Arjarn Nick Hewitson is from the Petchyindee Muay Thai Boxing Camp International

There is a famous saying by the philosopher Nietzsche, "that which does not kill us makes us stronger." These are very fine words and though simple give us a very clear message with regard to how to prepare one's body for combat or more specifically Muay Thai. Okay, before I go into my usual informative banter there is a key piece of information that I cannot stress enough; It is only possible to condition your body from the neck down. "That's rubbish" I hear people say, but they are wrong. Yes, I understand that you can chew large blobs of chewing gum to build up your jaw muscles as Jack Dempsey did. You can do push ups on your chin to develop strong neck muscles to limit the recoil of the head following a blow. You could even possibly have been fortunate enough to have been blessed with a jaw chiseled out of granite rather than one made of glass, but believe me when I say these won't help or in anyway stop the potentially lethal blow that I would inflict on your head if I got the chance. For your head in simple terms is little more than a strong box full of jelly. The reason I want you to think of it in those terms is so that you can picture in your mind this image. Okay now think of someone punching, kicking, or striking it. The outside of the box shows maybe no signs of damage, however open the box and your lump of jelly is now spread all up one side, and half way up the opposite side, just as the contents of your brain would be following a powerful or direct blow. Okay now that we all know this we will move on.

The guard is one of the methods we use to protect the head. The guard basically involves using your arms as a method to either deflect or absorb the force of the blow being delivered against our head. The guard in Thai boxing falls basically into two types. The conventional boxers guard (or western boxing guard) tends to have the lead hand forward with the rear hand back knuckles facing outwards covering the temple (imagine holding a telephone receiver in your hand), the rear arm has the elbow pointing downwards with the muscle of the forearm tight up against the body. This is to both cushion the head and body from impact while at the same time spreading the applied force over the body rather than allowing it to be concentrated around the head. The lead hand is forward of head and body by about 12 inches. This is used to act as an obstruction to incoming blows, so by interfering with incoming blows or by changing or obscuring the view of the target so making an indirect assault. This obstruction will also slow down the oncoming blow so reducing its final impact as well as giving greater reaction time to the person blocking so allowing them to move their head to a safer distance or location.

The second type of guard used in Thai boxing is the more traditional type Thai guard. This is where both arms are pushed out in front of the body at shoulder or head height. The palms of the hands are facing down towards the ground. This is used in a number of ways as protection. Firstly it gives you a visual method of assessing risk, meaning that unlike in the conventional guard position to accurately check whether you are in striking range of your opponent is to throw your jab. Depending on whether you touch your opponent, fall short of your opponent or touch your opponent without fully extending your arm tells you whether you are too far away, too close or at the ideal distance. However just as this will tell you it will also tell your opponent if they are paying attention. However with the Thai guard your lead arm is fully extended and therefore gives you that information in real time. The guard is also useful as in Thai boxing clinch work is a critical weapon in the Thai arsenal and therefore should your opponent commit themselves to striking your outstretched arms as well as deflection the strikes will also allow you to move closer to your opponent's body, therefore allowing you to move into clinch range, therefore tying your opponent up in the clinch so further deflecting the efficiency of their strike.

As mentioned earlier I stressed that the head cannot be conditioned to take impact, which is why I have explained about the types of guard available to you to use. One other point should be stressed, your arms (the main method of your head's protection can be conditioned) and should be thought of as expendable in that it doesn't matter if your arms get broken while protecting your head from damage (from a powerful kick or baseball bat strike) as they can be repaired. However great the level of discomfort or pain feels you must protect your head, even if you find yourself on the ground with someone trying to stamp the doctor martins logo into your head keep your arms up and your head protected as it only takes one clean strike to make someone a vegetable. Bruises and broken bones are nothing in comparison.

The torso or trunk of the body, makes up about 50% of your overall size and therefore is a very large target and as such is likely to be the focus of a great deal of your opponents physical aggression, although this is usually a secondary target as fighters are predominantly headhunters in that most of their focused attention is targeted towards the head. That being said the body comes in for a great deal of abuse over the course of a fight. However the torso can be very well conditioned to withstand a huge amount of physical damage and abuse. The main methods of protecting the torso are to increase the thickness and density of the muscles in the areas where it needs it. From months of prolonged punching with light weights your pectoral muscles will flatten and define, these muscles basically give a muscular cover to your breast bone beneath. The muscle acts as little more than a means of dissipating the impact of the blow, usually a punch. Below this sits your rib cage. This bony structure is to protect your vital organs from the kind of damage we are trying to inflict on them, and the ribs like any other bone can be developed or thickened in a number of ways:

(1) through breakage, both painful and potentially harmful (not advised), though due to the number of broken ribs I endured over my fighting career my rib cage is now almost a solid shield of thick bone;
(2) through impact training.

