#32 Arjan Prahmod and Golden Age Nongkipahuyut Gym (26 min)

This is a special session in that Arjan Pramod is a level of legend that is slowly vanishing. It’s not the usual Muay Library session, the techniques are secondarily taught, the runtime is shorter, but this is a glimpse into what is fading in Thailand. His gym in Nongki Buriram produced the second most champions in all of Thailand (the first being Arajan Yodthong at his camp in Pattaya, Sityodthong), including the famed brothers Nampol and Namkabuan. Arjan is a legendary trainer, a maker of legends himself, and now that his gym is mostly school kids on a daily basis, he has segued into being a teacher to teachers at the organization which seeks to preserve Muay Thai heritage and legacy. 

A large part of what the Muay Thai Library intends to do is capture men exactly like this. There aren’t many of them, but there are enough that the endeavor is vast and the opportunity to meet with and document their legacy is urgent. I loved walking through the Hall of Fame at the Nongkipahuyut gym with Arjan and just watching him look at everything. You could feel him remembering as he thumbed the pages of the scrapbooks. He’s seen those photos in frames a million times and he still studies them with interest as he gazes at them now. When I asked him who his favorite fighter is now (off camera), he gave a little knowing smile and answered Namkabuan, who is in this Library. To many of the legends of the Golden Age, there are no more great fighters. They are all gone. No more yodmuay. There are good fighters, but none that hold a candle to the greats of the Golden Age. And it’s men like Arjan Pramod who nurtured and shaped those greats. For those interest in that celebrated time you can see Namkabuan - his prized student - the Nongkipahuyut gym, and Arjan Prahmod at their peak in the documentary "Born To Fight"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qseDPOyslNg 

When I finally got into the ring to learn some techniques from Arjan, everything was ring-ready - it’s not an archaic study of “forms” that you might find in strictly traditional Martial Arts, or even in Boran teaching - but the movement harkened back to a line of Muay Thai techniques that you don’t really see in the ring much anymore.

What you see in this video, in the brief training session, is also a brilliant example of classic gym hierarchy. There are babies peppered around the ropes of the ring, giggling every time one of the older boys is dropped to the ground from a knee-catch demonstration. Then there’s the older boy, who is still only maybe 14, who is dutiful and quiet as he offers himself as the test dummy. The man who is giving the instructions is a kru - likely a prolific ex-fighter himself, probably a stadium champion, but I never got his name and failed to ask for his story while I was there, but clearly he teaches these techniques under the care of Arjan’s legacy. And then there’s Arjan, who overlooks the training. There are times when the kru has finished showing me a technique and we both wait for Arjan to give directions to the next piece of instruction, deferring from the top down. This session was shot a while ago, more than a year, and I held onto it for all this time because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to present it. I wanted it to be appreciated, and not just lost in the stream. I was terribly shy in the ring, not yet as practiced in making Muay Thai Library films, and we could only get a small segment of training. But all of it is precious. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

What to look out for:  

1. Underhook knee catch to trip: a few different techniques, Arjan shows how you hook under the knee (around the back of the knee) as you catch a knee strike, lift and walk toward your opponent to tip them over. I reckon the reason you go under and not around the top is because you don’t want to open your arms and break your frame, so you kind of scoop under the strike. I’ve been instructed against this (never by a Thai though) as the underhook is dangerous by leaving you open to an elbow strike, but this is how Arjan teaches it and you’ll just have to make the call for yourself. But it’s important to note that the arm hooks under either from the inside of the leg or the outside of the leg, depending on where you’re standing in relation to your opponent’s stance. Watch the kru step both inside and then outside the kid’s frame to demonstrate this.
2. Block to grab: Kru blocks my cross from the inside with his front arm, then grabs the side of my neck across his own body with the back arm in order to turn and land a knee. It’s important to reach across your own body to the neck with that back arm, as that’s what creates the complete defense for yourself. You can also pull your opponent’s head into your knee, which is great. But the long guard allows you to block from the inside of the strike (your opponent’s hook or cross) and then easily reach from inside your opponent’s guard with that other arm.
3. Slight lean back to kick: this is basically a slip of the cross by stepping with your back foot (back) and leaning away ever so slightly to avoid the punch, then throwing a kick to the body underneath your opponent’s outstretched arm. Slight dodge, kick. But he uses his shoulder to protect himself as he throws the kick, same as Kru Daeng taught me in our session on Dracula Guard from Southpaw.
4. Block kick to back elbow: the spinning back elbow off of an opponent’s kick is one I’ve seen from Golden Age legends a few times. What I like about Arjan Pramod’s in particular is that he uses this kind of Old School stop of the kick - rather than necessarily catching it - and then throws the elbow. You can scoop the kick just fine and then roll into the elbow, but Kru shows how to use your forearms to slam the kick back down - almost like holding pads - and then rolling into the elbow. I don’t recommend you use your forearms for blocking in a general sense, but when you’ve got forearms like top fighters have shins (of steel), this is perfectly painful for your opponent. (Incidentally, one of my favorite parts of showing this technique is how Arjan walks away and off camera after demonstrating the technique. Mic drop.)
5. Caught kick to chest push: this is how Namkabuan plowed his opponents across the ring like a madman. Catch the kick, open palm on the chest and go like hell. You can’t take more than 2 steps anymore, so Arjan shows how to just shove your opponent onto their ass without taking any steps at all. Got around that rule just fine.
6. Body Throw: one of Namkabuan’s nicknames was the “body throw expert.” This move requires a lot of just doing it to work out the feel and mechanics through testing. But the points to look at are how Kru doesn’t move his feet, he just gets up on his toes and “horse stances” with bent knees, then the torque of his shoulders twists the opponent’s body and their legs get tripped over his legs as they go.
7. Upward elbows: basically, you catch forearms if you try to do fan sok, horizontal elbows So use those to open your opponent’s guard for other strikes, or just skip them and come straight through the guard with these stabby, upward elbows. I like how Kru does one, then steps and does a second one higher and deeper on top of it to guarantee at least one slice.
8. Sweeping knees in clinch: when your opponent is throwing long straight knees in the clinch, you can sweep their knee with your own knee as they’re coming in, then use your upper body to help turn them down. This is a good solution to the “don’t grap the knee in case of elbows” issue from the first technique.

Arjan Prahmod's Manual 

Arjan has produced a curriculum of what may be called Traditional Muay Thai. I'm not entirely sure how and where it has been taught, and he did mention that the gym receives groups that train and study. The gym does not seem to be an active, fighter's gym at least anywhere like it once was. In any case, while what we did in this session was improvised interaction he references this curriculum in the film and gave me a small pamphlet that contains a kind of table of contents of what is covered. These are meant to be all the variations of the basic strikes of Muay Thai, plus old school tricks. I've photographed the more substantive pages here, just in case it interests you. I could perhaps revisit the gym and maybe detail the 15 trick moves for archiving reasons. That would be wonderful to do.