Yodkhunpon Sitraipom part 2 - Escapes (48 min) (Patreon)

This is the second part of a comprehensive session I had with Yodkhunpon, you can see the first part here where he introduced his famous slicing elbow.  Yodkhunpon  is the"The Elbow Hunter of 100 Stitches",  and  simultaneously held the Lumpinee and Rajadamnern 118 lb belts, a rare feat in the annals of Muay Thai history.  

 TIP BOX if you want to show your appreciation you can send gratuity directly to Kru Yodkhunpon, $5 or more via PayPal to the address sylvie@8limbs.us, please in the "add a note" section specify "for Kru Yodkhunpon".  I will transfer the funds.  Go to PayPal now.  

In this next 45 minutes or so with Yodkhunpon, he refines some of the techniques he’s shown me in previous sessions but focuses more acutely on clinch escapes. He begins with one that is kind of like popping the top off of a bottle, holding just under the armpit of the opponent’s body and timing the throw with a knee or change of position (from the opponent), so that you essentially “pop” them off of you. In this session he doesn’t talk very much about this one, but I’ve worked with him on it since (in unfilmed moments) and it’s really important to step to the side of your opponent. You don’t focus too much on getting your head out, that will happen on its own as you step over to the side and push the arm up over you. The reason it’s worth mentioning even though we don’t give it a lot of attention in this session is that this exact same step to the side is a huge part of Yodkhunpon’s overall program. It’s key to the slip out of the longer grip, which he shows next and which I kind of struggled with for a bit because I was missing that side step.

And here’s the thing about those tiny details: fighters don’t think about them, they feel them. One of my favorite things about learning from Khun is how you can literally watch him think it through, working it out in slow-motion and shadow while he breaks it down in thought first; then he shows it to you. Watching him do these turns or throws or elbows in space is like watching someone Waltzing by themself. You can picture the partner, but you can really see the movement in isolation as well. It’s beautiful, but it’s also really effective because he’s figuring it out by feeling. I had a friend in high school who was a dancer, just incredibly talented in Popping and Locking style, named Cho. He tried to teach us and one thing he really emphasized was not looking in the mirror while you were working out the move. You’d check the mirror to make sure that what you were “hitting” was visibly correct or dramatic enough, but he reiterated time and again how you had to learn the moves by feel. See it, calibrate it, then actually practice it by feel.  Chatchai Sasakul told me the same thing in the last Patreon session. That’s what watching Khun in his slow-motion thought space looks like to me. You can feel what he’s feeling (to a large degree) just by watching him, and that’s how you commit those moves to your body: with your body.

One of my favorite things about filming with Khun is that there’s no way to verbally express how immensely he loves doing Muay Thai. He’s a pretty unassuming fellow. He’s small (bigger than I am, but who isn’t?), he’s really quiet and speaks in a soft and sometimes inaudible voice, and his face erupts into this smile that is both charming and somewhat unexpected from his general resting face. None of those things hint at the violence with which he moves. Even his footwork, which is like a balloon filled with air instead of Helium bobbing and bouncing along the floor, is just weightless; it’s not menacing at all. But Jesus… the way he takes up space and the energy with which he hits those marks, or grabs you and you feel like you’re drowning because you can’t get out of his totally-not-even-tight grip; when you’ve felt it, you can’t unfeel it. It’s amazing. And you can’t really describe these things, I mean, not really. The way he lights up and goes into playful wrecking-mode no matter who he’s playing with in knee sparring, there’s no way to describe that. You have to see it. And in these videos - a large part of the point of this Muay Thai video library project - capture that to some degree. I’m lucky because I get to feel it, complete with a small dose of panic and horror because it’s happening in my actual body space. But I also get to give it back a little, the same way he searches for the technique out of the feeling in his body - in our first session I could feel how just centimeters of distance (millimeters even) made a huge difference between what his elbows felt like and what mine did. So I closed that distance in this session and you see him respond with the, “oh shit!’ kind of escape that I’ve been feeling. You can’t teach that, but he can because he makes you feel it.

A snapshot breakdown of what was covered in this session:

1. The “bottle pop” clinch escape, grabbing from under the armpit and step out
2. The “roll and grip” clinch escape from a longer lock, holding the opponent’s wrist as an anchor point (but power comes from the grip on the neck)
3. The “belly push” body lock clinch escape: this is for a higher grip from your opponent, you position your gloves on your opponent’s belly for angles and leverage, not really for an actual push to the belly - the lock is broken from your arms being positioned behind their elbows
4. The “peel off” body lock clinch escape: one hand on the ribs, one on the neck, and your knee on the same side as the hand on the neck to the outside of your opponent’s knee - pull back, not around
5. Timing in clinch turns, waiting for an opponent’s knee and again pulling back, not around
6. No lean back knees
7. Catching a mid-kick and using a shoulder twist to hurt the hell out of your opponent’s calf and potentially dump them
8. Catching a high-kick with your forearms and lifting for a dump
9. When your mid-kick is caught, how to “close your knee” and not your hip for the escape
10. The hand position on the patented Yodkhunpon clinch elbows: how the direction of your palm and fingers changes the trajectory of the elbow