Sylvie's Technique Vlog - How to Use Bagwork in Thailand (Patreon)

Published:

2020-12-22 07:03:50

Imported:

2021-08

Content

My change in understanding the purpose, or aim, of bagwork in so far as how it's used in Thailand is a very recent one. I've been wailing on the bag for years and years, not without benefit, not without purpose, but I've recently come to understand that many Thai pedagogies don't use bagwork for the purposes that I've been using it for. Instead, it's meant as a kind of more nuanced tool for practicing timing, rhythm, certainty and composure... in a word: jang-wa, which I've covered in a previous Technique Vlog (see article bottom), a word often translated as rhythm.

I came to this new understanding in a kind of Eureka! burst of realization, through my embarrassment of what my bagwork recently looked and felt like as Wangchannoi was looking at, judging, and then correcting it, (see below for a link to the session). I'm a very experienced fighter, have spent 1,000s of hours on the bag, and was nowhere near what this Golden Age legend thought of as bagwork. Then in a newly filmed session (not published yet at the time of this article), the former Fighter of the Year Yodwicha did the same kind of thing, after I'd already been working on improving from what Wangchannoi had showed me. It's kind of going to take me a while to get this repurposing down but I can see the meaning in it and that's why it's important to me. It's not about hitting the bag as many times as possible in the allotted time of a round - bagwork in Thailand is not for building power, endurance, speed and strength. It's about letting the natural swing and movement of a bag to be a metronome against which you learn timing, juggling, train under fatigue but not because you've just peppered the bag with a hundred strikes, but rather because you're at the end of your training. It's how a "cool down" of shadowboxing might go in my mind before, but with much more fight-realism involved and just as much mental focus. This vlog really shows what Technique Vlogs are. They aren't demos. They are a chance to talk about techniques in a wider sense, and my real time explorations with them.

You should definitely watch the first Wangchannoi session in the Muay Thai Library, to see him teaching me this. You can also watch the newest Yodwicha session when it's up, as he and Petdam (who will be added to the Library in some time as well) break down the purpose of this kind of bagwork. Also sessions with Jaroensap and Den Junlaphan have parts that are important. As I say at the end of this video, once you understand something differently, it will automatically change your approach to it. Even without "re learning" different combos or whatever, you'll just naturally stand at a different distance, have a different pace, a different mindset with which you approach the practice. That's the hardest and easiest part at once. For me, watching myself in the video with Wangchannoi was painful (when I watch for the voiceover) but it was also super illustrative of what he was talking about to me while we were filming. I kind of got it as he was telling me, but when I saw the video it was unmistakable... and a bit embarrassing. So don't rule out just filming yourself to see what your bagwork is like as is, and think about how you want it to look if it were to be more for the purposes of timing, precision, control, rhythm, etc.