Karuhat Sor. Supawan - Serpentine Knees & Flow (62 min)

This session reveals the work I had been doing with Karuhat in my Karuhat Intensive series, over 30 hours of commentary video, On Demand. You get to see what all that instruction on weight transfer and continuity is leading toward. You can download or rent those videos individually, or subscribe and watch them all.  

This is a re-edit of the original video posted which had some mis-synced commentary. All fixed now!

This session with Karuhat is incredibly special to me, for a number of reasons. What makes it special to anyone watching is that I’m grasping Karuhat’s movements and “reading” more than I ever had before. I worked with him for a month straight in what we call the “Karuhat Intensive,” which is available On Demand. You can pay-per-view, download or subscribe to be able to watch the entire 30+ hours with him. If you watch just a session here or there, you’ll see him breaking down pieces of his style – elements like how to catch someone who is angling away from you, how to fake the timing of a strike rather than which strike you’re actually throwing. You can get a lot out of any one session. But if you watch the whole thing, you see this incredible thing that Karuhat has been doing with me over the past year, but in a natural progression because it’s every day for a month. He’s teaching me how to read. He’s teaching pronunciation, articulation, vocabulary and nuance to diction – all that. But he’s also teaching how to express yourself, how to listen to someone before answering to create a progressive and yet natural conversation. He’s teaching fluency.This session is not a culmination in the sense of an end or a finish, but this session is a benchmark progression from all that work in all those sessions. You can watch me struggle through “see Dick run,” type reading exercises and then here I’m reading, adding personal comments and interpretations. It’s beautiful because Karuhat actually suffers his own techniques as I understand them better, execute them more fluidly. And his response is to giggle any time he’s surprised or overwhelmed… my response is to cackle.We met at the gym where Karuhat has been teaching for the past couple months, in Bangkok. We were driving home from Chiang Mai, where I’d just had a wonderful performance in a very challenging fight for me. I’d done well in that fight in part because I’d followed Karuhat’s advice that I need to spar with people who aren’t bigger than me, which has been my norm for many years and has made me very tough, but unable to experiment. Karuhat uses the “sand box” approach when teaching me, basically using his body as the pads and guiding me toward being able to see openings, track the open side, fake, understand space, etc. But I could only really do this with him. So simply getting more playtime with this new sparring endeavor made a huge difference in what I was able to do in that fight, and then the confidence and progression from that as this session with Karuhat right here. It’s what he’s been teaching me, but after I’ve gone and read a few books, held a bunch of conversations and had an argument or two. He even starts out making some corrections to something he saw me doing in my fight, which was faking my way into a clinch grab instead of using the exact same fake to land a couple shots and then grab. He’s working me through the movements and distances – that’s fine, but this is better.Looking at how Karuhat trains me, not just the things he’s teaching, is a brilliant thing to itself. He guides more often than he shows and he very rarely praises or criticizes. He just turns up the intensity or dials it down a notch to let me practice something. If I were a trainer, I’d want to be just like him as a teacher. Watching his sessions gives you tons of technique and strategy, but it also gives you a perfect picture for how to carve a student, rather than making a stamp.Some things to look out for:

1. When the opponent is on the rope, they’re pretty limited to defense. I was faking a knee and switching my stance in my fight to land a left (lead) hook or grab with my left hand for the clinch. Karuhat had taught me the fake-knee-to-grab many months back, but here he creates a variation on the theme and still switches stance as he comes off of the fake knee, but then just throws a nice solid cross, followed by a kick or whatever else. Then grab.
2. He starts out reiterating his long knees. He’s not a high-repetition knee fighter, so he uses a deep lean and sends the hip forward via a lancing standing leg. Like a fencer. But the angle of the knee itself is important. Mine come too high for his liking, which shorten them, but if you keep the angle of the knee low and bring your heel up to your butt, you actually end up bending toward center the longer the knee travels. It ends up kind of like a heat seeking missile, following your target if they angle off to the side.
3. If you then land off of that knee with your foot toward the opposite foot of your opponent, you can angle back with the opposite knee. It’s like you’re walking and the knees are swinging side to side like a machete, clearing bush in front of you. I think Dieselnoi would approve of this, as he used a similar side-to-side, scissoring of his knees to catch Samart, who was dodging and angling off.
4. The “serpentine knee.” Goddamn… I love this knee. Chamuakpet teaches me something similar in our session, where he’s Southpaw and the opponent has the same side block up. So you’re front leg to front leg, both blocking. He just scoops his leg to the inside in a little swivel and teeps to the center. Karuhat does this with a knee. It’s incredible. People try to block clinch knees with their own knees at higher levels of skill and it can be very effective. But just doing this little serpentine move allows you to stab right into the middle. It’s exactly like the little circular move of two swords for a center strike in fencing. But with your knee, at both very close range and standing a jab’s length away. I’ve used this a ton in my clinching since this session and my partners have yet to figure it out.
5. Wack-a-Mole knee and elbow. Yodkhunpon has a version of this, which is front-side elbow and back-side knee. Karuhat just keeps everything on one side, which he has emphasized to me for a number of strikes. It’s like how people throw a hook to the body and then the same side hook to the head, because people don’t double-block. Yodkhunpon’s version is nailing someone in the gut to get them to pop their head up, then elbowing their face to get them to duck down and you go after the belly again. Karuhat has me start from a very close clinch position, do a little skip-back to land an open-side knee to the middle and then use the same side, as it’s still the open side, to go up top. You can kind of push and pull at the same time. It’s horribly hard to get away from and very easy to keep doing.
6. “Dtoh.” During our Intensive Series, Karuhat worked with me a lot on this continuity, continuation, flow… it’s called “dtoh,” in Thai and it just means to continue. So, the opposite of a set combination. I struggled with it a lot and it’s still kind of like trying to find the beat in complicated music, but in this session I came much closer to it and held it for longer than ever before. Previously, Karuhat had shown me examples of what movements lead to other movements and had let me just try to keep moving; in this session, because I have the feeling for it and it’s coming more naturally, he just makes small corrections to the pace. The pace is what dictates the distance and vice versa. So, he just kind of guides me toward a slightly slower – or just not rushed – pace and it flows. Watch him guide the tempo, just ever so gently, and how much it allows the movements to be distinct and fluent.

If you'd like to train with Karuhat, or follow along with him, we've created a Facebook Page for him:  

Karuhat Sor. Supawan - ยอดเซียน 

I translate communications and help arrange sessions for him, through that page.   

You can read Kevin's post on Sylvie Study related to some of the themes in this post: 

How to Stand: Listening to the Music and Not the Words 

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#16 Thailand Pinsinchai - Attacking Shell (62 min) watch it here 

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TIP BOX: if you are inspired by what you see and want to show added appreciation you can send gratuity directly to Karuhat. Every time I send these extra donations and thank yous the Krus are really touched. Just message $5 or more via PayPal to the address sylvie@8limbs.us, please in the "add a note" section specify "for Karuhat". I will transfer the funds.

KRU FUND: additionally, 5% of all Patreon pledges go into my Kru Fund, and is directed back to the Krus and ex-fighters who have helped make this documentary Library possible: http://8limbs.us/muay-thai-thailand/starting-the-kru-fund