It's not the years, it's the mileage

I was spending a lot of time recently trying to think of why some students progress faster than others in Muay Thai. I feel that there are many reasons, but I want to focus on one of the first indicators we all think of: How long have they trained? Students who started earlier should be further along than students who started later, right? Not necessarily. This train of thought doesn’t take into account all of the proper measurements of time. We assume that a student that has six months of training would be behind a student with 12 months of experience. But again, that isn’t always true because we’re not truly measuring the time.

Right from the start you need to compare the amount of time actually training, not the time they have had a membership at a gym. If someone spent one year training Muay Thai and trained three days a week for one hour, they would have spent 156 hours training. Another student trained for six months, four days a week for two hours each day, they would have spent 208 hours training. While most people assume that the first student is better and knows more, it's more likely that the second student is ahead in their progress.

Now I wish I could just wrap this up here and act like it was that simple, but it’s not. Not all training hours are created equal. The most important feature is intention. Is one actively training with intention or are they going through the motions? I see this rear its ugly head the most during padwork. While you should try to hit pads hard, I see too many students try to hit the pads as hard as they can instead of as correctly as they can. It might feel good to exhaust yourself hitting the pads incorrectly (your pad holder will disagree), but it isn’t effective training. Thirty minutes spent hitting incorrectly isn’t 30 minutes of training.

This seems like a good moment to take a step back and explain that concept deeper. When you’re learning anything, you’re going to do things wrong. Doing it wrong still counts as training if you’re working on fixing those mistakes. That’s what training with intention is. If you just smash so you sweat and breathe hard that is not training with intention (unless your intention was just to tire yourself out).

I’m using this quote out of its original context, but it still works here. It’s not the years, it's the mileage. It’s not as simple as just being a student as long as you can. You have to work. And to stick with the car analogy, remember to still do your preventative maintenance. While I’m writing this to tell you to train as much as you can, you also need to rest, eat well, take care of your mental health, etc. It’s not easy to balance everything, but nothing good comes easy.