Hi, my name is Al

Martial Arts Rant - Kickboxing Styles

Okay, the proverbial first stop on my train of thought is kickboxing. I only know of a few types, but there is most likely a hell of a lot of them. I will briefly talk about:

• Kickboxing
• Muay Thai
• Bando(leithwe)

I have trained briefly in generic kickboxing, but have made about a years worth of impact on the bags of Kevin Junior’s Bando classes. Kickboxing is a stand up martial art, the only real moves that aren’t strikes are the clinch and ‘dumping’. Like most stand up arts, when someone goes down, they have to get up for the fight to continue.

Kickboxing is a generic term, there is no ‘real’ martial art called kickboxing, it is just a term to group together a lot of arts that use legs as well as feet. There is also a legal loophole where if you name your school/dojo “Such and such Kickboxing”, you do not need much of an accreditation in a particular style. I am not sure it still stands, but it was an interesting flaw in the system. Kickboxing uses hands, feet, elbows and knees and kickboxing professionals show amazing conditioning and stamina when fighting.

The clinch refers to when 2 kickboxers lock each other up. In some fights, this can be broken up straight away, in others, the boxers can grapple for a dominant position to kick, punch or knee their opponent. This can be unbelievably draining as knees are usually aimed at the kidneys, thighs and ribs. These are designed to wear down the opponent and lock them into a position when they can’t make use of long strikes that need room to gather momentum. However, not all blows are aimed at the body, if the boxer has a dominant position they will often drag their opponents head lower, and deliver a crushing knee to the face. Depending on the agreed rules, this may or may not be legal.

Muay Thai(mway tie) is the Thai style of ‘kickboxing’. Thai boxers are often trained from the age of 6 and will stop competing around 30-35. They are trained to use knees and lightning fast kicks to dismantle other boxers legs and sap their stamina. This isn’t to say that Thai Boxers don’t have knockout power, but their offense is usually based on a relentless attack that wont lose momentum till the fight is over. Traditional Thai boxing used rope bindings instead of gloves, and trainers would set themselves apart from other schools by the method that their hands were bound. In some fights where there was bad blood between trainers the boxers would bind glass, gravel or heavily knot the ropes to inflict as much damage as possible in the fight. Muay Thai is famous for its vicious knees and punishing kicks.

Bando(Burmese Kickboxing) is the hand to hand style of Myannmar. Muay Thai and Bando are both very similar in the strikes, rules and methods, but where Muay Thai focuses on legs and knees, Bando uses elbows and ‘dumping’. The Muay Thai clinch is a brutal move where an inexperienced fighter can get destroyed quickly, but is not seen often in Bando. This is because Bando fighters can use their head as a close quarter weapon. Using the side of their head, a Bando practitioner would aim for eyebrows, cheeks, or even a nose to break a clinch, and with devastating results. If the impact from the headbutt is not enough to ward off the attacker, it is often enough to give the Bando fighter room for a throw, which is just picking up their opponent and dumping them back on the ground. Fights can end quickly depending on the angle that the person is dumped, or it pushes all the air from the opponent as they absorb the impact. Bando fights are also fought using wrapped hands, the bandages(patti) are still used in fighting and have only been replaced with gloves in international fighting.

I do really enjoy the sheer brutality and conditioning of Bando, and it is always right up there when I try to decide what to do. The only disadvantages is the toll that the conditioning takes on your body.