3 Game-Changing Shifts That Transformed My Muay Thai Career WITHOUT Sacrificing My Health

Muay Thai is one of the most demanding sports on the planet. The hours of training, the repetition, the physical wear… it takes a toll. But in my experience, the biggest barriers to growth aren’t always about technical skill or fitness. Sometimes, what holds us back is the culture we’re steeped in; the unspoken rules, the outdated beliefs, and the internalized narratives that eat away at us as much as any low kick ever could.

I’ve been training since 2011 and fighting since 2013. I’ve been lucky to receive incredible coaching and sparring, even from the very beginning. But still, I struggled with many aspects related to being a fighter. Not because of poor training, but because I was neglecting areas that were never talked about or, worse, actively discouraged. It wasn’t until I made the following three changes that my career (and my well-being) really started to shift.

These aren’t just tweaks. They changed the way I trained, fought, and viewed myself.

TRIGGER WARNING: Depression, eating disorders.

Lifting Weights (Without Fear)

For years, I avoided strength training because I was told by one of my first coaches that it would “make me bulky,” “slow me down,” or “make it difficult to make weight.” As someone who was told to fight in a weight class that I hadn’t seen since before I hit puberty, and the fact that this “advice” came from someone I deeply respected, I deeply internalized it. I cut out all forms of lifting and convinced myself it was for the best.

Even in Thailand, where the training culture is revered, the approach to strength and conditioning was often limited to bodyweight circuits and high-rep work. Going from the fearmongering around lifting weights in the U.S. to a country where most old-school style coaches believed the same (but also didn’t know how to really lift weights) only kept me believing that I should definitely stay away from barbells and the like. And while bodyweight exercises certainly has value, especially for beginners or for general fitness, it doesn’t fully serve the long-term development of a combat athlete. I had left the “for fitness” and “beginner” long before I ever visited Thailand.

So what changed? I was slow in my fights. I trained so incredibly hard, but I was slow. My trainer yelled at me for being slow. Everyone I trained with made fun of me for it. I was strong, but I was slow, and I had no idea what was happening. Eventually, I began to challenge those old beliefs and slowly introduced myself to other methods. I had to ease my way into this territory after years of being terrified of straying away from the “traditional Thai model” of training. Eventually, I found a structured strength and conditioning program. I focused on compound lifts, progressively overloaded, and prioritized movement quality over quantity. I even started running less and switched out some of the grueling 12km morning runs for other types of roadwork.

The results? I became stronger, had better balance, was more “sturdy”, and was far more explosive and fast. And no, my fear of turning into a heavyweight overnight did not come true. If anything, my walking weight actually decreased, making my weight cuts so much more manageable, and my performance skyrocketed.

Strength training didn’t take away from my Muay Thai. It filled in the gaps that the traditional Thai model of long runs and push-ups/pull-ups/sit-ups couldn’t.

For those curious about what program I started and eventually settled into, check out Don Heatrick‘s numerous online programs. I’ve been reading his articles even before I started fighting, and it’s truly amazing that I get to work with him now. I had some help from Richi Alvarez in the earlier days (we had similar social circles within Thailand and he was always a huge proponent of “train smarter not harder”), and if you speak Spanish, he is the way to go!

Cutting Out “Recovery” Workouts

There’s a fine line between discipline and self-punishment. For years, I unconsciously blurred the two. I used to believe that I should feel guilty for “needing to recover” and any type of recovery needed to be “active” to soothe that guilt. It meant light jogs on rest days, extra shadowboxing rounds, mobility circuits. Anything to feel like I was still “doing the work.”

But the reality was that I was already doing more in a single day than most people did in a week. My training schedule was relentless – waking up at 5 am to run, two sessions a day, six days a week, with minimal variation or deload. And yet, I still felt guilty for resting. So I kept piling on more.

Eventually, my body started pushing back. I got sick all the time. I was short-fused and constantly frustrated, which only further isolated me in a foreign country (Thailand). Chronic aches and pains that never went away with all the massages, creams, and mobility work I did. Plateaued performance. The aforementioned “slowness” that showed up in my fights.

It took dozens of fights for me to notice that I didn’t need to do more. The last straw with me pushing through fatigue when I was supposed to be resting was when I rematched Rungnapa for the third time at a Muay Thai Day festival in Ayutthaya. I had easily beaten her twice, yet my body refused to respond to me during the fight. I cried after the fight (my trainer yelling at me didn’t help things), but a few weeks after, when I really took a few steps back, I realized that the entire training camp I was running on empty…everything. Instead of allowing myself time to recover and truly rest, I kept doing more, believing that Sunday run would “fix” how I had been doing in fight camp.

