Why Thai Boxers Feel Like They're Superior?

What are you on about?

It's easier to negate a sidekick to the knee, and the leg check that MT boxers do instinctually will do that nicely.

 

You can't actually fight can you?

 

Run the experiment yourself, I have, drop by a kickboxing/Judo/BJJ etc class, and spar them under their rules, do this with as many arts as you can, and then assess what it is your good at, if your only good at making excuses, then at least you'll realize it then.

 

Why?

 

Because you dont get magic powers that make you more likely to hit someone just because you are in "da str33t"

 

I'm pretty sure he meant to write: "If you can't hit me with 16oz gloves on you sure can't hit me without them."

 

I hope so....lol

 

We have an opportunity of using 20/20 hindsight to actually look at things more objectively. Thai boxing made a big mark in the 1960s. Another art that made a big mark in the 1960s was TKD. Both had a competitive format and they both greatly influenced what was to come.

We can talk about American Kickboxing and Sanshou, but both of those were developed for competition after Thai Boxing and TKD were already considered to be dominating. If you can't beat them, then join them.

Thai boxing itself picked up American/European boxing into the training because for the hands, boxing was dominating. Judo was popular in Thailand and specifically, many things you can do in Judo competitions are illegal in Thai boxing competitions. So we could say that Judo was dominating in the sense that specifically Judo technique was not allowed in Thai boxing.

Once we can use a bit of 20/20 hindsight, it isn't much of a stretch to see how dominating Thai boxing was through 1960s, leading up to big changes in the 1970s to even up the competitive field.

A couple things to note. The Thai boxing round kick is designed to break arms. If the kick is caught just above the elbow with the arm down, this can break the arm and I think often does. The blocking the kick is just a simplification to say that arm got broken defending against a kick, whereas, in many cases it was the case that the kick was designed to break the arm.

The Thai boxing round kick to the legs is well known still to be devastating. Imagine the karate guys in the 1960s getting dominated by Thai boxer's round kicks to the legs and knees. Enough that kickboxing didn't allow round kicks to the legs, but I will say that the few karate guys from Japan that I sparred with 30 years ago all frequently kicked my legs with Thai boxing round kicks. Like I said, can't beat them, join them.

 

actually I am quite good and at real martial arts, not just lip service ,it's easy to run the mouth

 

What, you mean running your mouth like saying if you fought a Thai boxer you'd break their leg?

Anyway, if you did know much about breaking legs, you'd know that the patella is not the optimum target

Does that mean that you're a real Shaolin monk?

 

What do you mean by "real martial arts" ?

 

Stuff that doesnt work unless there are no actual safety restrictions and then it suddenly becomes effective....the fact no other physical skill adheres to this paradigm is irrelevant

 

I'm awesome at climbing, but only real climbing. It doesn't work when I've got all these ropes attached to me

 

It's really weird how obvious and how similar all of these inexperienced dudes are in their writing. The same tired boasts, the same silly solutions, I just wonder where they're cloning them.

 

It's just received wisdom from the dudes that can't fight who taught them... and on, and on...

 

Right here, man.

 

You best be careful then lest your skill at verbal sprinting cause your feet to end up in your mouth instead of beneath it.

 

Lucky for some. I'd rate myself as just above the average. Depends on who you're training with and fighting against I suppose

 

Is that really true about San Shou? San Shou was developed as early as the 1920's just after WWI, not as recently as the 60's or 70's. Before the 20th century, and during the Ching and Ming dynastic periods which covers a few hundred years, bare knuckle fist fighting platform tournaments were common in China. Fighting for real with hands, feet, throws, blood and so on. So there's nothing that Muay Thai introduced, fighting-wise, either in terms of techniques or ferocity, to China as far as I can ascertain, even if by the 60's and 70's Thailand had begun to export so many impressive specimens of its national combat sport. China wasn't interested in exporting anything at the time, they were busy training for World War III.

