Game is a big part of what Karuhat does. Here everything is eyes. He is looking for the forward weight shift that signals a kick or a cross (power against your Open Side). This is one of the reasons behind his own personal attack style that frequently involves a false “tell”. He will often lead with his chest rising a little, or with a head dip, to trigger the eyes of his opponent. What he does with this tell is that he’ll either force the opponent to check defensively (limiting their movement options), and produce his attack a beat slower than anticipated, or he’ll hide attacks by removing the tell. He’s always playing with forward weight signals. But, when watching his opponent he is very clued into seeing the forward weight shift. This is a core part of the “reading” he is teaching Sylvie. When you are able to counter ON the shift it can feel that you are inside your opponent’s thoughts, beating them on the strike. This is something you see Saenchai do all the time to western opponents. He’s watching the weight shift of often fairly stiff opponents. The primary counter on the weight shift is a kick to the Open Side. This is high scoring in Thailand and can be a power shot. The Game of Weigh Shift watching can devolve into an assortments of fakes and counter fakes between two fighters. If this results in forcing a check in your opponent you can move to Game 3, Attacking a Posted Fighter.

Aside from just trying to jump the gun on the weight shift with a rear kick or knee, once your opponent is coming forward Karuhat likes a few counters. If she/he reaches you with hand pressures he likes to softly parry down and pivot out to kick. The lead leg can also be cut or sweep-tapped. In the Karuhat Intensive video series though you’ll see him repeatedly on the ropes lean exaggeratedly forward and hold the beat, so Sylvie can start picking up on this as a trigger.

Game 3

A second Game within a more squared off situation is attacking the posted fighter. When a fighter is on the ropes and raises their leg to check a kick they are posted. Their degrees of freedom are highly reduced. When a fighter is back-legged (put on their back foot) they are also posted. And when a fighter turtles they are posted (though on two legs). In this game the read is on their standing leg. Most of Karuhat’s posted attacks are to the torso. Body shots and teeps punish a rear leg check against a feigned kick. He also has a version of the body cross that morphs into a head or mid-kick if the opponent is able to draw themselves backward into the ropes, onto the back foot. There is a micro game within the game that consists of simply attacking the standing leg with low kicks, or hooking the Open Side (away from the standing leg), wherein you could just go back and forth. The posted fighter is harried and attacked in all 3 weak points in a kind of whack-a-mole. Standing leg, head, body, round and round.

Triggering a Game

Aside from simply reading a thorough-going opponent, Karuhat is also constantly moving between them purposely. It is not just taking what your opponent gives you, but also putting them into a Game they seem not adept at themselves. It’s the switching between Games that keeps your opponent guessing, and when you can put them there they may not entirely be sure what Game they are in at any one time. This has been one of the early frustrations for Sylvie in this kind of teaching because it’s a lot of reading. One of the keys she’s discovered when finding herself stuck in a Game she isn’t doing well in is to switch to a Game she feels confident in. It could be something as simple as kicking the standing leg, or drawing a check so she can body punch or teep. By limiting the focus you can re-calibrate, get comfortable, and then expand experimentally into a new Game.

Game 4

This was a very small Game Karuhat introduced yesterday, just to show how Games can evolve. It’s a Game that fighters like Lungsuan or Yodkhunpon played very well. It is a tracking game where you just track the Open Side, fighting close and knee that side, making use of the skip-step knee when necessary. It can evolve into a kind of Side To Side game where you set up for the power left knee, but usually it’s just a hemming game, offering lots of points and punishment. There is a knee technique that you optimally need for this, a straight knee that has a curve to it (which follows the retreating opponent), but it makes for a very nice Open Side pressure, no matter where your opponent turns on the ropes, and compliments hand combinations nicely. You can see Yodkhunpon’s version of the (slightly) curved knee (which is different than Karuhat’s which is longer) here:

Of course there is no limit to these kinds of Games. What is helpful is to see them in this chunked way, embodying deeper principles of attack, in that they eventually evolve into the full reading of your opponent. Weight transfer, delay, Open Side vulnerability, standing leg posting, much of what Karuhat is doing is working to limit the degrees of freedom that your opponent is capable of. It means that she/he becomes more predictable, more anticipated. If you come to realize that from a position they are only likely to do 2 or 3 things (instead of an imagined 8), you can become much more adept at reading which one it is going to be, and seeking out the natural hole or weakness that displayed.

subscribe here – click to browse

If you aren’t following the Karuhat Intensive sessions yet on vimeo I urge you to because there is nothing like it in the history of documenting a personal Golden Age fighting style, we’re watching the blueprinting of an entire and unique fighting style right before our eyes – as cameraman I’m amazed at what I’m seeing while I’m standing there. The Games illustrated here may help you get more out of these fantastic videos. Or, if you are a patron you can find these Games in the sessions Sylvie has posted in the Muay Thai Library there.

Make no mistake, this will be the hardest thing Sylvie has ever done – and I say that about someone whose fought every 11 days for the last 6 years, something I’m not sure any fighter, male or female regardless of nationality, has done. This is going to be harder than that. And I can’t wait because Sylvie is completely up for it. She’s going to crush this, on the way to her unearthly goals. But compared to all of that this is still mind boggling. There is nothing we could do other than to dive right into it and try to bring as many of you along for the ride.

