While YouTube’s Sensei Seth primarily creates content relating to all things karate, he has also spent the last year training in Muay Thai. “Muay Thai practitioners are known to be one of the toughest sets of fighters, period,” he says in his new video, in which he volunteers for a grueling conditioning routine with Josh Brackett, an experienced Muay Thai instructor whose clients have included no fewer than seven national Muay Thai champions.
“This isn’t body conditioning that I do on a regular basis through the program that they run in the States,” Seth clarifies, “but this is something that Josh has been through in Thailand.”
Josh starts off easy, with a series of backhanded and openhanded slaps to Seth’s hamstrings, progressively hitting him harder and harder. Then Seth lays down while Josh repeatedly throws a ball at his stomach. “I am sweating,” he says. And apparently this was just the “easy” part.
After that, the punishment steps up a notch: Seth does situps while Josh hits him in the stomach with a pad, and then he must maintain a dead hang while Josh continues to punch him with increasing power. “I swing like a punching bag!” He says. Then Josh switches up his technique, attacking Seth’s abs with a one-two punch.
Once Seth’s core has taken enough punishment, Josh turns his attention back to the sensei’s legs, hitting them with a series of kicks. “Leg kicks don’t hurt people,” says Josh, when Seth starts groaning in pain. “They don’t win fights.”
And then, finally, with a huge disclaimer not to try this at home, Seth and Josh move onto the final conditioning tool: a sledgehammer. But don’t worry; he’s not actually hitting him with it, he’s simply rolling the wooden handle up and down Seth’s shin, an agonizing conditioning technique used to increase pain tolerance.
“What I slowly and painfully started to realize is that as we went on, we weren’t making my body harder,” says Seth following his ordeal. “Doing squats, or lunges, or crunches, that makes your body harder, stronger. I think what we were doing was making our brains more equipped to handle that kind of damage.”
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