How to Crush the Head and Neck

Kru Nu’s son Bank has a terribly strong squeeze in the clinch, and ends up just crushing me most of the time when we practice. He just turned 14 and earlier this year began his Lumpinee career. So today I asked him to show me the hand position he uses, and learned that all this time I’ve been doing it backwards, leveraging with the wrong arm, and wrongly using the face of my wrist instead of the blade of my forearm. You are basically crushing the opponent’s forehead into your own shoulder, with the blade of your forearm (up by the wrist) cutting into the base of the skull, causing the neck to bend. When it bends the posture is broken and eliminates his or her power. It is also incredibly painful. There is a whole system of control that I’ve seen that flows out of this lock – Wung and Daeng at Lanna were excellent with it, just killing farang of any size in clinch practice – and now that I can learn it it should make me much a much better fighter. Small things like this make a difference.

After the camera stopped Kru Nu then joked, seriously, about how you can nastily drive your chin into your opponent from this position, demonstrating on his son.

It goes to show that you can be training full time in Thailand for two years, and even be a “clinch” fighter and not be corrected in a very important technical area, despite having good and invested instructors. As a woman this can be even more so the case.