Mastering Muay Thai Kick-Boxing review

Mastering Muay Thai Kickboxing is a great book and resource for beginning and intermediate practitioners. It progresses in a highly structured way and covers each part of the Muay Thai arsenal in high detail with colour photographs and line drawings to explain concepts and correct movement.

It starts out by explaining in great detail what a proper stance should look like, the proper way to move within that stance, upper body strikes including all the punches and the many Muay Thai elbow attacks, and lower body attacks including the famous muay thai round kick, cut kick, a lesser known angle kick, the push kick (teep) and also the long knee.

Next the book covers all the methods of defending against upper body strikes. Parrying, catching, slipping a punch, bob and weave, jamming a knee against the opponent and the shoulder jam and much more are covered here. Lower body strikes are then covered, again in the same detail and variety. What’s cool is the book has a table that lists out clearly the defences you can use for a particular kind of attack. It’s a useful resource to look up if you keep encountering the same problem in sparring.

What’s surprising is the book’s rather in-depth coverage of the Muay Thai clinch. Most books don’t go into much detail on this subject but this book covers attacks, throws and defences in the clinch in good detail. It then proceeds to discuss the proper equipment needed for training, and a chapter each describing proper use and holding of the focus mitts and thai pads.

The last two chapters are a great resource for all levels of practitioners as it covers endurance drills and combination drills. I found the combination drills especially helpful as it instructs the padholders as well as the trainees, so the trainee gets to practice his attacks, defences and counters at the same time.

I’ve been doing Muay Thai for a couple of years and I still picked up many useful tips from the book. I noticed some slight technical variations on hand placement for some techniques that differ from the way I do them, but these exist because different camps teach different techniques slightly differently. All in all, this should be a great resource for beginning and intermediate Muay Thai practitioners and should keep them busy for a long time.
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