Taking muay show on the road, old style muay thai seminar in FL

Man, I love puns.  I just wanted to give my readers a heads up. I will be hitting the road and conducting a seminar in Orlando, Florida on Saturday December 4, 2010.

 My focus will be on leveraging muay thai for street combat.  We'll cover the basics of old style muay thai and how it differs from modern sport muay thai. I'll go over the bio mechanics of specific muay chau cherk and lerd rit strikes, and how to take advantage of physics to maximize your power. I'll also cover defense tactics, pad holding techniques, combinations, and multiple opponent tactics. And knowing me we'll probably end up geeking out and go over weapons disarms, CQC tactics, and delve into combat / operator mindset theory. My goal: provide you with some basic tools to help you protect yourself in the street, and to help you recognize the rules that apply to fighting in the ring or the cage do not apply in combat.

 If you're in the Orlando / Central Florida area I encourage you to check it out. I promise you'll learn something you won't see at the MMA gym. No prior experience in muay thai or any martial art required. Here's the dirty details:

Date: December 4, 2010
From: 12:30pm to 5:00pm
Cost: USD$50.00
Location: Martial Arts World
6606 Old Winter Garden Road
Orlando, FL 32835

Register online or contact me via email for more info or if you have any questions.

Speed kills... the other guy in the world of muay thai

"The stronger swordsman does not necessarily win. It is speed! Speed of hand, speed of mind."

That's one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite stories, The Count of Monte Cristo. It is a common belief that power and size go hand in hand. Well that's bad news for a guy like me. See, I'm  5 foot six, a hundred and forty-something pounds - a self professed little guy.  I'm certainly not big, and I don't want to be big. I never had big muscles. In fact, growing up I had the metabolism of a squirrel. I tried bulking up, but my body just burned off every type of protein muscle-max weight gain product I could blow my allowance on. When I started training muay thai, I was hoping that this high impact martial art would get me yolked.

Nope.

But us little guys have a strength that a lot of the bigger guys disregard - speed. I think speed is a defense mechanism that you develop when you're being chased by bullies as a little kid. When that speed is used for fight instead of flight, bullies become a non-issue

I've noticed that during the course of their training a lot of western muay thai and MMA practitioners tend to develop the mind set that the more weight one can push the harder one can strike. Not necessarily so. Strength gives you the ability to move mass, but does it enable you to cause more damage to that mass than a person 2/3 your size?

When it comes to striking, speed is king. Developing the ability to throw with explosive speed can give a person a small as myself the ability to generate devastating power. Its simple bio-mechanics, nothing mystical. When you understand that the faster you can throw a strike in a smaller period of time, and get your body into it, your opponent is in a world of hurt.

Here's a couple quick tips to help you develop explosive power with your strikes:

1. Basic physics - your mass x acceleration = force. Don't throw punches with your arm, throw it with your body. Drive forward with your strikes, punch through your target.

2. Pivot in, pivot out - The pivot is one of the most important aspects of the muay thai round kick. If you throw a kick at 20mph, bring your leg back at 25mph, and bring it back with that pivot.

3. The faster you can pivot, the harder you can strike - this applies to elbows, round kicks, hooks.

4. Commit 100% to the strike at that moment, don't worry about counter strikes because if you're training right, you wouldn't depend on a one-shot knock out. You throw at least 3-5 in a single combo.

5. If you're like me you don't train muay thai for sport, but for protection. You can't get disqualified from a street fight, so when you strike you aim for soft targets, and you attack with everything behind it.

6. Most important tip ever! When you're learning a technique, throw it slow until you are comfortable with moving your body that way. Build the speed at your own pace, the power will increase as your speed increases. You aren't going to impress anyone firing off a half ass technique with no power.

Using drive to add power your strikes

Stationary strikes can become fairly strong with a tweaking of body mechanics. But in my opinion, stationary strikes carry two inherent problems. They limit the amount of torque and thrust you can generate, and they also inhibit body movement - arguably the most important aspect of a fight. If you aren't moving in a fight/combat situation, you're a target that's going to get hit.

Incorporating drive (forward motion) into your strikes will increase your hitting power not only because you're adding momentum to the force mix, but also consider this:

Knee Strikes - you'll be able thrust your hips farther forward, allowing you to drive deeper into your target

Elbows and Kicks - increased range of pivot rotation and hip drive

Punches & Headbutts - Additional force behind the strike and more ability to hit through the target.

In the video below I used the basic muay thai up elbow strike to demonstrate this concept. Modern ring style muay thai teaches the up elbow as a stationary attack. Lerdrit and muay chao churd integrates drive into almost all of its offensive and defensive techniques.

So when when you're moving while you strike you're killing a number of birds with one stone while conserving movement and keeping yourself a difficult target to hit.