Muay Thai: Beyond The Ring

2011 Holiday gift guide for the muay thai enthusiast

2011-12-12T11:46:00.000-08:00

It's been a couple years since I posted a muay thai holiday gift guide...whoops. I'm back at it, and that's all that matters, right? So, you want to get a gift for someone in your life who either trains muay thai, or is a fan of the combat sport, but what the hell is muay thai, and where do you start looking? Perhaps you train, and you want to give your girlfriend or grandma some ideas of what

As muay thai gets more popular, what will happen to the older muay thai systems?

2011-12-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

For me, it started with a bootleg VHS tape of fights at Lumpinee Stadium in 1992. Then, a couple weeks later I caught Paulo Tocha in Bloodsport on HBO, and in my teenage mind I was convinced. I didn't know what they called it, but whatever this fighting system was two things were certain: i. the style looked both brutal and at the same time elegant, and ii. those shorts with the writing on the

Black Friday & holiday shopping safety tips with a tactical twist

2011-11-26T11:28:00.000-08:00

So Black Friday has come and gone with some unsurprising violent outcomes across the United States. A woman in Southern California had the bright idea to discourage other shoppers from vying for an Xbox360 by using pepper spray, injuring 10 people in the process. I give her points for ingenuity, but she sort went against some social mores, such as that little known 'do unto others' rule that

Muay thai front leg round kick round up

2011-10-22T21:13:00.000-07:00

Front leg kicks are usually used as set up strikes, whether you're in the cage, in the ring, or in the street. The right use of body mechanics can make it powerful, but its rare that a front leg kick would drop a guy and keep him down. There are a number of ways to throw it - with the reigning method has the fighter stepping out before throwing the kick. Technique aside, a key difference in how

Truck and Car Pushing

2011-08-19T23:35:00.000-07:00

Conditioning Secrets Finally Revealed Back in the late 90’s there was a T.V. show called “Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed”. A masked magician would expose the methods behind large scale magic tricks and illusions by explaining how they were done and showing you how they were performed. His reason for doing this was because he was tired of seeing magician

Attacked by Twenty:True Multiple Opponent Realities

2011-07-03T21:51:00.000-07:00

After fighting and dealing with three, I had to deal with twenty more who swarmed and encircled me. Didn’t see that coming. Punches, elbows, forearms, hammer fists and chops worked. Knocked out a few but knocked down a lot more of them. Kicks and knees wouldn’t work. There was just too many of them and they swarmed too fast. I wasn’t tired until I stopped fighting. Must have been the

Three Dimensional Knowledge

2011-06-11T23:56:00.000-07:00

How It Really Goes Down in a Multiple Attack If you get on the internet, you’ll find a large amount of information on multiple opponent fighting. A large percentage of it is crap, but not because it isn’t any good. In fact a large amount of it is very well thought out and logical, but unfortunately it’s just conjecture and theory. In other words it’s just an educated guess. My friend Richard

Remembering the silent warriors of intelligence

2011-05-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

We typically use this day to remember those soldiers who died in the course of serving their country in battle: our grandfathers, uncles, brothers, friends. But please also remember the men and women who are all too often overlooked: the members of our intelligence community who silently sacrificed everything for us - names we'll never know, who's passing will never be memorialized other

Celebrate Earth Day with muay thai

2011-04-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

Happy Earth Day folks! Just a reminder to get out there and do your part for Mother Nature. Here are a few suggestions: 1. Save a tree 2. Recycle old tires 3. Conserve water Last but not least, love your fellow man. Give the gift of blood. Happy Earth Day from Donnie

Being mugged not what its cracked up to be

2011-04-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

Over this last weekend I received an email from one of my YouTube subscribers who had a hell of a story to tell. Friday night, this young man, only 15 years old, was robbed at knife point in the street. The mugger demanded money and his cell phone. He did the right thing in this situation: he complied. It's really easy, after training martial arts or having fought in the ring / octagon, to get

Giron escrima seminar at Muay Thai Academy

2011-04-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, or Northern California for that matter, this is a very rare opportunity to get exposed to a fairly closed system of escrima, the dominant Filipino style of fighting. Giron Escrima maintains a pretty small community of practitioners, most of them based in the Bay Area and central valley regions of California. Bahala Na Original Grion Escrima Federation is

Contour Kettlebells

2011-03-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone just wanted to inform you about a new piece of training equipment that works great for strengthening your striking muscles. It’s called the “Contour Kettlebell” and it works great at mimicking your strikes without getting in the way of your movement. They are made by GoFit and Bob Harper from the Hit TV Show "The Biggest Loser" for people that didn’t like hitting their forearms

MyMuayThai asks if MMA is bad for muay thai

2011-03-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

Muay thai blogger, and a leading resource for news on ring style mauy thai, MyMuayThai.com posted a contributed article earlier this month arguing that MMA actually hurts muay thai. I, for one, am stoked that other muay thai bloggers are waking up to this reality. I've made this point in previous posts, and received a fair amount of flack from the TapOut crowd. Thank you Mai for keeping the

