3 Killer Muay Thai Partner Drills

GRAB A WILLING PARTICIPANT FOR THESE AWESOME MUAY THAI DRILLS

By Matt Filart

Most of us miss Muay Thai something fierce right now, and sometimes it’s not even the heavy bag work or the great workout you get from it. For a lot of us, it’s the social interaction that we got from training with partner drills, pad work and sparring. 

If you’re lucky (or unlucky) enough to live with someone else right now, you just might be able to convince them to to train with you and run a few drills.

Having a training partner you can train with right now is a great benefit, especially if you're getting sick of shadowboxing or heavy bag work if you have a bag. 

Partner drills are absolutely essential to Muay Thai and are some of the most fun and challenging drills you can run. So, to help you and your lucky partner get started, we’ve complied a list of some of our best partner drills. 

5 Best Beginner Sparring Drills for MMA, Muay Thai, Boxing

Sparring is a lot of people’s favorite part of training Muay Thai or combat sports in general. It’s just so much fun to finally be able to hit someone without the fear of legal repercussions.

It can also be a bit intimidating for people just starting out and have never sparred before, especially if you see fighters and gym veterans going really hard on each other during their rounds. 

These 5 beginner sparring drills are great for people who are new to Muay Thai and have never sparred before, or have and are still getting used to it. These drills should be slow and controlled, so that they can help the people practicing them work up to actual sparring. 

These drills will also teach you some key principles that you should bring with you into sparring like when to counter your opponent. These drills also let you work on combinations and allow you to see what strikes are easy to throw following others, which is super important! 

Just remember to take care and treat your partner according to the unwritten sparring rules.

5 Muay Thai Sparring Drills | Technique Sparring Tips

 These drills are for those of us who have a bit more sparring experience but have some areas that need work in areas hard to train when sparring like normal. These drills are more complex than the beginner ones and you a go a little bit harder when practicing them. 

These drills rely less on taking turns with your partner and more on the actual rhythm that you will find yourself getting into in actual spar. 

These drills are what some people will call technical sparring, as you are allow to go “all out,” meaning that you can use what ever technique at whatever time, but you are limited to a certain technique pool. These drills are great because they force you to work on possible weak areas that you have while still keeping the pace and intensity of real sparring.

This way, you get used to seeing strikes coming and can develop the proper way to strike off your opponent’s attacks. 

5 Muay Thai Kicking Drills With A Partner 

These drills are great because while kicking is core to Muay Thai, most people neglect to really train them.

What I mean by that is... Sure, most of us throw easily over 100 kicks in a training session, but we, as nak muays, tend to neglect training the things that make our kicks powerful and effective, like the positioning of our shin and balance. Training the accuracy and finesse of your kicks is paramount if you want to make them more effective. 

It’s easy to train power kicks, but these drills aim to teach you how to kick effectively and when to kick effectively. These drills will also help you work on your reactions to kicks, so you’ll know when and how to block, check and catch kicks, as well as build that timing to throw a counter kick. 

Isolating kicks is great since most of us are used to mixing our punches and kicks together and with most combos being more punch heavy, most of our kicks could use a little extra work.