He actually blocked a kick
with his hand, forearm. Don't do that at home, folks. Hand or forearm against shin, like, look at this, who wins? Hi, my name's Miriam Nakamoto. I'm an eight-time Muay
Thai world champion, and I've been doing it
for over two decades. Today we're going to be
looking at Muay Thai scenes from movies and TV, and we're going to
judge how real they are. Her form is great on those elbows. So, elbows is the shortest-range weapon of a Muay Thai fight. There's a up elbow, and then there's round elbows. And then there's a Tomahawk elbow, and then there's spike elbows too. So what she's doing in this
scene is a spike elbow. In a Muay Thai fight, I would not elbow anywhere but the head. Because if you're elbowing somewhere else, that means your head is down, where there's a lot of danger. So that was very, very, very realistic. That, no. That's not Muay Thai. What Muay Thai is, is
you take a boxing match, and then you add not only punches, but you add in kicks.
And not only kicks, you can also elbow, knee, and standing grappling. That kick is awesome.
I need to learn that. The spinning kick looked
correct. It's not common. You wouldn't see that very
often in a Muay Thai fight. Usually you just see round
kick, you see the foot jabs, you see the low kick,
a question-mark kick, where it comes up here
and then it goes around. Well, I'll say 8 out of 10, just 'cause that whole jumping
up on the shoulders thing and flinging yourself down is like, no, that's not gonna happen.
But everything else looked great. That tree, I think that's doable, but in America, that is not common. People do kick tires, not full blast but just kind of repetitive stress, or they'll kick really heavy, hard bags. I would kick really hard Thai pads. Or you could kick a banana tree. It's absolutely 100% realistic and vital to condition your shins. Shin is your shield. You block kicks with your shins, you apply damage with your shins. But he keeps pointing his toes. There he is, pointing his toes some more. We don't do the toe-pointing thing. Because as a Muay Thai kick,
you want to cut them in half. As you point your toes, you actually end up kind of
putting some force that way instead of going this way. It would kind of take some of your energy away from your target. People do do a lot of
pool conditioning now. You could work on your breath, for sure. You could work on lung capacity. I think that would be valuable. You need body conditioning. You want to be dense,
you want to be durable.
If you go into a Muay Thai gym and the coach tries to
string you up like that, get the h— out of there
as quickly as possible. Flexibility is important. You could just lay on your back with your legs open facing up on the wall. Or you can have someone push down when you do a butterfly stretch. They push down on your thighs, and you try to close them. [groans] [laughs] I've never seen anybody
throw coconuts at someone to train their core.
But I have seen, you hit people with medicine balls. You kind of take the medicine ball, and you're like [grunts in rhythm] as you do your sit-ups and your crunches. Or they put a glove on
and they'll punch you. Oftentimes, too, you'll
stand with your hands behind your back, and
then they'll just kick. I'll give it 4. It's important to stretch, yes, it's important to
develop lung capacity, it's important to have a strong core, but the way they're going about it is totally not anything
that I've seen done ever.
His teep is beautiful. The teep is a foot jab. You can see it starts from his back leg, comes up his body, and goes, pat, right out through the lead leg. That would be the position you'd be in in a Muay Thai fight. But, yeah, a teep is
good if somebody keeps coming in on you and
you want to get space. A high kick to the head looks cool, and if you have a nice head
kick, it's a great knockout. But for me, I prefer to kick to the body. With the head kick, if you
hit with the top of your foot to somebody's skull, yes, it hurts them, but, yes, it hurts you too.
And I'm not trying to be
limping around, you know, with a messed-up foot for
a month after that fight. For Muay Thai, I've
never seen that stance. Because he was really,
really low to the ground. It's never that low. I guess that's Boran. And so they do more of that,
and I'm just more straight up. The logic in Muay Thai
of standing taller is as you're getting kicked and as you want access to your kicks, the lower you are, the
longer it's going to take to get your leg up there. But if you're already standing taller, you can just rotate your
body, and it's there. If you can catch their chin,
yes, it's a short night. I've had a lot of knee surgeries. Probably not in the cards
for me, unfortunately. But what I find is awesome about knees is when you're lighting somebody
up with knees to the body, it actually takes the fight out of them, kind of tenderizes the meat. And his form is perfect in his knees. By rotating the femur in, then
your lower half of your leg and your foot goes kind of outward.
Then you point your toes, and it creates a much more lancing effect. And you can also get more
range on your knee too, which keeps you further away from danger as you're implementing damage. So, those punches were terrible,
but it's a stunt scene. I did one stunt scene, and I was like, "Oh, this is not even real at all." For a film, you'd want
to take it out and around so you can really see it and sell it. But when you're actually fighting, you want to just keep
it tight to your body. Don't want to lift your elbow. Just want to rotate, just disguise it. Because the more you have a tell, the more your opponent sees it and they can prepare for that. That is accurate, the knee shield, keeping somebody off you.