In Muay Thai as mentioned previously clinch work is very common, and one part of that is the use of knee strikes during the clinch. Therefore while training and delivering these strikes to your training partners torso a number of things happen. The muscle between and around the ribs start to thicken, from the eventual and repeated bruising that occurs from the strikes, the blood starts to calcify on the ribs just as happens with a broken bone and this increases the thickness, strength and density of the ribs. To the back of the ribs just under the arms are the Latissimus dorsi muscles. These can be developed by lifting weights or even better by lifting your own body weight (chin ups or dips both help develop these muscles). The more developed these muscles become the better as they too are used as cushion against impact, though these muscles will not by themselves protect you from the impact of a strike. Used in conjunction again with the forearms will help to reduce the devastating effects of the technique.

The midsection mainly consists of your various abdominal muscles which are made up of several groups of muscles. This area is very prone to strikes from front kicks, body punches and knee strikes. In order to condition this area in order to withstand impact I would suggest lots and lots of abdominal conditioning. This includes crunches of various types to work and develop all of the various muscle groups, leg raises, sit ups and also impact training itself, using a medicine ball and / or boxing or bag gloves. It should be mentioned that the larger the surface area of the conditioning aid the lower the actual applied force , therefore in the early stages of conditioning use perhaps a kicking pad, then a focus mitt, then sparring gloves and then after many months of conditioning, bag gloves. You should also during this type of training have a means of the person being conditioned to stop the abuse quickly if needed. We use dropping the hands from above the head as a signal, as while you are trying to maintain keeping your abdominal muscles tight it is sometimes difficult to talk particularly if the blow has knocked the wind out of you. Another method of protection of this area is once again distance, by being able to manipulate your body as the strike approaches to move backwards or to the side to cause the strike to be indirect or incomplete will once again reduce the impact and therefore the force of the strike.

Muay Thai is also well known for its leg kicks and therefore being a primary target, these limbs need to be conditioned in order to be able to withstand both leg kicks and knee strikes. In order to do this it is required to subject these limbs to some level of discomfort. As a simple rule of thumb, in Muay Thai any strike below the waist is blocked with the shin and anything above the waist by the hands, therefore in order to block with the shin, it first needs to be conditioned. Now over the years I have heard of and been subjected to all kinds of methods to do this. Some appear to have developed through a mix of folk law, some through commonsense and others by trial and error. Okay dealing with folklore first. Yes, Thai boxers conditioned their shins by kicking trees. To be more exact as children they would kick banana trees, as the bark of the tree was very fibrous and relatively soft like balsa wood. As they continued to kick the tree with time the trunk would become compacted to the point that it became very hard like teak. This occurred over a period of months if not years, therefore the gradual hardening of the tree trunk was not noticeable as the shins with which they were kicking were likewise becoming both harder and also used to the impact related nerve stimulus (pain). As I mentioned previously this was done with banana trees, and when last I looked there aren't many of those about in Birmingham, Manchester or London outside of the botanical gardens, so for most people that would be a non-starter, and it doesn't work on oak trees so don't do it. Also under the folklore heading is hitting your shins with a stick to toughen them up. This technique will help your shins to thicken up, however it's really dumb. Your shins will thicken as hitting your shin bone will cause it to bruise and as such the blood will start to calcify so making that particular part thicker and therefore denser, however because of the lump you now have on your shin, your shin bone now has a raised area and therefore as an effect you have a stress concentration at the point where the lump joins your shin. As such when you block with your shin rather than one shin bone sliding over the other, it will come to a stop at the lump therefore focusing the energy of that kick through your shin bone which can be enough to fracture the shin bone. Therefore bashing lumps out of each other's shins is not advised, for the same reason care should be taken when rolling the shin bones. This I've seen done in Thailand where coke bottles are used to roll up and down the shin bone, however as the coke bottle has raised flutes on the outside of the bottle the same stress points can be produced. During my own training I had for a period of several years a scaffold pole rolled over my shins by my training partners, with their weight bearing down on it. Although somewhat painful, this compacts the surface of the shin and causes even bruising, which ultimately leads to uniform thickness of the shin bone and therefore no stress points. However once you start sparring, even with shin pads you will eventually clash shins, which results in lumps. However this method does make your shins thicker and gets the nerves used to the pain associated with the impact of a strike. Okay the easy way. If you simply kick a heavy bag (ideally one filled with sand or very dense material) your shin will become compacted and therefore more able to deal with impact stresses. The same thing happens kicking Thai pads, which it why it's the most used method throughout Thai training though not nearly as glamorous. The other methods are simply used as a shortcut.

Leading on from the shins are the thighs, these are a significant target and when hit hard can significantly effect the outcome of a fight, however in most cases this is a psychological rather than physical issue, as a strike to the thigh triggers the bodies physical damage response, which is the bodies way of stopping you getting more injured, and as such makes your leg give way, just as with a dead leg, the level of impact or bruising caused by the strike is not enough to physically impact the leg, it is simply your damage response, therefore if you are able to learn how to switch this response off your legs are able to withstand a tremendous battery of kicks without even flinching. I could at this point tell you how to do that but Im not giving away all my secrets just yet so you'll just have to keep reading future articles to find out how.