By doing Muay Thai I’m hoping to not only learn new skills for self-defence but also being able to execute them properly. So far, I think that I have been able to learn many new techniques as they are similar to my previous martial arts experience. By being in this activity, I have learnt that there are many techniques that I have yet to learn. I also realised that the moves that I’ve learnt so far are the things I’ve been wanting to learn.

The only previous experience that I’ve had with Muay Thai was during my grade 8 Chiang Mai trip where I found many similarities with Karate. Due to this I decided to vary out from karate on to Muay Thai. I think that I’m good at punching and picking up the new skills quickly.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been learning a variety of new skills which come with their own difficulties.

• Knee strike: The knee strike is basically kneeing the opponent’s gut while your upper body leans back to generate more power from the hips. I have difficulties with this skill as I have never learnt moves related to the knees in my previous martial arts experience. Furthermore, I find it hard to move my hips and use them for extra power. I still haven’t overcome this problem as I am not used to using my hips nor knees in martial arts. I think that with a few more weeks of practice I will get the hang of it.

• Side kick: For the side kick technique, I found it a bit hard to adapt to as I learnt a similar move in karate. Both of them are side kicks but in karate we snap our leg back. I found it easy to adjust to as it wasn’t too different, I just needed to control the snap of my leg. However a problem that I’m facing currently is once again my hip movement. Similar to my knee strike I’m too stiff with my hips and I do not move them enough to execute the side kick perfectly. In addition, I sometimes hit my instructor’s pad with my sole instead of my shin. However I think I’ve improved a lot on it since this mistake has been decreasing.

• Stance: For the Muay Thai Stance we have to keep our hands up on guard all the time. This is similar to what I had to do in Karate however in Karate my hands were guarding my face lower than they do now Muay Thai. Due to this sometimes I my hands revert back to my Karate stance. I find it hard to maintain as it’s a simple subconscious stance. Since I’ve been doing Karate for 4 years I’m subconsciously used to keeping my hands lower. I think that it will take me some time to ingrain the Muay Thai stance in to my subconscious. 

• 2 Minute Rounds: During the classes we have 3 rounds of speed training which last for 2 minutes. I find this part the most difficult as I need to be fast so it uses more energy in one go. One thing that I need to improve on is my breathing. I tend to forget to breathe while punching and kicking as I’ve never done speed rounds before. So once again this is another thing I just need to get used to. The second thing that I noticed is that my arms get tired quite quickly. I noticed this mostly when my instructor build up the number of punches from 2 to 20. I’m not too surprised as in general even outside of Muay Thai my arm strength is not very strong. I was thinking of doing workouts for my arms outside of Muay Thai classes to build up more strength.

Overall, from my first few Muay Thai classes I learnt that it is very different to Karate even in very subtle ways. Apart from that there are many new things that I am learning as well that are very foreign to me. Due to these reasons I’ll need to adjust to them over time.