What the best full contact sport for conditioning? Muay Thai or boxing?

Question

What I hope to gain from either sport?
Great abs and toned body and self-defense...

Answer 1

The basic offensive techniques in Muay Thai use fists, elbows, shins, feet, and knees to strike the opponent. To bind the opponent for both offensive and defensive purposes, small amounts of stand-up grappling are used: the clinch. Muay Thai is often a fighting art of attrition, where opponents exchange blows with one another. This is certainly the case with traditional stylists in Thailand, but is a less popular form of fighting in the contemporary world fighting circuit. With the success of Muay Thai in mixed martial arts fighting, it has become the de facto martial art of choice for competitive stand-up fighters. As a result, it has evolved accordingly and incorporated much more powerful hand striking techniques used in western style boxing, and the Thai style of exchanging blow for blow is no longer favorable. Note: when Muay Thai fighters compete against fighters of other styles (and if the rules permit it), they almost invariably emphasize elbow (sok) and knee (kao) techniques to gain a distinct advantage in fighting. Almost all techniques in Muay Thai use the entire body movement, rotating the hip with each kick, punch, and block. The rotation of the hips in Muay Thai techniques, and intensive focus on "core muscles" (such as abdominal muscles and surrounding muscles) is very distinctive and is what sets Muay Thai apart from other styles of martial arts.

Like most competitive full contact fighting sports, Muay Thai has a heavy focus on body conditioning. Muay Thai is specifically designed to promote the level of fitness and toughness required for ring competition. Training regimens include many staples of combat sport conditioning such as running, shadowboxing, rope jumping, body weight resistance exercises, medicine ball exercises, abdominal exercises and in some cases weight training.

I practice Muay Thai and rather do 12 three min rounds of boxing than 5 three min rounds of Muay Thai against a more experienced Thai boxer any day!

Answer 2

Boxing.Of course, Muay Thai is boxing, too. And kicking. The sparring is incredible but what martial artists and Muay Thai overlook most, the running. 7, 9, 11 miles before breakfast gets a guy in shape. And the skip rope. What I've seen of Muay Thai, short sparring, kicking padded trainers and bags. Only wrestling is more tiring, or as tiring, as boxing. I've done both. Boxing builds more stamina, wrestling is more exhausting.

Answer 3

I like to do Muay Thai more. I use more parts of my body, my elbows and knees than I would in standard kickboxing.
You will learn great self defense skills and a toned body.
As for the abs, round kicks will help but after training I do sit ups with weights on my chest.

Answer 4

Abs and toned body - "Toned" bodies come primarily from lower body fat and resistance training (primarily free weights). So to get "toned" the number one thing to concentrate on is your diet. Second is weight lifting.

Self-defense - Both boxing and muay thai are great but I would give the advantage to muay thai from a self defense point of view simply because of the added advantage of using elbows and knees which can do a lot of damage.

Answer 5

The best way to prepare for a fight is to simulate it as closely as possible. Full-contact training, even with protective gear, allows you to feel and react to the impact of a strike, and the pain associated with it, in a safe environment. I've seen a lot of people fall apart the first time they got hit for real. Full-contact sparring will help prevent this. Step sparring is alright, but it's more of an intermediate level of training. Think about it. In step sparring, you know what's coming, and you have a predetermined response to it. In a real fight, you'll have no idea what's coming, and your response will have to be spontaneous. And that book is misleading, if not incorrect. Bogu, or equipment-based full-contact sparring, was common in Okinawa at the turn of the last century. Many Chinese martial artists sparred with Western boxing gloves once they became available during the late 1800's, too. Finally, Jigoro Kano, the founder of Judo, had his full-contact-trained students fight the kata/step-sparring based jujitsu schools of the day, and ended up tossing them around like rag dolls. I have no doubt that early martial arts teachers would have used protective equipment if it had been available.

Answer 6

The best full-contact sport for conditioning is amateur wrestling, no-doubt. I remember how the football players on our team used to complain about how much harder the wrestling practices were than the football practices...

Answer 7

Muay Thai!!!!!!!!!!