Muay Boran, the ancient martial art of the Siamese warriors, is back!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) November 23, 2009 --

Muay Boran was virtually unknown outside Thailand until a few years ago. It differentiates itself from muay thai in terms of fighting styles and techniques used. The most evident difference is that practitioners don't use boxing gloves, but, like in the old times, fight with hemp strings wrapped around their forearms. Thais sometimes refers to it as muay kat chuak or "bound-fist boxing". Muay boran (literally "ancient boxe") is the closest to battlefield combat, emphasizing powerful combinations of elbows and knees to break the opponents' bones as quickly as possible. Such techniques slowly vanished when muay thai become regulated and turned into a sport, together with the old masters who still remembered them.
Ironically, it was saved by the Western devotees of martial arts. As the interest for muay thai had been growing enormously in the past twenty years, ancestral styles of Asian boxing have been sought and investigated as well. The quest for "secret" centuries-old techniques brought muay boran back from oblivion and a few schools, gravitating around the charisma of some revered old masters, resumed teaching some of the old style boxing, with various degrees of credibility.

It was with the Thai movie "Ong Bak" that this ancient form of combat got a great boost, in Thailand and abroad, too. The amazing techniques used by former stuntman Panom (a.k.a as Tony Jaa) to knock down scores of villains were rarey seen before and didn't resemble much of modern thai boxing. Anybody already in love with muay thai was soon hooked to its ancient version and demand for teachers soured. This prompted existing boxing camps to upgrade their trainings and add some old tricks to meet the need for ancient boxing.

As many techniques are too violent to be allowed in any official contest, this ancient boxe doesn't have its own official tournaments yet, even though things may change quickly. At the moment, a beautiful opportunity to see something similar, at least in terms of atmosphere, falls every year in April, during the Songkran festivities (13-16/4). In the town of Mae Sot, in a ring near the border, Burmese fighters meet their Thai counterparts, fighting with hemp strings wrapped around their forearms. The atmosphere is steamy hot and filled with national pride (Myanmar and Siam are ancestral foes), heavy betting and other illegal cross-borders activities. Fights are to the end, but with time limit. If both contenders still stand at the end, the fight is considered a draw. Everything goes, including headbutts and attacking an opponent when already down, so you won't see any great technique implemented there (apart from some sok klap) but plenty of violent action.
source: www.best-muaythai-equipment.com

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