Sangtiennoi - Advanced Clinch Entry & Leverage | 52 Min (Patreon)

Sangtiennoi is a former Lumpinee and Rajadamnern Golden Age legend who fought and beat the best of the best. In this video he instructs me in both clinch and the general Muay Khao style that he specialized in.

I was sweating, sitting on the matted floor of AMA gym in New Jersey (USA), when I told the legend - who Thai publications call “the man” - Kaensak Sor. Ploenjit that I was moving to Thailand for a year. “Good,” he said, “get a lot of experience.” Then he wrote down a phone number on a scrap of paper and told me this was his friend, who had a gym in Bangkok. I should go train there. I was headed to Chiang Mai because I’d already experienced and loved a gym there (Lanna), but that scrap of paper is still in my wallet; 6 years later. I never called the number because I’ve never lived in Bangkok, but last month I finally went to see Kaensak’s friend: Sangtiennoi Sor Rungroj, a legend of the Golden Age of Muay Thai. His name means “little candlelight,” which is fitting to his quiet, persistent method of watching and illuminating just enough at a time. Teaching like this is one reason you have to have hour long videos. In Thailand the nuggets are not a set of demos. They all come in context and in time.

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

The gym is large but relatively cluttered. Not in a bad way, more like how old houses that are actually lived in are filled with the memorabilia and life collected over a lifetime: framed photos, animals, plants, pets, family, equipment and fighters. I’m always taken by gyms which also house fighting cocks, usually under these domed wicker basket cages - it’s just a cultural feeling that I dig at Thai gyms, fighting is fighting for them - but I was really charmed and a little alarmed by the chickens and baby chicks that run free, everywhere. The chicks scuttle between your feet while kicking pads, when you’re sitting before a session, just all the time. And there’s a sweet dog, which follows around the reigning queen of the gym, Gigi, the 200 kg hog. This place is amazing. 

I spoke with Sangtiennoi while sitting on some benches. He patted Gigi’s enormous body as he asked me about my fighting. We’d spoken before my arrival about what I was looking for, a private session with him on any technique he wanted to show me - just Sangtiennoi’s style - but he doesn’t really do private sessions. A lot of older elite fighters who own gyms don’t really offer private sessions; it’s a different role than gym owner and over-seer, which is what Sangtiennoi is at his gym, really a lesser role. It’s like asking a General to run the troops through drills. It took some explaining, but finally Sangtiennoi locked on to the part in our conversation where I said I am Muay Khao (he is also a knee fighter) and so he decided to focus on that. I am so grateful he did, because his knowledge and choices for focus are fantastic. He doesn’t hold pads for me and up until the last 10 minutes or so had me working with a fighter or one of his trainers while he watched and jumped in for instruction or corrections. The techniques he gave me are immediately practical and endlessly practiceable. Really, really useful and not “tricks” so much as tactics.

Clinch Lock Escape

Cross Face if in the Double Outside Position

Outside Arm Swim in on Turn

Clinch Entry - Long to Short

The first thing he shows me is how to pull your body all the way over to one side in a clinch lock in order to create room for the opposite side’s arm. So, if you want to get your right arm to the inside, you pull your body over to your left, hard, and then snake your right arm through the tiny gap you’ve created.

Next he shows me a cross-face that I’ve been shown by my own trainer, Kru Nu, many times before but I’ve always attributed my short stature to be the reason I can’t do it properly. Being short does make it more difficult than for longer limbed folks like Kru Nu and Sangtiennoi - both somewhat tall for their fighting weights - but it was in the repeated attempts of this move, Sangtiennoi watching and correcting - that I finally figured out that the problem is my own elbow engaging the shoulder of my opponent. That’s something that’s easier to do if you’re tall and long, but knowing that this one vector point is the main focus for how this move works is a huge revelation for me. One which I didn’t actually get until watching the video. Basically it’s the “smoosh face” that you see a lot, pushing an opponent’s face to break away from the clinch. But you grab the jaw in Sangtiennoi’s version (which gives you a better grip and your opponent can’t wiggle her face out), and lean your own head and neck back as you push away, to create greater leverage - you stand up tall and lean back, which helps to engage your elbow into your opponent’s shoulder, which turns them out and weakens them so they can’t muscle out of the move. I wasn’t straightening my arm enough, so with my elbow bent back I wasn’t putting pressure on my partner’s shoulder, which meant I wasn’t forcing his shoulder forward - the whole center point of the move. In addition to standing up straight and pressing your head and chest back for more leverage, Sangtiennoi kept trying to get me to step back behind my partner as well, basically putting my lead foot by his heel. I never quite got there, but it’s the same spot that Yodkhunpon insists on for his “step over” moves. So, aim for the heels of your opponent.

The third technique Sangtiennoi focused on is one of my favorite things I’ve ever learned. It’s so simple, immediately practical, and seems so obvious. My clinching “frame” is generally one hand on the back of my opponent’s neck and one on the inside of the elbow on the other arm. When you can’t catch the inside of the elbow you might have to grab around with that arm instead, which in my case is my right arm, usually. However, it’s usually an “outside position,” which is un-ideal for a lot of reasons and outright bad at times as well. Once you’re in the lock it can be very hard to swim that arm in - one way is the first technique, above, where you pull your whole body over and try to jam your glove up through the opening. If there’s no space, however, this new technique - my favorite - is pretty much a guarantee: you use the hand on the neck to pull your opponent’s head into your shoulder, then take a hard turn on that same side (so same side leg stepping back and around) and as your opponent is swinging through the air you use that moment of being lax (them being off-balance) to sneak your other arm up through the gap. Then you’ve got a double neck tie and you can go to town on some really nasty straight knees. Sangtiennoi really wanted me to keep jerking down on the head between knees, kind of the super elementary double-tie clinch and head drag that is taught in tons of gyms in the west. So this is immediately practical in all those gyms.

