Adapting to No Head Contact Sparring in Thai Boxing Personal Training

12.11.2025

Thai Boxing Personal Training

Thai Boxing Personal Training

Take something away from training and you can suddenly gain so much more. Sound like a trite statement? Perhaps, but in this lesson report I discuss what happens when a valuable target is denied. The training experience proved to be very fruitful indeed.

Wednesday's 1.5 hour Thai Boxing Personal Training class adapted to my client's needs by prohibiting all head contact. This was because he forgot his mouthguard. Not an easily replaceable piece of kit when you are already at your place of training, I decided on changing tonight's lesson plan. Instead of a continuation of our rounds determined by a dice, we covered a series of specific rounds that did not allow strikes to the head. All head contact in my lessons are touch contact in nature and carefully controlled to ensure very low risk of injury (and all sparring is conducted in a safe manner in line with best sports practices). I take such matters as CTE very seriously, especially when my clients don't generally train for competition.

None of this stopped us from having a highly productive lesson restricted to body and leg striking targets. The restriction made for some excellent adaptions. Firstly, the sparring was generally at a much closer range to accommodate the body punching. Secondly. there was a greater desire for sweeping attacks and clinching.

We trained using the following 3-minute Muay Thai sparring rounds:

1. Body shots only boxing

2. Body and leg shots only kicks

3. Body and leg shots only kickboxing

4. Body and leg shots only knee strikes

5. Clinch only sparring (allowing all legal sweeps and dumps)

6. Clinch with knee strikes and elbows (no head strikes)

7. Muay Thai sparring with no head strikes

8. Repeat of the previous round

We then took the lessons learned and applied them to the focus mitts and heavy bag 3-minute rounds:

1. Body shots punches and kicks to belly pad and Thai pads

2. Leg kicks and body shots to belly pad and leg pad

3. 1-minute skip straight knees, 1-minute curve knees and 1-minute power knee strikes

The lesson finished with our usual routine of static stretches, slow dynamic stretching and PNF stretching.

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