DIAMOND MUAY THAI

Diamond has been running in Nai Wok on Koh Phangan since 2011, and the shape of the place has barely changed in that time. Everything sits on one site: two rings under a thatched roof, a long row of bags, the bungalows, and the tables where everyone eats after training. For a solo traveller that matters more than it sounds. You do not arrange anything, you do not go looking for anyone, and by the end of your first day you have eaten two meals with the same group of people.

This is a train and stay camp built around Western visitors, and it is worth being straight about that from the start. You are not going to be sharing the floor with a stable of Thai fighters preparing for Bangkok. The trainers have that background, several of them at a high level, but the students around you will almost all be travellers. The row of national flags strung across the training floor is an accurate summary of the room.

Sessions run twice a day, Monday to Saturday, and the structure is the same each time. Fifteen minutes of skipping, then stretching together. Hand wraps go on, and the trainers do them for you until you can manage it yourself. Then shadow boxing, with the group split into beginners and more experienced. From there it is pads one on one with a trainer, or freestyle work on the heavy bag while you wait your turn. Three rounds on the pads when it is quiet, and two rounds when the session is busy, which it often is. Shin guards on for three rounds of sparring, then strength and conditioning. The cool down is the detail worth knowing: everyone stands in a circle and takes a turn leading a stretch, so the group works through a different exercise each time round and everyone has said something to everyone before the session ends. Food is on the table before you have caught your breath.

The private sessions are the thing to book. The best hour of one on one coaching I have had anywhere in Thailand was here, and the reason is not only the coaching. It is that the hour is an actual hour. At a lot of gyms a sixty minute private turns into thirty or forty minutes of work once you take out the warm up, the trainer resting between rounds, and a long cool down at the end. That did not happen. I ran for twenty minutes beforehand so the clock would not be spent on a warm up, and got sixty minutes of undivided attention on two things: balance through combinations, and the mechanics of throwing an elbow. I train at an advanced level, and those two adjustments moved me further in an hour than the group sessions would have in a fortnight. At 700 baht that is the best value on the price list by a distance.

The honest trade-off: the group class is pitched at a mixed room, and the pad rounds are the thing to watch. Two rounds instead of three is a meaningful difference over a month, and the busier the season the more often that happens. The camp caps drop-in numbers from December to March for exactly this reason, which tells you they know. The other thing is the food. Two meals a day are included and they are served hot straight after training, but it is rice, curry and a boiled egg with some fruit, and it is not enough to live on. Budget for eating out or at the 7-Eleven on top of your package. Neither of these makes Diamond a bad camp. They make it a specific one. If you want a hard, quiet fight camp with Thai training partners, the mainland will serve you better. If you want to arrive alone, be looked after, and buy a few privates to actually improve, this is a very good choice.