I was in a documentary that featured the tail end of this fight camp, the weight cut, and the fight itself. It is on this page – scroll down to watch!

I didn’t need more movement. I needed better recovery. And that didn’t mean another run or workout. It meant actual rest. Sleep. Nourishment. Mental downtime.

When I finally gave myself permission to truly rest, something shifted. I showed up to training with more focus and more energy. I actually started to improve, not because I trained harder, but because I recovered better. The feelings of guilt come rest day are still there (even to this day!), but if I can’t change my feelings first, I can certainly change what I do… and hopefully my feelings will catch up with my current knowledge of sports science and exercise physiology.

Healing My Relationship with Food and My Body

This one is deeply personal. I’ve shared some parts of this publicly through various interviews, but many parts I have never shared with a single soul.

Like many fighters (especially women), I’ve struggled with disordered eating and body image issues for most of my life. The first time I decided to “go on a diet” was when I was 12 years old – it required extreme starvation, comparing myself to celebrities and models who didn’t even have the same bone structure as me, and a fear of eating anything.

And unfortunately, the fight world often normalizes these struggles. Extreme “dieting” (aka starvation) during fight camp. Feeling guilty for eating a cookie. Complimenting someone for looking “lean” while ignoring whether they’re okay mentally or emotionally.

I used to feel like I had to “earn” food. Those rest days? They didn’t warrant full meals. My body had to look a certain way to be taken seriously – all the explicit and implicit messaging from being in a combat sports space all made me truly believe and internalize this. Even when I was “performing well”, I was constantly anxious about my weight, food, calories… chasing an impossible version of “fighting fit.”

What changed for me wasn’t a single moment, but a long, gradual unlearning. But first, I had to hit rock bottom for that journey of healing to begin. After a decade of starvation, hearing from everyone within the gym how they thought they were fat and their new “hack” to losing 10 pounds, a long and dark depressive episode hit me. Although a huge part of me still wanted to keep going to the gym and focus on losing those 10 pounds a coach suggested, an internal voice told me that this was the time to step away from the gym. That I had to say “screw it” to trying to lose weight if I didn’t want this current mentality to imprison me for the rest of my life. I didn’t have to listen to that voice, but I’m very, very happy I did.

I disappeared from Muay Thai for over a year. I ate as I pleased (even though it came with extreme guilt and binge-purge tendencies). I gained a lot of weight, which was my worst fear at the time. It was chaotic, messy, and the whispers of people talking about my weight gain didn’t help. However, this internal purpose of trying to break free from that kept reminding me that all this was part of healing.

Fast-forwarding a few years (and skipping over some details from my personal life of getting out of a toxic romantic relationship), I eventually began to view food as fuel. I stopped extreme dieting during fight camp and focused on eating for performance and recovery. I stopped idolizing arbitrary numbers (weight, calories, macros) and instead tuned into how I actually felt in training. But because fighting still requires me to weigh myself, I started limiting it to just once a week for the sake of my sanity.

Ironically, working with Thai trainers has helped me tremendously with viewing food as fuel (rather than something to be “burned off”). My first Thai trainer absolutely despised the typical Western way of “losing weight” for a fight (which was just extreme starvation while trying to train for three hours every day). He always told people, “You have no power because you no eat! Eat, have more power.” He tried to get his fighters to eat more when they could.

Even more ironic was when I gave myself permission to eat more and stress less, my fight weight became easier to maintain. My energy stabilized. My focus sharpened. And mentally, I felt so much freer. That internal noise quieted down enough for me to be able to focus on training and improving again, rather than constantly feeling like I needed to monitor my weight.

These Shifts Didn’t Just Change My Training — They Changed Me

What I’ve learned is that being a great fighter isn’t just about how many hours you put in at the gym. It’s also about what you do outside of it. How you recover. How you fuel yourself. How you treat your body. How you speak to yourself when no one’s watching.

These changes helped me train smarter, recover faster, and compete at a high level without destroying myself in the process. I’m still making mistakes, still learning, still evolving, but I’ve left behind the version of myself who thought pain was a badge of honor and exhaustion alone meant I was doing it right.

If you’re reading this and you’re feeling stuck, I hope this reminds you that real growth isn’t always about pushing harder and just dealing with “the suck”. Sometimes it’s about stepping back, questioning the rules you’ve been handed, and permitting yourself to live differently.

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