Elbow Strikes from Muay Thai to Karate - Martial Arts Teacher Training

19.12.2025

Muay Thai enthusiasts engage in teacher training focused on perfecting elbow strike techniques.

This morning saw the fourth lesson of my Karate teacher client's Martial Arts Teacher Training course on elbow strikes in Muay Thai. My mandate is to teach him how elbow strikes are used in Thai Boxing and also how they might contribute towards his karate teaching.

Specific Sparring - Martial Arts Teacher Training

We worked through the following sparring protocols:

1. Clinching with elbow strikes to the arms and body - This type of training promotes using grappling positioning, posture breaking and holds to create incidental opportunities to drop elbows. However, it is also a safer introduction to the techniques.

2. Clinching with boxing gloves with elbow strikes to the arms and body - The introduction of boxing bridges training into Muay Thai, where they must be worn, and it also eliminates grip reliance.

3. Clinching with boxing gloves and full-face head guards with elbow strikes permitted to the head - Now the fighters have a full range of targets, including their primary one: the head.

4. Clinching with boxing gloves and full-face head guards with elbow strikes permitted to the head and knee strikes - Here both fighters have wider range of targets. It provided an important lesson in how elbows set up knees and vice versa. The experience also provided me with a teaching opportunity using posting as a natural follow-on from landing an elbow and to set up knee strikes.

5. Boxing, clinching, knee strikes and elbows wearing head guards and boxing gloves - We now could bring in some outside boxing to set up for clinches and also to deliver elbow strikes from different ranges.

Pad Work - Martial Arts Teacher Training

Here I would usually use Thai pads, but I decided to use focus mitts so that my teacher client could work more in accuracy with elbow strikes. We used the standard 4-punch boxing accumulation combination to drop horizontal elbow strikes - jab/elbow, jab/cross/elbow, jab/cross/hook/elbow and jab/cross/hook/cross/elbow - using the opposite arm to the last punch thrown. I also brought in a posting technique to set up the smash-down or tomahawk elbow strike. This posting action forces a student to reposition, working angles and maintaining balance.

Heavy Bag - Martial Arts Teacher Training

I then revised all the elbow strikes taught and introduced some more advanced techniques on the heavy bag and in partner work. We went through horizontal, slashing, uppercut, spear, chopping, diagonal, backward, sideways, smash-down, downward spiking and spinning elbow.

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