Happy Monday everyone!
This week was a bit of a detraining week for me. But I still got some good training in. Just not as much as I normally do. My body needed the break and with the changing seasons here in the U.S. my allergies kick up.
I did train 3 days this week in Muay Thai. That was great. I helped teach one day, and we taught… yep you guessed it… Boxing fundamentals!
So I wanted to talk about that. There are so many websites you can look up to see each persons take on the two, however, this is what we taught and teach for our students.
Muay Thai vs Western Boxing:
Differences
- Muay Thai stance is more squared up with opponent than traditional western boxing. This gives us the ability to check/block our opponents kicks, and helps with body mechanics (makes easier, and more powerful) for kicking with the rear leg.
- Western boxers blade their body more. They do this because they only have to worry about the other boxer boxing, there is no worry about kicks, elbows, or knees.
- We keep our hands closer to your face for guard and protection. We have to protect from kicks, and elbows as well. Western boxers do not need to do that.
- Western boxers tend to have their hands lower at shoulder level.
- Footwork – we don’t lean back hard on the heel, we stay 60 % rear foot, 40 % lead foot depending on which stance we land in. Also we might have to change stance to switch kick as well. Some times our weight is on our lead foot. We don’t hop around back and forth, we tend to shuffle in, cut around, or shuffle out.
- Western Boxers dance about, bounce
Similarities
- Footwork – yes footwork is here twice. We have similarities as well. Our punches all originate from the feet. We use our hips and torso for the torque.
- Jab, Cross, Hook, are all the same animal. We use the same tools in the tool box, a wrench is a wrench. We as Muay Thai practitioners use other tools with it, like a kick.
- We both have to read our opponent and watch their body mechanics to hopefully predict our opponents strikes so that we can guard against them.
- Contact sport. In the end these are both a contact sport.
At the end, the two are both amazing contact sports. I don’t like to say one is better than the other. That really has to do with the practitioner. There have been amazing boxers that have crossed over into Muay Thai.
We taught our fellow students that boxing begins with the feet. You lift your lead hip a little when you throw the jab, but don’t turn hour lead leg to much or you will get kicked there. We taught them to pivot their rear leg so that their rear knee points to the lead leg when throwing the cross. The power comes from the foot to hip to hand movement. The power for your boxing starts in your feet.
I did a better job of getting protein in this week. I will keep up with it.
Thanks for reading, I hope everyone is staying safe. Hug your loved ones, and give your fur babies some love too from me.
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Thinks with Spinks 