I have many years of visiting this Muay Thai gym in Bangkok. Here’s a photo of me with Jomhod from a few years ago.

I was thinking earlier, after training, about how this gym has an interesting mix of older trainers, like Arjahn Fahleap, who has trained and held pads for great fighters from the era when this was a top competition-level gym in Bangkok, to now, where it has modernized itself with the times and become a gym oriented toward tourists or expats, many starting from low skill or zero.

By the way, coming back real quick to Arjahn Fahleap, he has over 500 fights, and was known to be a beast during his prime. In the past, this gym won prestigious awards for Gym of the Year, and was a bona fide, hardcore training camp, from which top fighters have emerged, most recently, Ognjen Topić, whom you might know from YouTube or Instagram in this niche.

But yeah, I was thinking about how things have changed. This gym has all this knowledge available, with these men who are like walking libraries of Muay Thai due to their massive experience. But the people attending the sessions are usually brand-new or tourists, and they might not know who’s holding pads for them. Like, they might not truly appreciate those moments.

To me, it’s interesting to see the mix of this old era of hardcore trainers and the post-COVID new people who are trying out Muay Thai, since the sport is being promoted all over the world through new promotional organizations like RWS. I'm older, and it's just a weird connection that I am seeing, because we are at a cross period when it wasn't too long ago that everything was different. So, there's this mix of people, and it's extremely noticeable.

The training at Eminent Air Boxing Gym is still fantastic, and anytime I’m back in Bangkok, that’s one of the gyms I go to. I’m happy that Arjahn Fahleap is still in his 40s, so he’s young, and we will have a good amount of time to train together moving forward. I recommend to my readers that they drop in and hit the pads with him one day, and I’m sure you will find it worth your time.