Karuhat Sor. Supawan - Tension & Kicking Dynamics | 103 min

3x Lumpinee Champion 

Karuhat holds a special place in the Muay Thai Library in that he is my personal hero, and I’ve seen him enough times that there is something of a linear progression in which details of his absolutely unique Golden Age style is revealed. And every time I go see Karuhat, I expect to demonstrate the work I’ve put into what he showed me in the previous session. And every time, Karuhat overlooks any of my progress in order to set his sights on a new detail. What’s brilliant about this, of course, is that he only moves on to the next thing because he can see that I’ve worked on the other bits. He’s building me, shaping me, slowly and steadily. In this session, he’d forever complained about how slow and wide my kick is, but today was time to fix it. It’s like repairing a house: you fix the bigger things first, the things that have some urgency; peel off that hideous wallpaper before laying down a layer of nice paint, for example. But he does this with absolute generosity, patience and a degree of kindness that’s nothing short of incredible. I’m very grateful for every second I spend with him. This is largely an video that tracks me struggling hard with the technique he’s showing me, but a great deal can be learned from watching someone reach for a technique, and another patiently guiding her or him. That’s the benefit of these longer video sessions.

Previous sessions in the Library:

#20 Karuhat Sor Supawan - Switching Attack (144 min) watch it here

#11 Karuhat Sor. Supawan Session 2 - Float and Shock (82 min) watch it here

#7 Karuhat Sor. Supawan - Be Like Sand (62 min) watch it here

Bonus Session 1:  Karuhat Sor. Supawan | Advanced Switching Footwork | 60 min  - watch it here 

You can also read about the Golden Kick, an article I wrote after much reflection on what Karuhat was teaching me here. It’s important for those who have been following my discussion of the Golden Kick on Facebook to note that he is teaching more than the Golden Kick. It starts with learning the upward trajectory of a proper kick, but then it morphs into lessons of weight transfer and timing in a technique quite different than the Golden Kick, techniques that seem almost unique to Karuhat’s style itself.

Karuhat, more than anyone, is a relaxed fighter. His relaxation is so superlative because he uses every minute bit of tension in his opponent against them. He creates tension with fakes or by standing too close or forcing a block, then exploits that tension. And so he knows how to have virtually no tension anywhere. The way he goes about creating that tension is many-fold and in this session he runs through a number of them. He uses fakes that aren’t the kind of fakes I think of, but are a kind of time-delay. So the kick is the kick you promised, but not when it seemed to be coming. He uses weight transfer and elastic flow to create illusions of timing and distance, things that are incredibly hard to read while standing in front of him. 

One of the main focuses of this session is what I’ve come to call the Golden Kick (you can read my blog post about it and see video demonstrations from a number of Golden Age legends), which has a different trajectory that the kick I’ve been working on for years and years. Karuhat thinks that my kick is slow and wide, both of those problems are addressed at once with the Golden Kick, which comes up the side of your opponent’s body and then crashes in at the last second. You manage to sneak inside the block in many cases and the economy of movement on it is awesome. We return to this technique over and over again in this session, in the Karuhat way of learning through repetition that isn’t “drills,” but rather moving around and playing with the technique until you can feel how it works. He shows me how the extension on the kick comes from the standing leg, which twists extending the hip, but he also works with me on weight transfer to get power into the kick as well as how to hide it (using slightly different dynamics than the Golden Kick). There are a few times that he has me just drop my arms to my sides and rag-doll them while gliding through the full range of the kicking motion, which demonstrated to me the importance of relaxation for the technique. When you see the flopping arms in the video, that’s not the technique - it’s a technique for the technique, as the relaxed arms allowed me to flow through the motions by taking tension out of my shoulders and hips. He’d have me throw the kick with my arms down, then I’d try it in more regular guard, then kind of “recalibrate” the relaxation with the arms down again.

He also works with me on a second kind of kick, which is more about weight transfer and this time-delay fake that he works on in this session. This kick comes up very wide, almost across the body of your opponent, because you’re stepping very wide outside their stance. This kick and the Golden Kick aren’t the same, so be studious in watching the difference between the two as he’s demonstrating for me in the video. There are numerous occasions when he stops me and demonstrates, slowly, a few examples of what he wants me to do and I try to imitate - both for the Golden Kick and for the one that comes across. It’s good to see his examples because he’s correcting small details of what I’m doing, but I strongly advise that you watch him carefully when he’s not demonstrating, when he’s just kicking me back as a counter. That’s his natural kick, that’s when he’s illustrating the most about how these kicks are used, their context, etc. 

The biggest elements of this session, aside from a Golden Kick trajectory, are timing, weight transfer, and causing your opponent to block in order to use those predictable body positions to your advantage. This is high-level technical and strategic stuff here, but because of how Karuhat teaches, with the repetition and slow progression of new elements, it’s something you can bring into your practice immediately. I now use these weight transfers on the bag, in sparring and in padwork. I’ve been practicing the delayed striking as a fake in both padwork and sparring, and I apply the Golden Kick as often as I can in order to iron out the various kinks I have. Don’t be overwhelmed by the tiny details. The most important thing is always relaxation. Karuhat is using a handful of techniques and strategies to teach that single lesson: relax. No tension.

