Kongtoranee Payakaroon - Power in the Hands (89 min)

You can listen to a podcast version of this session here. iTunes.

Kongtoranee is the older brother to Samart Payakaroon. You may even say that he is more accomplished in straight-forward Muay Thai achievements than Samart, but as sacrilegious as it sounds I’d never really had heard of him - there are holes in all our knowledge, sometimes big ones, especially from the early Golden Age. After our session with Samart, while talking about the gym and the new renovations he pointed to a room in the back and said his brother was sleeping there, my husband and I lightly asked if he was a nakmuay as well. Samart just stared at us smiling, “he has 5 Lumpinee belts!” he exclaimed. Our jaws dropped accordingly. He also one Fighter of the Year in Thailand two times. He's known in some non-Thai circles for his years teaching at Evolve in Singapore, but an interesting biographical fact is that before becoming a kru at Evolve he spent many years in Pattaya as ref at a tiny bar just outside of Walking Street, where a lot of local kids cut their teeth fighting in front of tourists. I wrote about this bar here: Fighting At the Bar in Pattaya - It's Not What You Think. Here is this 5 time Lumpinee Champion reffing kids and show fights for local tourists in an undersized ring, for years, and none of the bar customers would even have a clue of who he is. And you know who is doing the same low-profile ref work at this very same bar now? Mild-mannered Yodkhunpon "The Elbow Hunter of 100 Stitches", one of the most feared elbow fighters in Thai history. You can also find Yodkhupon's sessions in the Muay Thai Library. This is the thing about the Library project. Truly great fighters in Thailand pass into and out of obscurity as time goes by, and the hope is to capture some of the core of this fighting style and personality in an archive. I'm happy to have this addition to the Library.

Upon meeting Kongtoranee, I was delighted to find all the ways in which he’s not like Samart. That’s one of the cool things about Muay Thai, is that you can’t just stamp out fighters from a mold, so even if you train side-by-side at the same gym for decades, your Muay expresses you and no two fighters are quite the same. Kongtoranee isn’t long and lanky the way Samart is, so his style is not so much evasive as it is grounded, super economical and powerful. But you’ll see similarities, too. Both brothers stand in their fighting stance as though they’re just waiting on a street corner. Kongtoranee squares up to throw his incredibly relaxed and powerful punches (his fists are just absolute rocks, I've heard that he was referred to as the "Thai Mike Tyson") and, my favorite similarity is that the two brothers share the exact same laugh. It’s a bit raspy and a chuckle that comes off surprisingly boyish, given the otherwise gruff demeanor of both men.  

Watching Kongtoranee in this video, I was totally taken by how balanced and economical all his movements are. His punches come straight from his ribs, his feet never wobble even a tiny bit, and when he works me through a series of strikes for rounds at a time on the pads, he’s teaching me a pattern of distances that could be stitched together to make a perfect fighter. I missed a lot of the beauty of his movements when I was standing right next to him, trying to mimic elements and thereby missing others that you can only see when looking at the whole picture. But I tried to pull those out in the voiceover. His feet, knees, torso and shoulders generate all his power and, even in the slow motion, pulled gestures toward strikes when he’s demonstrating, you can see the power right despite the subtlety of movement.

Sometimes these sessions are super basic, which I actually love because they draw out a blueprint of schools of thought in Muay Thai, lineages in the different teachings of the art. Kongtoranee lays out one such line beautifully, steadily, insistently. It’s wonderful.

Things to look out for:  

1. My feet were way too staggered all the time. My back foot kind of creeps behind my front foot and puts me in a single track where my hips can’t move properly. He shows me how to calibrate my stance a few times and starts to laugh at my “duck walk” later in the rounds, but basically the most squared up stance – for punches – is where your back foot is just half a length behind your front foot. He’ll pull his feet together and out to show this several times, watch for it and check it out.
    
2. Punches come out from the ribs and the power is driven by the rotation of the torso and hips. The shoulder stay relaxed. You rotate your fists just at the end of the punches to drive that bam power from the front knuckles just at the end.
    
3. On kicks he really wants your torso upright. He told me over and over to “relax,” meaning the arm you throw behind you to generate power just really flies back. As a result, that whole side of your body is relaxed as you impact, so all the power comes from your standing leg and the kicking leg is like a baseball bat. Come up on your toe on the kick, and most importantly you don’t step at an angle on your kick, you step straight forward into the foot of your opponent. Same for knees.
    
4. Elbows come slightly vertically down, not horizontally. Where you step your feet is important to accomplish this, but you also can’t “wind up” your elbows by pulling them back first – they come from the guard and shoulder.
    
5. Punching out of your guard and coming back to guard. Seems simple enough, but lots of us drop our hands before and after punches. I’m one of them.
    
6. Driving power in your punches through your feet. He rotates his feet and shifts his weight from foot to foot on hooks in a way similar to what Chatchai Sasakul teaches. If you’re hooking with your left hand, your weight shifts onto your right foot and you pivot hard on the left foot.
    
7. And we finish up with some awesome clinch moves. One is a knee as your opponent is trying to swim inside; one is a turn as they try to swim over. And we spend a good bit of time on one where you can pop the arm over before they even get a grip on you and pivot over to the side for a damn fine knee into the guts. 

Note: due to some background music we had to mute the background soundtrack due to a YouTube copyright claim in a portion of the session after the 1 hour mark. 

Importantly:

TIP BOX: if you are inspired by what you see and want to show added appreciation you can send gratuity directly to Kru Kongtoranee. Just message $5 or more via PayPal to the address sylvie@8limbs.us, please in the "add a note" section specify "for Kru Kongtoranee". 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