The Law of Impact, Street Fight vs Sport Fight

2011-03-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

When it comes to accidents on the highway streets, the law of physics always favor the larger, heavier vehicles. Even though smaller compact vehicles are better on gas and can get you around town much easier. But what these “Politically Correct” “Kumba Yah” type of vehicles seem to forget is that they can’t take too much impact especially when hit by a larger vehicle. It’s just the way it is,

Thank you readers - OSMT enters Alexa's Top 1 million

2011-03-18T19:32:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, a quick bit of news here. This blog, Muay Thai Beyond the Ring, has officially broken into the top 1 million visited websites on the Internet, as ranked by Alexa! Alexa is like the Nielsen Ratings of the web. I'm certainly stoked! For the past two years, Daniel and I have been providing truly unique content on the subject of muay thai, peppered with a whole lot of street fighting

Change up your muay thai with the lost art of 'shifting'

2011-02-28T22:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a post that Daniel drafted but hasn't posted yet. I've been busy with a move this week, and didn't have time to write a post from scratch. I went through this, added my own ideas & tips, so you're stuck with some really great advice, and a few of my snarky comments thrown in for good measure. Definition: Changing foot position and stance in order to make your punches more powerful.

Muay Thai Elbow Strike Instructional

2011-02-21T22:30:00.000-08:00

Elbows have a reputation for being a dirty, but highly effective technique used to end a fight. Inherently, they're powerful strikes, but a common misconception in the MMA and mauy thai communities equate the size of the muscle to the power of the elbow. On the contrary, muscle mass has little to do with contributing to the overall power behind the elbow strike. Instead of throwing your elbows

Learn muay thai at home? Yeah, right.

2011-02-13T00:38:00.000-08:00

I receive many emails from a lot of people from around the world who have the same problem - either they don't live anywhere near a gym, or local martial arts schools don't offer muay thai. In the face of this challenge, many turn to the Internet to learn from home. I certainly sympathize with those of you who've reached out to me asking for advice on how you can train from home, however, I

Are you fighting, or just sparring?

2011-02-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

If you're more than three feet apart in a street fight then your just sparring with each other, no if and's or buts about it. The funniest fights I would see where always when two so-called martial artists got into it in a street fight. They would be jumping up and down, moving all over the place, yelling and “kia-ing” all over the place. They pretty much never really hit each other, it

How your brain impedes your muay thai training

2011-01-31T23:52:00.000-08:00

In the process of learning muay thai the most difficult part for us Westerners is our natural inclination to over analyze everything. And if you're an American, forget about it. Our society is driven by instant gratification. I mean, isn't there a cheat code or cliffs notes? Anything? Muay thai is inherently foreign to the Westerner. The techniques require you to purposely put your self off

Are we all closet Fairtex mauy thai haters?

2011-01-15T12:20:00.000-08:00

I'm a marketer by day, a chew toy for my dog by night, and a few evenings every week, I share my experience in muay thai with others. In marketing, I've learned that if your competitor mentions you (usually not in a nice way) in a press release, you've done your job. So I'm about to make sure that someone at Fairtex has earned their paycheck. Someone out there has been going through my posts

Hit’em with the Ground or a Wall

2011-01-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

Due to the popularity of MMA Fighting and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu many who get into streetfights today try to take their adversaries to the ground to subdue or finish them from there. To me it just doesn’t make much sense to take someone down to the ground when you don’t have to. Most will do it out of training habits, the way you train is the way you will fight, and others will do it because

Why You Don’t Hit With Intention

2011-01-11T15:26:00.000-08:00

One thing people find hard to understand is the relationship of the mind -body connection. The state of the mind affects the state of the body, and visa versa. It is important for you to understand just how much your mind goes into your strikes when you’re fighting. You cannot hit someone or something unless you first think about doing it in your mind; your fist just doesn’t shoot out and hit

How to Increase Your Striking Power Using Stairs

2011-01-08T01:48:00.000-08:00

Question what’s easier, climbing up a flight of stairs or coming down them? Obviously coming down the stairs is easier than going up them. Now why is that? Because coming down the stairs uses less energy due to gravity. Also the majority of your weight comes forward as you step down and it takes less muscular force to do it with. In boxing one of the lost arts of the sweet science is “Drop

Don’t Ask the Learned Ask the Experienced

2010-12-12T18:26:00.000-08:00

I remember when I was going to high school we had a teacher who coached the swim team. Now the strange thing about it was he didn’t know how to swim! How crazy was that? But as crazy as that was there are martial arts students who are learning how to defend themselves from people who haven’t a clue about whether what they are teaching works or not. Not only is this crazy but it’s also downright