Pictured: not me, and not Charn Chai.
July 23-28, Day 27-32
In addition to meditating, training in Muay Thai was another quintessential Thai experience I wanted to have. For those unfamiliar, Thai kickboxing is also called the ‘art of eight limbs’ because it includes (brutal) elbow and knee strikes, in addition to punches and kicks. I practiced it for a few months alongside Brazilian jiu-jitsu at an MMA gym back in the day and still box intermittently in San Francisco, so I was curious as to how an ‘authentic’ MT experience in its country of origin would be. Not to mention, you have to admit it sounds cool to say ‘oh ya, I trained in Muay Thai while I was abroad’.
I initially looked into a few Chiang Mai camps and considered training longer-term, as some gyms even offer residences on premise, but two factors came up:
I didn’t have much time left on my visa and didn’t want to commit to something that I didn’t know if I’d enjoy, and
I ended up going up north to the forest monastery, and conveniently found that Pai had a super legit gym that was also open to visitors.
..so I decided return to Pai and focus on writing, resting, and training at Charn Chai Muay Thai.
Tourists + avocados. She even offered me a couple free ones for helping her load and unload!
Back to Civilization
The way back from the monastery to Pai was serviced by a single daily songthaew, which is basically a covered pickup truck with benches in the back. There was a huge batch of us leaving that day, and we were impressively able to pack 12 people with luggage and a local with her 8 sacks of avocados she was bringing into town to sell, into the back.
The first thing I did back in Pai was eat three plates of delicious (also non-vegetarian...) Thai food and pass out blissfully on a mattress for three hours. So much for achieving freedom from the pursuit of sensory delights, I guess. I decided to ease back into exercise first with a yoga class, and coincidentally ran into a friend from the Chiang Mai yoga session, and went off to a studio in an outdoor shala. Exercise was prohibited at the monastery (we literally tried acroyoga on the lawn once and were stopped by the staff) so it was good to move again.
The next day I made the short trek to the gym, just outside of town. After sitting still for days on end meditating, I was excited to brush up on boxing and work off some of the excess pad thais from the trip.
Training
Charnchai is open to drop-ins at all levels, even complete beginners, so I was surprised to find that they hold an entire roster of full-time fighters, with many other students traveling specifically to Pai to train for weeks or months at a time.
A few details I noticed almost immediately - first, the teacher to student ratio was way better than any gym I’ve been to previously, because there are so many current and former Thai fighters helping out with classes. There’s great amount camaraderie with the trainers, who are serious fighters but also horse around and keep the atmosphere fun. The second is that it’s really dirty, at least by western standards. It’s part of the authentic experience, but there’s definitely a stark contrast between the gritty, open-air training environment with dogs, chickens, and neighbors’ children tracking dirt everywhere, versus the always-mopped mats and air-conditioned interiors of boutique San Francisco gyms. The grime itself didn’t bother me much, but the tough, somewhat unregulated training also seemed to create opportunities for injuries. I heard a few horror stories about infected cuts from running barefoot, severely bruised legs and feet from kicking the wrong things, and training injuries that took people out of commission, sometimes before a fight.
Before I go further, some context of what I did for each two hour training session:
Skipping rope and stretches - the preferred warmup of choice at every boxing gym. Unfortunately, I never actually learned how to jump rope, so I go quite slowly and slap myself with the rope every 20 seconds or so..
Pad work - training offensive strikes and defensive blocks and counters 1:1 with a trainer. It was a bit of an adjustment to switch from the narrower stance and combo-oriented punching drills I had gotten used to with boxing at first. But this was the most valuable segment of training by far, because they had such a good number of instructors who knew what they were doing. At other gyms I’ve been to, students hold pads for each other, which means the experience greatly depends on you and your partner’s experience.
Bag work - this part was pretty boring for me because the combos were extremely basic and made up ad hoc by a trainer, who would then just walk off with minimal feedback. I’m just used to more complex sequences and movement I guess, and the lack of supervision gave me time to just wail on the bag for some time.
Clinching training - or neck wrestling, which is sorta unique to MT. The idea with clinching is when you’re too close to throw a punch, to grab and control the opponent’s head so that you can brutally knee them in the face or get in an elbow hit. The drill is to practice grappling for an advantageous position and kneeing, but in practice on day one, I was basically grabbed and started getting kneed in the sides without much instruction on how to step, maintain posture, or change grip, mainly due to language barriers. The trainer also scratched my neck open pretty badly while grabbing me. I wasn’t particularly upset that I had to skip this part the rest of my training days.
100 kicks - at the end of drills, just as everyone is getting tired, you line up to deliver a back-to-back sequence of 10 roundhouse Thai kicks on each leg, with five trainers in a row. An individual kick is easy to deliver, doing these non-stop when you’re already winded from training basically felt like death every time.
Conditioning and stretches - at this point your body is shitting out, which means it’s time to push it to the limit. First you do crunches - while another student literally bashes you in the stomach 200 times with a boxing pad! It sorta feels like a meat tenderizer where you’re forced to flex the whole time through or take an unpleasant gut shot. Then everyone circles up to do even more core exercises for what feels like an eternity while the gym owner Bee paces around, rapping people who are struggling with their form with a bamboo stick like a disciplinarian school teacher.
My right leg after day one…
Personally, I sort of wrecked myself by day one... I tend to be overzealous in the beginning when doing something new - eager to prove my competence to myself and others. In the case of training MT, it included kicking the heavy bag (which is like bashing your shin/foot into a rock) multiple times after a trainer gave unclear instructions, getting cut by the instructor during clinching, and generally bruising the hell out of my right shin and foot because I kicked at full power the whole training. Needless to say, I changed my mind about doing both 8am morning and afternoon trainings for the rest of my week, opting just for the latter. Fully committing myself to training sounded good in theory, but realistically would've made me resentful about waking up early and quickly burnt me out.
Takeaways
The best part of the experience really wasn’t the conditioning, but the community of fellow trainees I was welcomed into despite my short stay. Others had come for weeks, months, even years, taking up long-term residency or making annual pilgrimages back to Pai to train, and formed a group for daily dinner and drinks. It was nice to have some semblance of a regular social cadence in an otherwise transient city, especially since I cycled through travel companions in every city. I think it would’ve been hard to stay in Pai if not for my training and my writing as well. The town served as a relaxed backdrop, but I would’ve quickly bored of it if just eating and drinking every day was the primary focus.
It was also great to have that satisfying soreness that comes with working out again! The conditioning itself wasn’t as intense cardio-wise as some HIIT and boxing classes I’ve done, but I worked my calves and lower back harder than I ever had, since every kick is simultaneously a one-legged calf raise, oblique crunch, back stabilization, and full hip and leg engagement. Needless to say, I beat the shit out of my shins as well and was practically limping (in a good way) by the end of the week.
Ultimately, it was a privilege to experience. I have great respect to those dedicating much more of their time and lives to such an intense sport, and hope to stay involved in combat sports for exercise moving forward. It’s also a luxury to be able to dabble in training just for fun. Many others, especially lower income Thais, turn to it as a means for survival - putting their bodies and brains on the line for a chance to earn prize money in the absence of other job options. One of the trainers told us how he started at age 7! If you think football is bad, imagine putting your kids into full-contact fights with no head protection…
Charn Chai Muay Thai, featuring my terrible farmer’s tan.