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Muay Thai is well known for having established fighting styles that are extremely different. Some may be extremely aggressive, favoring a bulldozer type fixation of attacking. Some may be more reserved and calculated. Rather than trying to overwhelm an opponent with raw power, they instead bide their time and only strike at the most opportune times.

There are a variety of kickboxing styles in the world of martial arts. There’s Muay Thai, American kickboxing, and Japanese kickboxing, just to name the few that we’ve recently covered. The differences between them are subtle to the untrained eye, but there are several crucial distinctions, especially with respect to their rulesets.

In this post, we’ll follow the lead of Alby Tam of the San Francisco-based Muay Thai gym Combat Culture, who walks through the history, rules, and defining characteristics of Japanese kickboxing in the video below. As Alby explains, Japanese kickboxing began as a blend of Muay Thai and karate in the 1960s and took off in popularity during the 1970s. By the late 1980s, it had entered into a period of decline, and it was then supplanted by K-1, which continues to be extremely popular in Japan.

Being a good training partner is one of those things that most people don’t think about when they first join a gym and start learning a martial art. This is totally normal. When it’s your first day or even your first month, you are usually inwardly focused because your main goals revolve around not embarrassing yourself and building up your endurance.

To help provide some background information, this blog will follow along with the video of Alby Tam of Combat Culture in San Francisco and help answer the most basic questions about Muay Thai: where it comes from, its general rules, and even some of its benefits.

As Muay Thai grows in popularity, more and more people with martial arts backgrounds have begun to seriously think about either cross-training with Muay Thai or becoming exclusively Muay Thai fighters. While it’s safe to assume that having a martial arts background is not going to work against you as you learn Muay Thai, some people will have an easier time transitioning than others.

Like all martial arts, there are several general styles of Muay Thai. The two most important factors that play a role in deciding upon a style are physical attributes and personality.

When Alby Tam of the San Francisco-based Muay Thai gym Combat Culture was growing up, the only combat sport that he remembers watching with any regularity was boxing (we’re not counting the WWF and WCW). Every so often, however, he’d stumble across a different kind of martial art that he’d never seen before. It was usually late at night, and usually on a station that he didn’t watch very often, but it was here that he caught a glimpse of another type of combat sport where the fighters were wearing pants and shoes. They were also kicking each other. 

One of the most enduring strategies in any martial art is to wear down your opponent’s energy until they make mental mistakes that you can then exploit. With jiu-jitsu, this kind of strategy is often more defensive—you force your opponent to attack, and then use technique to defend and escape from holds until they’ve tired themselves out. In mixed martial arts fighting, it’s far more common to take a more aggressive approach, and to wear down your opponents with a constant barrage of strikes.

Finding a new gym is always difficult, especially if you’ve recently moved to a new city and you don’t have a lot of connections in the area. As Shane Fazen of FIGHTTIPS and Vince “The Anomaly” Cachero explain in the below video, just about all of the things that anyone is really looking for in a new gym boil down to feeling comfortable, being challenged, and finding a group of people who will make you better. For younger fighters, you may also want to find an established fighter willing to take you under their wing.

Your first visit to a martial arts gym is never easy. It doesn’t matter your age, your athletic ability, or your gender; it takes a lot of courage to commit to trying something new and following through with it. It can be especially terrifying if you’ve had no experience with combat sports (or even contact sports) and enter into a space where you will be expected to fight another person.

You’re never too old to start doing jiu-jitsu. True, it’s never easy to walk into any space as a novice when you’re in your forties, fifties, or sixties. However, with jiu-jitsu this is more a matter of leaving your emotional comfort zone than putting yourself in physical danger, especially when you train with accredited instructors from the Gracie Academy. If you can overcome the familiar narrative that you can only start doing things when you’re in your teens or twenties, and that you can’t have a career, a family, and new interests, you can learn jiu-jitsu.

Police reform continues to be a hot-button issue, but just about everyone can find common ground on two things: Police officers should only use force as a last resort, and they should strive to never use force that is excessive. Using excessive force violates the rights of the citizens they are sworn to protect and frays trust between departments and communities. When people don’t trust their local police departments, crimes go unreported and public safety suffers.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu has a long history that stretches back to the start of the twentieth century. The martial arts traditions on which it is based, primarily Japanese jujitsu and judo, date back several centuries. The growth in Brazilian jiu-jitsu’s popularity has paralleled the rise of mixed martial arts fighting, largely due to the success of the early Ultimate Fighting Championship in the 1990s.

Preparing for your first Muay Thai fight is usually preceded by months if not years of training and conditioning, but you may still find yourself with a lot of questions about what happens before the big event. This post explores some of those questions and should be seen as a resource for anyone who is curious about what takes place before a Muay Thai fight. It doesn’t matter if the fight is just a few days away or if you’re just starting your training and want to know what to expect.