There is a saying that goes like this: “The teacher comes when the student is ready”. Today, I want to talk about that.
Let’s take a trip back in time first. At the end of March, I fought on the famous prison fight show in Thailand. I fought for 3 rounds and “lost”. I go more into this in this post.
After the fight, I felt happy to be back after 10 months but also frustrated. For some reason, I could never fight like I wanted to. People kept congratulating me on my performance, but with one of them, I expressed my “unhappiness” with my performance. He told me to go train somewhere else for a bit to pick up new things.
I decided to stay at my gym, and they offered me a fight as soon as I was back training. The only issue was that it was hard to fix the mistakes of my last fight because the prison didn’t release the tape. I doubt it’ll ever happen either.
My goal was obviously to do better than last time, but I also wanted to show that I could outsmart people in the ring. The issue was that the trainers at the gym weren’t really training me to use that style. They loved it when I tried to do it but couldn’t teach it. So when I fought, I fought more forward and strong, like they were always pushing me.
Four weeks before the fight, I decided to train with the legendary Ajarn Pipa. He was the trainer of Saenchai, Lerdsila, Somrak, Silapathai, and so on. Google any of the names, and you’ll see technical trickery.
He was always on my radar to work with, to be honest. He was just hard to find since he would move from gym to gym. So I always missed out on working with him. Until he came to a gym close to me where I knew fighters, they told me he was staying there permanently, so I took my shot.
He basically identified what I needed to focus on in preparation for my next fight. I worked three weeks in a row with him. During our sessions, we mainly worked on elbows, clock control, and movement. The way he taught it to me made sure it stuck, and in my gym, I’d practice what he taught me daily on the bag and in shadow boxing.
In our third and last session, he told me that I’d win the fight for sure if I used my elbows. Which I did. Not only did I use my elbows, but I also had the first performance that I was extremely happy with. You can watch a highlight here.
Honestly, I trained with Ajarn Pipa at the perfect time. I was already developing the style he was teaching due to the fact that I studied a lot of his students on YouTube. Because of that, I could accelerate the learning process when working with him. I knew how he wanted certain things.
I went to him at the perfect time, and he went crazy when he saw the fight afterwards.
The lesson here is simple. Everyone has certain people they want to train or work with. They will arrive in your life when you’re ready. Trying to force it too much will result in a lesser experience since you can only do so much.
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Until next time.
Alex
