This September me and a friend of mine decided to travel to Thailand to train for a month. We obviously we’re going for the Muay Thai training, my friend maybe more for just the pure fitness aspect of it, having never trained any martial art before. Myself, I was going to sharpen my technique and get better.
I’m from the northern parts of Sweden and we don’t really have that many Muay Thai gyms up here, so this was going to be a real good experience. We decided we were going to stay for a month because of various reasons (Money, girlfriends, work etc)
We scouted out a bunch of different gyms all over Thailand and finally settled for Team Quest up in Chiang Mai.
So we shot off an email to the gym and off we went!
Name/location/contact
Team Quest Thailand
114/3 Moo1 T.Padad A.Muang, Muang Chiang Mai,
Chiang Mai, Thailand 50100
+66 86 091 1536
http://tqmmathailand.com
http://www.facebook.com/tqthailand
What they teach
Muay Thai / MMA / Grappling
Schedule:
The Muay Thai class runs twice a day, starting at 07:00 AM to around 09:30 AM and the afternoon class starts at 16:00 PM and runs to around 18:30 – 19:00 AM depending on whats being worked on and the number of students at each practice.
Below is some photos of the training schedule for MT:
The grappling class runs once a day from 15:00PM to 16:00PM. This is pure grappling for mma, with some splashes of ground and pound and things like that.
While we visited, they also ran an MMA class between 13:00 and 14:00 PM where we did specific training for the guys that had MMA fights coming up.
(This was not a part of the actual schedule, but the instructor talked about making it a daily thing)
Also, the MMA coach was just about to start his training camp for an MMA fight, so we we’re lucky enough to get to take part of his strength and conditioning program, which included three days of power workout (Mon-Wed-Frid) and two days of sprints (Tue-Thu).
This wasn’t a scheduled workout either and we kind of just fitted it in at a time that worked for everyone doing it.
Instructors
MUAY THAI
(http://tqmmathailand.com/category/te…thai-trainers/)
Team Quest Thailand has 5 full-time Muay Thai trainers.
Above is a link to some information on each trainer and their area of expertise and so on, so I thought I would just fill in with my personal experience working with each trainer.
KRU JOE:
Joe was probably the best trainer at teaching pure technique in my opinion. I did a lot of pad work with him and he really focused on getting your basic techniques working really good rather then adding some new crazy spinning elbow technique or something. Joe was really good at explaining and really calm and a good teacher.
KRU GEN:
Gen is Joe’s brother(TWINbrother to that) and I found them to have a pretty similar way of teaching. Every time we did pad work I just kind of ran up randomly and grabbed one of them and it almost always happened to be Joe, so I really didn’t get much work done with Gen. I think I ended up doing pads with him three times. Gen’s English was a little worse then Joes, but he was really good at getting me to understand what he was teaching anyway.
KRU PING:
Ping was the trainer that I kind of “bonded” with more or whatever you want to call it. He also did MMA so he was kind of the guy I spent the most overall time with and got to know the best. His style of teaching was kind of a mixture between pure technique and adding in some crazy stuff once in a while. Ping was always positive and laughing, you kind of always came out of the padwork smiling.
KRU NUT:
Nut was the guy I did the most pad work with since he’s a really big dude (190cm) and I’m as tall as him so it felt best to work with him. He really mixes up techniques and makes you think about footwork, a lot of movement and feints and stuff in addition to the regular techniques. I really liked working with him, you kind of never knew what was going to happen next, there was no “pattern”.
KRU NEE:
I only did pads with Nee one single time, but from what I gained from that plus the times I watched him working pads, he really focuses on proper defense and counters. He kicks a LOT when you are doing pads with him.
Bottom line, they have a variety of trainers that you can kind of alternate between depending on what you feel you have to work with.
MMA
The MMA / Grappling instructor is David Hulett (http://www.sherdog.com/fighter/David-Hulett-12137)
He runs everything MMA over there and is really good at teaching grappling and overall MMA, being that experienced. I planned on only doing a couple classes of the MMA- practice but ended up doing it every day after I tried it out.(I realize not many people are going to Thailand to train MMA, but I would recommend trying out one of his classes.)
I cant really put in to perspective how high the level of MMA is over there coming from a place where the level is really low, so pretty much everything would have me impressed. I enjoyed it anyhow.
Prices, money, training/living/food/everything
Visit http://tqmmathailand.com/category/ch…accommodation/ for info on rooms and accomodation andhttp://tqmmathailand.com/prices/ for everything involving payment. No point in me copy-pasting when you are just a click away.
We ended up staying in a “Superior room” paying 15000 baht for our 1 month for the two of us. We left happy, the hotel was nothing out of the ordinary but perfectly fine. Any place that would have had a bed and aircondition would have been fine by me. The staff was really friendly.
Food
Visit http://tqmmathailand.com/what-to-eat/ to read up on where to get something to eat while you’re training at Team Quest. We went to the food market pretty much every day and bought everything we had between meals at the shopping mall.
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