What is it?
Muay Thai is a combat sport in Thailand. Unlike boxing and many other forms of fighting and self-defense, this martial art is a full body art, using fists, elbows, knees, and shins.
“Super-intense kickboxing, combat-style sport that improves balance, coordination, and flexibility.”
– The Ring, Singapore
I started Muay Thai around September 2018, at THE RING boxing community and have loved it ever since! I’ve been going every Sunday morning and trying my best to make it Fridays or Saturdays when possible – as the times follow a schedule making it sometimes difficult to be flexible around those timings.
I initially joined for many reasons:
- Learning Self-Defense, because I’m looking to travel a lot in my future, and my parents want to be comfortable in knowing I can defend myself
- A form of (full-body) physical exercise whichisn’tboring
- A sense of routine, every Sunday 8 am, usually my mom tries to bring me and then we go have a nice breakfast after!
- Form of anger management, especially with so much going on at the moment considering and apart from IB, it’s great to have time to get everything out
- It’s fun!
19th February 2019
REFLECTION
LO 1 Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
Firstly, I have been made aware of my own strengths and weaknesses, for example, I feel that this has opened my eyes to what I’m capable of – showing me that I have the potential to learn martial arts and protect myself if necessary. This, explicitly skills wise, such as given how fast I was to learn muay thai techniques originally but how much harder it has become to learn such a disciplined art, and the challenge of how much discipline it actually takes to do so. I feel as if unlike many other skills you can learn such as in academics, muay thai is not something easy to learn through reading instructions or even like sports by reading rules, as such specific techniques and the ability to read people’s actions and react accordingly all come in split seconds which some from constant rehearsal and repetition rather than thought or study.
Therefore, I am open to improvement and growth opportunities, for example – I went to Australia for 2 weeks during December, and during that time, I got my family across Perth to drive over a punching bag which we attached outside my room, so that every morning I could go practice my techniques – otherwise, I was scared I would lose what I had worked so long perfecting. This shows that I am constantly wanting to improve and grow my skills.
LO 4 Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
Similar to the point I made above in Australia, I showed constant commitment to Muay Thai, also showing my ability to foresee potential challenges to my initial plan of constantly improving, and at first, I tried to find boxing rings in Perth that I could use, but most were closed for Christmas time. So instead, we talked to a few family members and found out that they actually owned an old punching bag and were willing to bring it up for us. Additionally, it is on Sunday mornings at 9 am. This means I have to be organized and sleep early on Saturdays which is difficult because of course those are the ideal nights out, meaning I show a strong commitment to leaving early every Saturday night, waking up early even Sunday and making my way into the city to my boxing ring for a few hours.
7th October 2019
REFLECTION
It’s been a few months now that I’ve been doing muay thai, and I’m really glad that I still love it and that every time I go – I’m learning something new. Recently we’ve been doing a lot of sparring too – and I think this has really strongly tied to LO4, commitment, and perseverance because sparring can be really frustrating. Especially, when it’s very repetitive and you can’t get a hit in, or you’re getting beat – it can be very demotivating, but what’s important is to continue and to see everything as a learning curve to improve. This is as muay thai can be learned but it is hard to implement – for example, I can do a good kick, but it’s hard to do one in sparring without being too obvious and getting blocked. And similarly, it’s difficult to block a kick and have a fast reaction to everything. Therefore, I’m starting to see how difficult Muay Thai actually is, and the effort I have to commit to, in order to progress, which simply comes from practice and repetition!
DEC 2019 REFLECTION
Yay well just here to share something cool that happened last weekend! So my boxing gym had a special session and I signed up for it because there are only 30 spots – and got in! So it was basically getting to train with professional boxing champions who are here for a boxing match that the gym was hosting the following week! Anyways, I was quite scared considering I had never done boxing before – but thought that the experience would be great, and then after having done Muay Thai for so long, maybe it would be important to try boxing at some point. The whole session was quite fun, turns out there were about 6 of us who never boxed before, so we were in our own group. We all ran through 3 blocks, first there was a warmup, then we learned basic punches and steps, the next was a core and strength block, followed by a sparring block, and finally a warm down. I didn’t realise how different boxing was to Muay Thai, and at least I know for sure that I prefer Muay Thai because it feels so much more interactive using all parts of the body.
Anyways, I think I showed LO5, which was demonstrating the skills and benefits of working collaboratively. This was as the 6 of us had never done boxing before, we were all learning new moves together and having to keep up with the other groups in which some had done boxing for years. Of course it didn’t help training with professionals which was really intimidating… But the 6 of us really supported one another, and I even made a friend called Ley and we sparred together – which was a lot of helping each other figure out the moves and working together! I think this showed that although I was super nervous going into the session, I felt it was a very safe and supportive environment throughout, so I wasn’t afraid to ask for help with anything because in the end – we were all just excited to learn!