That is definitely a
legitimate thing to get space. I firmly believe he can jump up there and put both his knees like that. But, yeah, that's not
happening in a fight. That's too much of a gamble. I mean, you're spending
a lot of time in air. You could stay on the ground
and just drive forward and slam an elbow into their face. And they bow. Yeah, that's accurate too. Always bow to an opponent,
whether you win or you lose. I have to rate it high,
because it's Tony Jaa. So I have to say 9 out of 10. You mean you're going to
fight me using Muay Thai? Not only am I going to use it, I'm going to rearrange your face with it! A Mongkhon is something that you wear.
Your teacher gives it to you. You do not fight with it on.
It's for spiritual reasons, and then you can't go
under the ropes wearing it. It's disrespectful. You've
got to go over the ropes. And when you fight, you take it off. That's it! The invincible tiger knee blow that made him famous! I've never in my life
come across a tiger knee. It's a knee, buddy. It's just a plain old knee. It is absolutely effective to
knee somebody in the stomach. It is absolutely effective to add momentum with a flying knee. And it's not as risky, because your feet are
still underneath you. It's just forward momentum. I can see Muay Thai has
many levels to be mastered. Hiyah! The first person, who looked
like they did more damage, got whooped by the second person, who looked like they did less. And then he talks about, like, there's different levels
to Muay Thai to master. I don't know what he's talking about. It is not, you know, "Kill Bill," when they did that secret
punch to the heart, it's a boom, boom, boom,
boom, and punches him, and then, you know, kills Bill.
No, there's nothing like that in Muay Thai that I am aware of after 23 years. I'll give him a 2 because of the Mongkhon. No, actually I have to take that away, because he's fighting with it on. So 0 out of 10. Yes, foot stomp. Heck yeah,
definitely do those knees. The kick, not as much. I don't know why you would be kicking in that really small space. There's a lot better things you could use. I would do punches, elbows, and knees, because those are the
more close-range weapons. And then the push kick would be good too, because they're in front of you. You wouldn't really do
round kicks and high kicks, because you have to go out and around. Like, yeah, no, you want
it to just go this way. He actually blocked a kick
with his hand, forearm.
Don't do that at home, folks. Hand or forearm against shin, like, look at this, who wins? You can get your arm broken,
get your hand broken. Well, I like that he keeps
trying to cover and block. That would be definitely
what you want to do. I mean, the hands are kind
of all over the place. Yeah, you don't wanna be … that's not good. If somebody's striking at you, you just need your hands up. I would give it a 6,
because it's basically if you have a hallway in your house and you're going to
have a full-blown fight. So, what they're doing is
they're doing the Wai Khru, or Ram Muay, and they
have the Mongkhons on, and it's a spiritual dance.
They're definitely doing that correctly. But, so, it's hard to say. Every school has a different dance specific to their school. This clinch part is correct. This is the grappling
portion of a Muay Thai fight. So, you seek to control
position with your hands and your arms and your head. He has him like this.
He's controlling the arm. The other arm's over here,
and his hand is over here on the side of that guy's neck. You find control by either
bringing them closer to you and deliver strikes at the same time, or by creating space and making a frame. With experienced pros, they're
not going to do all this. It's going to be more controlled.
Uh-uh. You don't do that. You're going to eat a
nice hard piece of bone, and it's not going to feel good. He was standing in front of a Thai fighter in a Thai fight with their hands up. And he was in front of the Thai fighter punching with his hands down. You would never do that.
That's elbow range. You would need to have your hands up. Oh, and then he swept
him. That was correct. There's a bunch of different
ways you can sweep them. So he grabbed the leg, lifted
the leg, and turned him. You can also sweep your opponent by either body locking and
getting an angle and dumping, or as they knee, you sweep their leg. You can take them back over your thigh if you get an angle on them. I give it 8 out of 10.
That was pretty good.
[Miriam laughs] Yeah, this is totally not realistic. I'm just here for that outfit. The performer is doing elbows, and they're elbowing like this. The thing with elbows is
if you're in elbow range and you're elbowing, they have elbows too. So you never want to throw an elbow with the other hand down, because that's, you would be cut open. That kick was really silly. He's just spinning around
lifting the leg up. But it's like, even with a
punch, it's not just about this. Kicking is not just lifting the leg. It starts at your foot
connection to the ground and the rotation of your foot. And it's like, your foot, your ankle, your knee, then your hip. And then the last bit is this. And so the same thing
with a Muay Thai kick. If you want to kick with the right side, it starts with the left
side of your body, actually.
You want to rotate the
opposite side of your body to sling the kick, and
then the leg comes after. I know that it's stunts and
you have to kind of cheat it, but you still can make
it so it looks right instead of kind of flailing. 2 out of 10. That was, like, all completely off. My favorite of the clips viewed today was "Raya and the Last Dragon." Their body mechanics made a lot of sense. The fight scene made sense. That was cool that it was two women, too.
You know, that was really neat. Thanks for watching. If
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