Note: The technique of the turn on this is very important, and in fact this is an aspect of Muay Thai that over all these years I had never seen right. It looks like turns like this are wide, sweeping arcs, but they aren’t. You don’t turn out and around. You pull directly into your shoulder, and pivot. The turn comes from your pivot, not from your arm. Yodkhunpon was the first person to show me this, and Sangtiennoi is the second. See below.

He also chastised me for my body grab, or low clinch. It’s not that you can’t grab the waist but rather that if you do, your move needs to be pretty immediate. You don’t want to “hang out” at a waist grab because it doesn’t look good. So he had me practice throwing my partner pretty immediately after getting a low clinch.

The bulk of our session, time-wise, was spent on a simple tactic that implements a large number of elements all at once. So spending a lot of time practicing it, especially in the method that Sangtiennoi has us doing here, where you just keep going and going with one partner playing one role, backing up and defending, and the other partner playing the other role of advancing and attacking, is really useful. He put a belly pad and some gloves on his trainer, Pi Dam, and told me to just dern (literally “walk” but meaning to go forward in attack) and use long weapons in order to set up for grabbing in the clinch. This is “clinch entry”. Sangtiennoi shows me first how just walking in and grabbing alone will get you elbowed. I actually have stitches in my face at the time of writing this from doing exactly this. So to avoid that problem you use teeps and long punches, kicks and long knees to distract and damage your opponent on your way in. Sangtiennoi specifies that you look for when your opponent’s energy goes down - which I think he means both in terms of fatigue but also watching for frustration, or when their confidence drops - and that’s when you grab for the clinch. This is a tactic that can be related to the strategy what Dieselnoi employs, although Dieselnoi breaks it up into rounds, and in the early rounds you use long weapons, crowd the angles, cut-off and defend - you let your opponent tire himself out by using all his weapons in the first, non-scoring, rounds and then you just chase that worn-out gazelle down in the scoring rounds… also steering your opponent using teeps (mostly) and kicks to get them into the ropes where you can grab them. Sangtiennoi doesn’t talk about the ropes at all, so  his tactic is (arguably) more about how you get in than where you ultimately put your opponent.

We do this exercise for a long time and it draws out different challenges, I succeed with some things which work less well later on and develop into new approaches which work better once we’re both kinda tired. That’s the brilliance of these marathon methods in training - by just going and going, rather than stop-and-start-over drills, you have to adapt to the technique under a variety of different physical and mental challenges. As I get more tired, I kind of forget that the ultimate goal is to grab for the clinch. I get kind of caught up in just tagging Pi Dam from a longer distance. When I’m reminded to grab for the clinch, I’m more dominant under fatigue than I was at the beginning when I grab him, but I keep just letting him go again instead of pushing to finish him. That’s something that Sangtiennoi’s body language expresses annoyance with, but he was sure to point out his approval when I would grab and yank Pi Dam’s head down. Those were fight-ender moments… if I’d not let him go, I mean. So, that’s what he’s trying to teach me and that’s what I’m training for myself now.

Within this long-form practice of clinch entry, Sangtiennoi stops us a few times to show me how to grab the head, pull it into my shoulder and do a deep pivot to really whip Pi Dam around for a knee (I talk about this in my note above). He explained the importance of pulling the head into your shoulder first but I had a surprisingly hard time with it. And at the very end he has me parrying Pi Dam’s arms (which off-balances his whole body) to kind of step off for knees. This is a great time to work on this technique because I’m tired, so I’ve been going forward this whole time and once you get fatigued (and if you’re in the lead as well), you’ll likely slow down and try to stand your ground a bit or even be moving backwards. This parrying technique is well suited for going backwards, trying to stand your ground, and can be used while going forward although much less effectively. So it was a natural progression.

And the very last bit of our work was directly with Sangtiennoi, showing me the finer points of those parries. He rests his hands very gently on top of his opponent’s gloves, very much like Yodkhunpon does. Sangtiennoi shows how you can’t use your fist to go on equal level with your opponent’s gloves because you’ll slip, so you want a pretty much “open” glove on top of your opponent’s gloves. Then you can push to the side, push down and attack, or do one of his really amazing arm hooks. He also goes into the appropriate direction for each of these - you don’t hook an arm when you’re moving forward, for example - but he really just wants me to play with the variety of options and feel out for myself which I like, how to use them and importantly when to use them. You learn that by feel, so you have to practice it with lots of time and patience. 

All throughout our session Sangtiennoi insisted on me keeping my guard really high, which is a kind of Old School style and signature to him but it’s A) one that Master K employs (my original teacher) and so it’s the first one I learned, and B) it’s effective for protecting from punches and elbows while also being ideal for your own clinching and elbows. He also wants me to use more “timing,” which in Thai is the same word as rhythm. So it’s that rhythmic, steady shift of balance between your feet that you see Thai fighters using. Like a slow, methodical marching - but you explode out of it, time your attacks with your opponent’s movements. Again, that’s one you practice by spending hours and hours just doing it and feeling it out for yourself. You have to make your own rhythm but you have to work off your opponent’s rhythm… timing. 

You can read about Sangtiennoi's  gym here, it's a special place .