So what am I talking about, why so hard? I’m going to leave aside just the fact that she’s aiming to train with two legends of the ring – Karuhat Sor Supawan and WBC World Champion Chatchai Sasakul, one-on-one every single day, and I’m going to leave aside that in the evenings Sylvie will then be training at what I believe is the toughest gym in Thailand, Dejrat Gym, home of the Thai National team – this gym is tough not because of how hard they work, and they do, but because of the unique character of Arjan Surat who breaks you down mentally, especially if you speak Thai, only to build you up, to break you down, to build you up, etc., fashioning a harder and harder personal steel; and I’m going to leave aside that each evening when she gets home exhausted from that gym she’s going to sit down and do film review of the morning’s training with Karuhat, as she voices over for everyone what we will the be uploading and posting to Sylvie Study for patrons. I’m going to leave all that aside. What is going to be so hard is what it is that Karuhat is teaching her. It will pull at the very nerves of what Sylvie is made of, the passages at which an animal, its faculties, takes in the world.

Sylvie and I talk a lot about what exactly it is that Karuhat is teaching. He pretty much hates holding pads, and he doesn’t really work on technical dimensions. What we came to realize – and Sylvie talks about this in her vlog – is that Karuhat is teaching Sylvie how to read. Not “read” as in “look closely and observe”, but actually to look at the body as if it is composed of letters. Okay, this might seem a little out there, but bear with me. Shapes. What he teaches her though a kind of slow, constant sparring – stopping onto the break into a correction or admonishment – is to recognize the shapes and positions of an opponent, and to read what they mean. It’s like “seeing openings” but it is much more than that. That would be like calling Reading “hearing sounds”. Hopefully this is something that Sylvie can really bring out in the hours of commentary that she’s going to be doing over the next month, but he is actually teaching Sylvie literacy. Yes, you can fight quite a bit, and have pretty good success if you learn your combos and bite down and throw them over and over AND over. A lot of kickboxing fighting is like this. But the reason why Thais fight so differently than everyone else – and they do – is that they are literate readers. It’s the reason why Saenchai can face some pretty competent western fighters and just completely overwhelm them, looking like he’s in the matrix. It’s because he is in the matrix. He’s got night-vision while everyone else is feeling around, or popping out their memorized combos, looking for openings. Karuhat, one of the greatest feel fighters Thailand has produced has been teaching Sylvie how to read already in the many long form (Karuhat) sessions available on Patreon. The elements of what they are going to do are already there. But now it’s immersive. Every single day.

In fighting Reading entails: feeling the space and directing it’s stricture, seeing the shape of the body and recognizing it’s support (legs, balance), recognizing the Open Side and seeing when it changes, using rhythm to lull and delay to slip past, creating tension to make your opponent more readable. None of this falls within the realm of combinations or even techniques. Sylvie’s been kind of blessed – and cursed – as a fighter. Combinations have always been an anathema to her. She couldn’t throw one to save her life. She does not trust them. This forced her to be without one of the great cheats of fighting. When you can’t bluff your way through space with aggressive, memorized action you are forced to live on the edges of fighting in all the small things. This is one reason why she became a clinch fighter. In those small spaces she could fight for dominance. What Karuhat is doing, and it began most sincerely when he switched her to Southpaw to erase much of what was, is teaching reading, literacy. Installing new software, or an even better analogy, a new operating system. Now the problem with “reading” in this sense is that if you aren’t very far along with it it is almost useless. It’s like sounding out words letter by letter, not something that is even close to reading per se. And under stress much of what you learn is just thrown out the window because the body trusts what the body trusts, and nothing else. In order for reading to work it has to completely take hold. It has to invade your perceptual mechanisms. It has to become not only the “what” but also the “how” of seeing. That’s why it has to get into the nerves.

Why I say that this is going to be the hardest thing Sylvie’s ever done? Sylvie had a problem with violence. I’ve written about what I believe Sylvie’s doing through her voluminous fighting. I believe she’s building a new house out of a house smashed by violence. A house of techniques, culturation, rites and will. Fighting. Renown kru in Chiang Mai Andy Thomson was fond of saying: When the student is ready the teacher presents himself. It is insane that Karuhat as a teacher has presented himself to Sylvie. It’s almost out of a Kung Fu movie. He’s not a kru who actually has students. Something in him. And something in her, found each other. And he wants her to see. It will be the hardest thing in the world, as fatigue starts to build up over the repeated days, and as a student seeks to please the teacher, to let go of the old way of seeing (or not seeing). The body knows, and has stresses build the old grooves of perception tenaciously grip in like iron talons. You can not shake them free. Karuhat will patiently guide Sylvie through the perceptions of reading, he is incredible at this, but only by letting go of the old assurances of what is real (faculties of perception) and allowing oneself to see, a new, will vision take hold. Honestly, I’m honored to be a part of this. No second of it will be wasted, every moment will be earned. And it is incredible that others like you will be allowed to come along.

Listen to and download the podcast version of my first intensive session with Karuhat. You can find the full video of the session with commentary for free here. Take the training with legends with you anywhere you go.

You can find the full Karuhat Intensive Podcast Playlist here.

Subscribe to the Preserve The Legacy Podcast on itunes

or find it on Stitcher.

Easily become a patron of the Muay Thai Library project – a suggested pledge of $5 – to get access to full length commentary videos archiving the techniques of the great krus & ex-fighters of Thailand. See the Library TABLE of contents here.

Note: The video above had an audio issue, this is a new copy all fixed.

join, support & study over 40 documented hours of video with commentary in the Muay Thai Library. $5 patrons receive a 15% discount on Sylvie Study On Demand video, and $15 patrons receive 50% off.