This session is very valuable because it’s only a few techniques being hammered out over and over again. A bit of advice: watch when he corrects me because you can see adjustments in those moments, but again, what you really should be watching all the time is Karuhat’s kicks when he’s not demonstrating. When he’s just kicking me back. That’s the kick. It’s still a turn of the hip, but the hip turns very late and the standing foot almost turns around. What to look out for:

1. The flow forward as you drag your kicking leg into the kick. The leg comes up more or less straight, like up the side of your opponent’s stance, then turns in at the last second in a whipping, accelerated movement. Watch how he doesn’t break his frame at all on that kick. His hip comes straight and then turns, there’s no line outside his natural stance where the kick pulls out first.
2. The lean forward and pause for a split second before throwing the kick or punch, so the “fake” is the time of the strike, not the fact of the strike. It’s a delay to allow the opponent to respond first, then your initial strike - which you’ve already started - kind of becomes a counter to whatever they do. 
3. The Golden Kick is the straight up the body and then in trajectory - it’s super fast and super hard to see - but the other kick he uses is the delay, which is sometimes quite wide. Almost like a baseball bat coming across the opponent because you’ve stepped so far outside their stance. This is around 45 minutes in when Karuhat switches over to this other kick, and I think I didn’t understand that it was a different thing during the session. So I’m still trying to do the Golden Kick but he’s showing me weight transfer, trying to get me to understand the flow of movement. So mine is a weird mutant version of both kicks, so watch him instead when he shows how that kick just kind of lifts up into your opponent’s head from a graceful, flowing weight transfer. It’s about the weight transfer.
   1. At about 30 minutes in he’s showing me why my Golden Kick is too short. My trajectory is right with the kicking leg, it’s coming up straight and coming over, but it doesn’t extend or get any longer because of my standing leg. He demonstrates the difference between the two beautifully, right at 29:30. In the first one, the standing leg stays with the knee pointing forward and the kick can miss from a foot away. Then he throws it again and twists on his standing leg, so his knee is pointing to the side and nearly backwards at the full extension of the kick and it’s so long. That’s why I miss and he doesn’t.
4. The fake punch to long kick. This is kind of a half-assed punch that can become real at any moment, because the acceleration is at the end, not the beginning. At about 20 minutes into this video he’s showing me the extension of the arm as a fake punch and is trying to emphasize how relaxed it is. The reason it’s so relaxed is so you don’t give away your weight transfer as a telegraph for any strike. You want ONLY the arm to be the distraction. So you don’t “pull” the punch, you just extend it and don’t pop it at the end. At face-level, the punch doesn’t come out very far and doesn’t really intend to be a punch. At body level, however, the punch can become a body punch if your opponent doesn’t move. But it becomes the kick, that lagging behind kick, if they move because the kick is long enough to catch them. But you, like, flow into it. The punch and the kick aren’t the point, they’re just what touch your opponent - the point is the weight transfer.
5. Karuhat shows this to me a few different times and in slightly different ways, but at 40 minutes he’s emphasizing how your counter is to your opponent’s block, not their strike, necessarily. He has me bring my weight forward to fake the kick, which causes him to try to check the kick with one leg up and his guard up to block, and you just hit the guard. He’s on one leg, so anything you slam him with his going to knock him off balance and crack open the guard for the next strike. It’s awesome. It also goes together with something he emphasizes in this session about hitting on the same side: if you punch with your right hand, follow with a right kick. He tells me that everyone expects alternate sides, so if you jab first the opposite side kick is coming and people train themselves to block on that side in anticipation. So he doubles up on one side because it isn’t what’s been trained. It’s the same concept as his head pushes in the clinch rather than the neck pulls that everyone trains.
   1. At around 1:10:00 he’s showing me how to use the punch to get someone to “close up” their guard and then you throw the same side knee right into their newly opened belly. His footwork in this part is interesting becuase it’s a mix of his general floating footwork and his weight transfer. Watch him over and over again, I never get it but he does it beautifully quite a few times.
6. The Karuhat Superman. Karuhat has two (probably more than 2, but he’s shown me 2) versions of this switch that is so awesome. The first one is always done from my southpaw stance and you jab with the right hand a few times, then upon switching your stance you do this gallop-into-a-strike forward and kind of walk that same right hand into your opponent’s face, but now from an Orthodox position so it’s your rear hand. I’ve never failed to land this, neither in training or in a fight. It works every time. But he also teaches me this incredible cutting off fake; so you cut your opponent off by moving to your left, then after a few steps (with their back against the ropes) you act like you’ve given up on that angle and reverse to go right a couple steps, but with the body position of having given up. They relax from your “emotional fake” and then you do what is more or less a grounded Superman: fake the kick, throw the punch, but without the jumping. You can jump, maybe he told me not to because I wasn’t doing it well, but he stays grounded in this version. I love the psychological fake element though.
7. He also shows me this interesting, kind of fishing trick. You lean forward to bait your opponent into an attack, but then you rock backwards and kick with your front leg. Karuhat never let me kick with my front leg without a switch stance before (again, not necessarily because that’s something one doesn’t do but probably because the way I was doing it annoyed him and wasn’t strong), so this was an interesting development to have him teach me how to do it without the switch. I love doing this on the bag: lean forward, rock back and kick with that front leg. Headkick, preferably.
8. And the last thing he shows me is in the same vein as everything else, but is still its own thing. It’s this leg-drag/stutter step to delay your actual strike when someone is responding to the promise of the kick. So, if you step and bring your weight forward for a kick and someone steps back or leans back, you then just keep faking that kick until they’re in a position where they can’t actually defend it. I’ve done this in sparring with my partner Team and he has the same technique, so we are both trying to fake each other out and postpone the actual strike as we drag/stutter forward. It’s awesome.

You can send some support to Karuhat through the purchase of a Karuhat shirt, celebrating his badassness from back in the day. All profits go directly to him:

shop these Karuhat shirts here 

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