On June 27, 2026, four Kun Khmer bouts were broadcast worldwide for the first time from the Kombat Stadium in Phnom Penh. An art with roots in the 9th century, banned and hunted under the Khmer Rouge, suddenly found itself on an international stage alongside Kombat Taekwondo. What exactly were we watching in that ring?
Full analysis at Dojang Club: https://dojang.club/kombat-grand-prix-022-phnom-penh-kun-khmer-taekwondo
Conditioning matters. But there is a reason some fighters look fresh in the fifth round while others are visibly struggling after the second, even when both have trained equally hard. The answer is not aerobic capacity. It is structural organization, specifically how efficiently a fighter transmits force through the body and returns to a ready position between efforts. Before your next training session, read this. It will change how you watch a fight, and how you prepare for one.
Read the full article on Dojo and Ring.
The Mayweather-Zambidis exhibition was cancelled days before it was due to take place, brought down by a legal dispute that shut down tickets, promotion, and distribution in one move.
Greek veteran Mike Zambidis had done everything asked of him. The system around him had not.
Full breakdown at dojoandring.com.
There are fighters who win titles. And then there are fighters who change the way a sport is played. Rob Kaman was the second kind.
For two decades, the Dutch-Moroccan kickboxer competed at the very top of kickboxing and Muay Thai, collecting nine world championships and delivering knockouts with every weapon available to him. His stance-switching style was revolutionary. His low kick was a weapon unto itself. His nickname, Mr. Low Kick, was not branding. It was a technical statement about how he approached a fight.
A new documentary traces his career from first bout to final fight, covering his championship runs, his greatest moments inside the ring, and his appearances in action films alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme.
For anyone serious about combat sport history, or simply about understanding how the low kick became the weapon it is today, this is essential viewing.
The full article, with a deeper look at what made Kaman's technical approach so ahead of its time, is on dojoandring.com.
Read the full article on dojoandring.com
The Lethwei Golden Belt operates by rules that most combat sports abandoned long ago: the only way to win it is by knockout.
No judges decide who takes it home. No points accumulate over five rounds to tip the balance. If both fighters are still standing when the final bell rings, the title stays where it was. A draw. No winner declared.
In an era when championship belts multiply faster than they are defended, this one works differently. A 21-year-old became the youngest openweight champion in history and defended it 18 times. A Canadian fighter broke a thousand-year tradition to claim it. And the rule governing everything remains unchanged: to be the king, you have to stop the king.
Read the full article on dojoandring.com
The samurai didn't train grip strength for aesthetics. They trained because a weak grip meant death. That difference in motivation produced a completely different kind of strength, one that modern gym culture has largely forgotten.
Most practitioners train their hands the wrong way: all fingers squeezing equally, relying on the palm, ignoring the ulnar side entirely. Research shows that the little finger alone contributes roughly 33% of total functional grip strength. Remove the ring and little finger, and grip force drops by more than half. The samurai knew this without a laboratory.
The full article covers the anatomy, the principle of dynamic grip, and four exercises that actually rebuild hand strength from the ground up.
Read it at Dojo and Ring: https://dojoandring.com/samurai-grip-hand-strength-modern-training/
Muay Thai has a reputation for being a grounded art. The clinch, the low kicks, the body shots at mid-range — these are the images that define the sport in most people's minds. That reading is accurate, but it is not complete.
The Thai boxing tradition contains a well-developed catalogue of aerial techniques. Jumping attacks are not a modern borrowing from kickboxing or MMA. They belong to the classical vocabulary of the art, and their rarity in competition reflects strategy rather than ignorance. A jumping technique surrenders your base for a fraction of a second. Thai fighters, as a rule, are too tactically intelligent to use these strikes carelessly.
But when the moment opens up, aerial attacks are fight-ending weapons.
The full guide on Dojo and Ring covers each technique in the system — the Superman Punch and its lead-hand variation, the jumping elbow, the jumping roundhouse, the scissor teep (and why the Karate Kid comparison is not as far-fetched as it sounds), and the two primary forms of the flying knee, each suited to a different tactical situation.
The guide also addresses the strategic framework that makes these techniques work: why they exist, what functions they serve — power amplification, distance coverage, psychological disruption — and why the best aerial strikes in competitive Muay Thai almost always arrive after deliberate setup rather than impulse.
Read the full article here: Jumping Attacks in Muay Thai: The Complete Guide to Aerial Strikes
Before a single strike is thrown, before the fighters even touch gloves, the audience sees something that looks like a dance but is not one.
The Ram Muay is the ritual performance every Muay Thai fighter carries out before a bout. To someone unfamiliar with what they are watching, it can look like pure decoration. In reality, it is one of the most layered elements of the entire sport.
The Ram Muay is not improvisation. It has a fixed internal structure, learned, repeated, and passed down through camps and lineages. It operates on two levels simultaneously: ceremonial and functional. It warms up the joints and major movement chains, activates the nervous system, and allows the fighter to read the opponent through the performance itself, watching how the other camp responds to what is being shown.
Every camp has its own version, and this is not simply an aesthetic preference. The style of the Ram Muay often reveals the tactical priorities of the camp: those built around the clinch tend to produce tighter, more controlled sequences, while camps with a strong kicking game show wider, more extended leg movements. Experienced coaches read the Ram Muay the way a chess player reads an opponent's opening.
The Ram Muay is not tradition for tradition's sake. It is living proof that a martial art can carry its memory, its teacher, its camp, its origin, embedded in the body itself, performed in every fight, without a single word spoken.
If you want to understand why the distinction between Wai Kru and Ram Muay matters structurally, how the Sarama music interacts with the fighter's movement rather than simply accompanying it, and what the international spread of Muay Thai loses when it simplifies or skips the ritual entirely, the full analysis is at dojoandring.com.
→ Ram Muay Explained: Structure, Personal Style and Tradition in Muay Thai
