Kru Phet-Tho on Improvement (Patreon)

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Kru Phet-Tho is a retired Thai-boxing fighter and instructor. In this video, he shares his insights and experience in improving Thai-boxing, but you can apply these insights broadly to many other movement activities.

His intuitions about talent development are similar to Liberation Martial Arts theory, so here are takeaways from our perspective.

• To get good at the thing, dwell in the thing, and do the thing. Dwelling means watching it and being around it. Let it contextualize all that you do.

• Getting good at the thing also means understanding the thing. Understanding the thing means understanding the game rules and objectives. Copying or miming movements doesn't mean you know what you are doing or moving in a skillful or relevant way to the objectives. Many people spend years in an activity or hobby feeling like they don't know what they are doing because they were taught techniques or movements first rather than starting with the question the task is trying to solve.

• Understanding the thing provides context for the rest of training. The questions you ask or the things you look for become more relevant. It streamlines the process and helps you organize your own training. Organizing your training better makes you better.

• Practice doesn't automatically make you better. There are plenty of times people get worse despite lots of practice. Just because you are practicing doesn't mean your practice gives you relevant information. The organization and design of your training is paramount.

• Kru Phet-Tho comes at this from his intuitions as a fighter, but LMA has refined the learning process further. For us, practitioners improve by playing the game. Playing lots of games means the games have to be safe and fun.

• Without context, training doesn't mean learning; it means copying, memorizing, and miming. Copying is not learning. When you play the actual game, you learn.

• Slowing the game speed down allows for more exploration and learning. Watching sparring and fights, or in a broad sense, watching people engage in the living activity, whether dancing or rock climbing, gives you conceptual priors that build your knowledge base.

• Don't watch techniques or instructionals; watch the living movement activity. To get better at writing, read actual stories rather than isolated words or sentences. Copying words and sentences in isolation, plagiarizing, or copying a whole story won't make you a good writer, but that's often what we think is learning. Write stories to get better at writing stories because there are too many things involved in any skill, and it can't be reduced and isolated to simple repetitive tasks.

• Everything changes. Don't get attached to perfection or perfect technique. Techniques can never be the same, and you can never be the same. Your opponents will change, and each person will change. You can never move the same way twice.

• Rather than focusing on movements in a game, focus on its conditions. Improve your ability to read the situation. If you can't read the situation, you're guessing and gambling.

To access the complete Liberation Martial Arts curriculum and contribute to the sustainability of this project as my family and I navigate some recent health and financial challenges, consider upgrading your membership. If you've been putting it off, now would be a great time to sign up. Find other ways to support us here. – Sam

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(I write daily about martial arts and other topics from a liberatory perspective. If you like my work, please support me on Patreon or Substack, or make a one-time donation on Ko-fi. Find Southpaw at its website. Get the swag on Spring. Also check out Liberation Martial Arts Online.)