Sagat Petchyindee (part 2) - Maximum Damage (61 min) (Patreon)

Sagat Petchyindee part II – the first part of this session is here.

3x Lumpinee Champion, 3x Rajadamnern Champion – inspiration for the Street Fighter character “Sagat”

Sagat is absolutely incredible. His energy is infectiously bright and cheery, you can feel how much he loves the moves that he’s instructing and how the techniques he applies are meant to emphasize the power and efficacy of those movements – that’s what he finds so delightful. But his style is all about maximum damage and you can feel that, too. When he starts moving in space to demonstrate how you get these moves onto someone, he’s like a tiger in an enclosure and your immediate instinct is telling you to get the hell out of his way. Then he’ll burst into laughter and it’s not so much a relief as indicative of just how much of a tiger being a tiger he really is. I love it.

Sagat’s favorite question is “how feel?” He wants you to feel the technique, not just get it right out of the careful execution of each of the small pieces. You do those things in order to create that feeling, and  you know something is right or wrong based on how it feels. Did it feel like you could rip right through someone with that? Great, you did it right. That’s the hard part about learning his famous uppercut, which he spends a good chunk of time on with me in this session. He grabs my hand and jerks it forward and back in a stabbing motion against his bellypad, trying to get me to feel the violence in it. Like you’re shanking someone. I can’t feel it – there’s no violence in my version – and so it’s slow to develop. Then, at certain moments, when I add the violence in there will be a degree of explosiveness that he feels against his bellypad and he’ll clap his hands, saying, “yes!” But then it’s hard to repeat it because I’m trying to figure out the mechanics without putting the ghost into the machine, so to speak. Sagat puts his tiger heart into every movement; that’s the secret to his style.

What to look out for:

1. Sagat gets amazing snap and reach on his punches by leaving his back foot pinned to the floor behind him. The muscles in the back leg drive the power and the pinned-to-the-floor element allows for really fast recoil. He emphasizes punching past a target and you only turn your knuckles down a bit at the end of the punch, rather than rotating the fist like a Karate punch. Above all, keep your elbows tucked into your ribs.
    
2. The rotation that Sagat gets on his strikes is pretty incredible. It seems like he’s exaggerating when he turns sideways at the end of an elbow, but he’s not; that’s really how he twists and if your face gets in the way of his elbow or strike, then it might look like less of a twist. When he has me do the jab-cross-elbow he really, really emphasizes the step or crash and twist of the body on that elbow.
    
3. Elbows to the body. They’re incredible and I’m amazed nobody does them anymore. Again, the full body weight crashing in is the execution of power for this move.
    
4. The pop-over on punches and the “snake on the limb” elbow. Sagat keeps his guard out at times, with a long front arm that can generate a lot of power from an already-extended position. That’s from his body twist. He teaches me how to pop an opponent’s guard down and punch over it, which is really similar to an example he gives for an elbow, whereby your hand is the head of a snake and it slithers up the opponent’s arm and then bites their face (the elbow). You can feel it.
    
5. Sagat makes a beautiful point about digging grooves in your techniques, in order to create consistency. He tells me that he wants me to come train with him for 4 days and each day we’d spend 30 minutes on a single technique: 30 minutes only the right cross; 30 minutes only the jab; 30 minutes only the left hook, etc. When he puts me on the corner to slam out 10 minutes of just the right cross, you can see why this approach makes sense and would be effective. At every point in this session he tries to pin my elbows to my sides to improve the techniques he’s showing, and on the corner he literally comes and stands next to me as a wall of sorts to make sure my strikes come out without the “chicken wing” elbow. He even times my punch and shoves my punching shoulder forward so I can feel the looseness required for that strike to not get fatigued. It’s a “whip” in the striking arm the same way you have a “whip” in a kick. It’s not hard to describe in words, but it’s not enough to describe in words. You have to feel it, which is why 10 minutes or 30 minutes wears the correct grooves.
    
6. Sagat’s situps. He teaches me these situps that I’ve seen fighters do at various gyms but I never really tried. He says that standard crunches and situps come from your chest and are worthless, but this kind of “double” crunch, because you’ve already exhaled and then you have to press even more air out on the second contraction… it’s no joke.