Muay Thai is quickly becoming one of the most practised martial arts worldwide, and it’s not hard to see why. After all, it boasts an impressive arsenal of moves, and the process of getting good at it involves a lot of full-body exercises. Still, you may be wondering, is Muay Thai good for self-defence?
Muay Thai has undergone a lot of refinement throughout several centuries, all before ultimately becoming the fighting style we know today. Based on history alone, it’s easy to see that this fighting style has heaps of real-world applications. But just what makes it so good?
Let’s have a look at what Muay Thai is and why it’s so great for self-defence!
What is Muay Thai?
Muay Thai is the signature sport of Thailand, and it literally translates to Thai boxing. Hundreds of years back, when the territory was still called Sukhothai Kingdom (and later Siam), it was a military defence technique that would eventually become prominent across Asia and beyond.
Despite the etymology, there’s a lot more to Muay Thai than just throwing punches. It’s often called The Art of Eight Limbs, as it incorporates fists, feet, knees, and elbows, both offensively and defensively. Further, in competitive bouts, clinches are a legal move and constitute an important strategic pivot in many situations.
Regarding offence, the dominant form of attack in Muay Thai is kicks. These can range from push kicks to break an opponent’s inertia and build up a tempo, to powerful round kicks that can debilitate the lower body, pacify with a strike to the neck, or anything in between.
Further, Muay Thai relies heavily on waiting for openings, as opposed to throwing flurries of strikes. Working with eight different points of contact, a Nak Muay can get out of any number of dangerous situations.
One thing to keep in mind about the sport is, it’s equal part fighting style and cultural heritage. You can make a case for Muay Thai having some of the most beginner-friendly communities in all of martial arts. After all, respect for your opponent is a core tenet of practising Muay Thai.
Why Is Muay Thai Good for Self-Defence?
Muay Thai is one of those disciplines where not every practitioner gets involved with sparring, much less competitive fighting. That said, the physical and psychological advantages you gain through training have broad applicability in situations where you have to defend yourself.
Offence
The average street brawler with no formal training will hardly ever expect a kick-dominant fighting style, giving you an important edge. Besides being incredibly powerful, Muay Thai kicks are a highly versatile weapon. You can use them to stagger from a safe distance, break the opponent’s tempo while giving you space to back off, and even combine an inside leg kick with a cross punch if things get particularly heated.
Further, the bevvy of knee kicks come in very handy if your opponent has you in a clinch or submission. From this position, you can learn to respond with knee blows to the body, and more flexible fighters can even learn to utilise elbows for an angled strike.
Defence
Speaking of elbows, you can expect to master using them alongside knees and shins for blocking attacks. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of fighting would be familiar with boxing-style blocks. However, absorbing the impact with your elbow can lead to the attacker injuring themselves. This will often “win” you the fight before it ever has the chance to escalate.
Further, shin blocks can protect you from rogue kicks, and they segue wonderfully into leg attacks of your own. The process of building pain tolerance for these kinds of blocks is on the difficult side, but with serious training (and that ever-useful Namman Muay Thai oil), your legs will become a well-oiled machine prepared for attacking and defending alike!
Another often underrated advantage to learning Muay Thai is that it lets you deal with multiple assailants at once. Outside the relative safety of the ring and sport-specific restrictions, you’ll find that a street aggressor won’t be playing by the rules most of the time. The abundance of leg work and defensive techniques lets you maintain and estimate distance with pinpoint precision before punishing accordingly.
Of course, the best way to deal with a fight is to avoid it altogether. In situations where that’s impossible, Muay Thai offers superior crowd control techniques, especially compared to something like boxing.
Weaknesses
One possible weakness of Muay Thai is that the bulk of the action takes place in the standing position. You don’t really learn how to respond to situations where you’re sucker-punched and forced to fight back from the ground. At the same time, you should have no trouble keeping your footing in the first place if you train properly.
FAQs on Is Muay Thai Good for Self-Defence
Is Muay Thai dangerous?
Like any combat sport, Muay Thai carries a level of risk, even outside of competitive bouts. Keep in mind that your training regimen will have you exerting yourself head to toe, and it’s not unheard of for this system to lead to some form of injury. For example, a big part of learning a jumping roundhouse kick is focusing on landing safely without twisting your ankle.
Beyond that, for professional and amateur fighters alike, injuries of various levels of severity are fairly common in Muay Thai. While punches take a bit of a backseat relative to kicks, elbow attacks are enough to drive that statistic up. Then there’s the risk of damage to the knees and elbows themselves, which can be permanent if left untreated.
That said, any reputable Muay Thai instructor would be fully aware of the possible risks. If you pace yourself and pick the right gym, you don’t have much to worry about. This goes double if you’re in it for overall body strength training or learning to react in emergency self-defence situations. Usually, light and heavy sparring is a nice supplement to your regimen, but gyms rarely mandate it.
What do I need to train Muay Thai?
Is Muay Thai good for self-defence for every body type out there? Yes and no. You have a lot of techniques to get around your limitations, although certain bodily features help more than others. For starters, longer legs will give better results on average, as will a degree of flexibility in the lower body. Overall, being lean and agile (even at the expense of some strength) is better for Muay Thai than being bulky.
Beyond that, you need a fair bit of Muay Thai gear, but it shouldn’t set you back much. Besides the obligatory wrapping, a pair of fight shorts and a good rash guard for training make a huge difference, and the same goes for quality gloves and shin guards. The market is extremely saturated nowadays, but brands like Twins have some amazing resources for amateurs and pros alike.
Is Muay Thai good for MMA?
If you plan on branching off into MMA, Muay Thai might be one of the best places to start. Learning to use eight different points of contact is invaluable in a sport where nearly everything goes. Plus, clinch training is the cherry on top for when an opponent grapples you and you need to respond.
One possible downside is that Muay Thai training will leave your punches relatively underdeveloped. This is not to say that you won’t be throwing any (in fact, a jab is the cornerstone of many of the best Muay Thai combos). Still, there’s a lot more emphasis placed on kicks than anything else.
With that in mind, you may want to pick up a sport like boxing to help offset this weakness. It can be difficult to implement both into your regimen, but you’ll come out of it a more versatile fighter. Besides, it’ll do wonders for your ability to defend yourself outside the ring, should it ever come to that.
Conclusion
So is Muay Thai good for self-defence? The answer is a resounding yes, especially when combined with a sport like boxing or other complementary disciplines. The individual moves you learn as a Nak Muay can be very powerful, but they also allow for quick and effective diffusion of unwanted situations.
At the end of the day, every combat sport has some degree of applicability in a self-defence situation. Still, few are as versatile as Muay Thai, and the unpredictability of its moves has helped make it a staple.
So, grab yourself some Muay Thai shorts and jump to it!
Keep the learning going—visit the Muay Thai blog section for more expert breakdowns and advice.