But well before WWII, effective forms of boxing from many nations including the most effective domestic styles were already being taught to the military, but of course wrapped in the legacy/context of Chinese martial philosophers (every one knows the Sun Tzu stratagem 'know your enemy' right well China has been analyzing the fighting of outside nations since she was a nation! Few things are more documented in the military histories than how their enemies fought and how it could be overcome)

Ultimately I do believe Thailand and China share a very intimate, close-knit history of fighting arts, they are more the same than they are dissimilar and this is best exemplified by similar training method (namely, hard realistic fight training, an absolute necessity for the lawless and war-torn histories of both nations). Many scholars of inter-country relations in Asia associate this with the inevitable fact that when two nations war with one another, they learn each others martial arts, including weapons which is how so many weapons across the sinosphere share stylistic properties. So in many ways, Muay Thai is just another form of quan fa, or to look at it the other way, quan fa is one of many ways in Chinese for saying "muay thai", but one that only focuses on certain types of fighting. Muay Thai's distinctiveness is really in what it contains as opposed to doesn't. It's got all the same brutality of boxing, but more. On the other hand it doesn't (like boxing) allow for open fingered grappling. Neither does San Shou. Obviously, in both those arts, the gloves are for protecting the fingers from getting broken, which for any sport, sucks. But then Guoshu allows both Muay Thai/San Shou like striking and grappling and throwing, so in a way it harkens back to Muay Boran as well as various styles today known as "Kung fu" at least the ones that haven't forgotten their legacy (I think many have and that's clearly seen in the disparity between their violent history and their modern gentrification).

I think because of the control of the Communist party San Shou was relatively unknown outside China by the same time you mention when American Kickboxing and Muay Thai made their international marks. Muay Thai also didn't invent that sort of round kick or any other kick, because the correlation is not really causation I will agree they have made that kind of kick legendary, but there is sometimes a sense other nations only improved their kicking after meeting fighters from Thailand, that requires a huge leap of faith I think. It's more understandable that Thai boxers left an impression on fighters in other cultures, but I truly believe that impression was not "how do they kick like that" but more along the lines of "everyone should train like those guys do".

At the end of the day both the sport version of "kung fu" which we call San Shou and the sport version of Muay Boran which we call Muay Thai, were 'officially' born only a few years apart, and only just after World War I. Both were heavily influenced by boxing styles outside of Asia that became more well known after WWI, if not in technique (because Asia already had the same techniques in its styles) in the formality of the combat sport (which promotes good training, consistency, et cetera). It was truly East meets West and traditional meets modern and the outcome was what we have today. And neither style changed too much from that point onward, because honestly by the early 20th guns had replaced most hand to hand on the battlefield, and hand to hand fighting for sport or entertainment was largely as developed as it ever was going to be (and was probably more civilized than in any previous era) I often find it curious that people look at modern martial arts as something humans had to take thousands of years to 'evolve', invent, and so forth. I don't think fighting is very much different today than it was 10,000 years ago. You can't convince me someone in that age didn't have as mighty a round kick as today's top Muay Thai contenders. No banana tree was safe even back then! ><

Wow brother my post was too long, sorry. I have to stop doing that once I start typing I forget to stop. I should definitely stop trying to tell jokes I'm terrible at that too.

 

It's not that weird when you consider that in a lot of cases you have people commenting on things that are essentially hearsay because for a vast majority of people martial arts battles and glory are a by-proxy phenomenon. By that I mean that very few martial artists of the whole fight anyone even most that spar regularly will never fight against an unknown in an unfriendly encounter, so they have no choice but to ride on coattails, vicariously. But this isn't unique to martial arts at all is it? It's common to art, in general (how many copycats in the art world at large? More than any could count). Certainly happens in philosophy as well, but that's a chat for another day

Even in boxing, Muay Thai, wrestling and so on, you have boasting and crazy claims too and some of the wildest claims in just the last couple decades. So on one hand it's perfectly expected that the same boasting would come from the 'real' martial artists, it's a sort of vicious cycle of acting tough. The trouble with their argument is that people who train Muay Thai are going to fight serious, and are going to be willing to 'put up', because that's the kind of person Muay Thai encourages, as do other arts that have a good structure for combat training. Those are the arts that don't encourage playing around or talking about solutions, as you put it. So their willingness to 'put up' should be a clear sign to anyone that an artist or instructor or their school trains 'serious' and should be treated as such. Even if I was a great martial artist and I'm the furthest thing from it, I would not in a hundred years challenge anyone at a Muay Thai school. A lot more would get bruised than my ego.