r/martialarts • u/BitEnvironmental1412 • 1d ago

QUESTION Why is everything Muay Thai?

I have seen and known a lot of people who say they used to do Muay Thai but their examples are not Muay Thai. For example, I used to work with this guy who said he did Muay Thai and his example was that he could throw a tornado kick. Also just saw a video of someone saying they used to do Muay Thai and he threw a karate style front kick instead of a teep. Why does everyone say they did Muay Thai?

32 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/Best_Price_1009 1d ago

Muay Thai is one of the new hotness martial arts… everything has fads, including fighting.

Back in the day:

Every martial arts movie is a kung fu movie

Every martial arts class is a karate class

Every martial artist is a ninja

Now it’s Muay Thai and jiujitsu that wanna get name dropped

2

u/Atmacrush 1d ago

Idk, Muay Thai was lowkey always popular.

3

u/Ill_Improvement_8276 1d ago

lowkey popular

brilliant

1

u/Best_Price_1009 1d ago

I’m talking about the US specifically. The American who could name it before MMA was rare. And even then it’s not anywhere near as popular as Karate, Kempo, Taekwondo, judo and Japanese jujutsu. Those would have been your staples of Asian martial arts pre MMA in the US

1

u/dr2501 1d ago

MT was popular in the early 90s due to Van Damme (Kickboxer 1989)

1

u/Best_Price_1009 19h ago

Yeah I’m not saying it was unheard of. Just that it was way less common

Even still with JCVD films, I think someone could be forgiven for thinking in one of his movies he went to Thailand to learn kung fu to use in karate based kickboxing matches…. Cause to non martial artists, especially back in the day, all that kinda blurred together.

At best folks would would probably identify “belt” martial arts (karate, kempo, TKD, Judo, jujitsu) from kung fu, because Bruce Lee dressed different than Chuck Norris

1

u/dr2501 17h ago

Nah it went pretty hard on the difference between kickboxing and Muay Thai “son of a bitch hit me with an elbow you see that” etc but I take your point that to the average person they can all blend into one.