It was a pleasues to see her training @ Rawai & she stood out in conferdance from most Thai female fighters. (she had 2 fights @ Phuket & won them both with eaze)

Muay Chaiya looks interesting, so this is MT with grappling and stuff, kinda extended MT.

Any how MC is more devastating they inflict the blows to the weapons(hands,arms,legs,etc) of the opponent aswell as the vital parts(Head, upper and lower torso).

I didn’t mean to say soft, I meant tame.

I never met anyone involved in Krav Maga I’d consider even minimally credible.

I do think there is a school of thought that believes Muay Chaiya is more inherently Thai and therefore better in some way. Also because Thaiboxing is a sport this some how excludes it as a unique art of it’s own. I disagree with this but that’s my take.

I heard a lot about Muay Boran and firstly I thought this was “Ong Bak” – never heard of Muay Chaya before. Strange, this isn’t mentioned in the lot of general material about Muay Thai a lot more when they have the same origin. I’m looking forward for more information about that really interesting stuff =D

TextMT-
Good idea on the comparison between MT and MC, I’ll give it some thought. As for me teaching old school MT in Thailand to Thai people, in Thai… yeh, I get mixed reactions (the irony hasn’t escaped me). Only today, the mother of a prospective student was surprised to see that the teacher wasn’t Thai. Most reactions are positive though, and I get more people surprised that I teach muay thai and I’m not that big a guy (they see most farang MT guys are pretty stacked – I’m not ;)

Commando & TonPo
Most people come to learn MT for self-defence or fitness. Some come to improve their ring fighting. Check out Kru Pedro (www.ancientmuaythai.com) who has used Chaiya in the ring in the past. Also do a youtube search on ‘yao chaiya’ to see the cute young Yao kicking ass in Phuket. There’s a problem with the style in the ring, where the judges don’t like the style so much. Kru’s Pedro’s students only win when they knockout, never on points :( he’s working on alternate strategies to counter this as we speak)

Nopstar-
I think most of the basic blocks could be used in the ring. Most of the ‘illegal’ stuff are moves that link in combination to the blocks etc so can be ignored for ring fighting. The important thing with most of the moves is properly understanding the underlying mechanisms behind the style that makes its moves effective. It’s not rocket science, but I’ve heard of Thai coaches not thinking a particular elbow effective because they think it’s not powerful. But this is only because, they don’t know the mechanism to make it so. I’ll have a think about which ones would make good examples… or which would best be used in the ring.

Great article, I’d actually like to see some of the blocks and how one could use it inside the ring and out. Maybe you could post a short clip or something?

LorKoteKote-
Everyone on mmt has a right to express their opinion… (as long as it isn’t blatantly racist etc.)

Littleman-
Not really the right post to be talking about this, I don’t want to take the focus of this post, I’ll send you and email on my thoughts.