I spent over eight months in Asia, primarily in Thailand, the home of Muay Thai. I was a young, ambitious fighter, driven by a strong need to understand fighting at a deeper level. Looking back, I made some poor decisions during that period, and a large part of that was shaped by my obsession with learning fight IQ and theory.
It started earlier, in 2024. I was a trainee solicitor, who, no exaggeration, in the twilight evening, had taken the first paycheck he had, more money than I had ever amassed at a single point in time, and travelled to London. My academic self-exploration had begun with what I called metalearning — learning how to learn. In hindsight, drunk on self-optimism and a great vision for my future while juggling academic courses, had set a goal for myself to be an elite generalist - to learn languages, instruments, and travel widely. So I used Anki extensively, a spaced repetition, and spent time studying how learning works, how the body learns movement, and how lerning could be compressed.
Eventually ChatGPT became part of that system. I used it like a search layer for anything that came into my mind: angles, distance measurement, mechanics of movement, ideologies of fighting. It was not passive consumption; it was constant interrogation of ideas.
At that stage, I believed I was improving my decision-making in fighting by understanding it more deeply. I placed a strong emphasis on rationality in combat — understanding before execution. It was what seperately good fighters from elite fighters in my opinion.
Thailand: The Shift Into Theoretical Fighting
When I arrived in Thailand, that system was already well-developed and time consuming. It only deepened.
I began to explore fighting through multiple conceptual lenses — not just as technique, but as structure, philosophy, and systems of interaction. I would spend long periods thinking through fight scenarios, visualising exchanges, and mapping abstract models onto physical behaviour.
At one point, while sitting in a small food shop in Thailand, waiting to travel to Chiang Mai, I remember clearly having what felt like an important insight. I began to believe that fighting could be analysed philosophically, or through layered conceptual frameworks, similar to language or systems theory. That idea stayed with me and expanded quickly. This is only one example of how my mind was operating at the time. I had an unlimited reserve of willingness and ambition to draw upon. If it could help or explain my reality, I was willing to spent time and energy understanding it.
Fighting was something I was constantly analysing internally. I was spending hours visualising, testing theories in my mind, and trying to map abstract concepts onto real exchanges. This produced a strong internal experience — but it was not intuitively translating cleanly into live situations.
In my defence, this was my reason for going to Thailand. Before leaving, in Edinburgh, Leeds, and at home, I had put in a herculean effort into physical training - running, lifting, plyometrics, balance, eye training. Complemented by extensive fight iq training, I planned to go to Thailand and spar, put what I had learnt into practice, So I could finally begin to fight.
My early experience when sparring was that it did not reduce, and might have even produced, decision anxiety or hesitation under pressure. I still faced the same physical limitations: timing constraints, limited actions in sparring, and the complexity of making decisions under real exchange conditions. My attention was often split between the moment itself and an internal search for conceptual clarity or “correct” decisions. Early stumbling blocks, I am certain.
First Fight Experience and Misapplied Frameworks
During my first Muay Thai fight, some of these conceptual frameworks carried over in distorted ways. I took the fight after a 10-day stint in a monastery. I had no money at this point, and the monastery was time that I could arrange my affairs. Money a friend had promised me, to help me travel to another hostel, to volunteer and buy me time to get an online job, never materialised, and so, without sparring, and feeling unprepared, I entered into a fight.
I had, hours before the fight, come across an idea of fighting as a conversation — that exchanges could be interpreted as dialogue between opponents. I remembered being taken with this idea, and method of analysis - the state I was in likely fuelled this approach, I was still looking for the answer, the feeling that I understood fighting. During the fight, in the second round, I started to throw feints and to interpret feints and reactions as attempts to “understand” how my opponent was speaking, and of understanding his system.
In practice, this became counterproductive. I was over-applying philosophical analysis to a domain that was fundamentally physical. Later analysis, including further reflection using ChatGPT-sourced knowledge and my analysis, made it clear that this was a misapplication of cross-domain thinking. The mechanical reality of fighting does not map cleanly onto linguistic or philosophical systems, even if there are superficial similarities.
Cognitive Friction: Knowledge vs Application
Across this period, a consistent problem had emerged. It was something I noticed in Chaing Mai as I trained, balancing physical action to mental analysis.
The ideas I was developing did not automatically translate into live performance. They did not reduce hesitation. Instead, they often increased cognitive load during exchanges.
There was a persistent friction between:
- abstract understanding
- and physical execution
I would often find myself waiting internally — not for action, but for clarity. As if insight would resolve the decision in real time. In sparring, this delay is decisive. The general feeling of anxiety in a foreign land did not help, and definitely worsened the problem. But I had learnt everything, from shapes to forces, and whilst I could correct my actions well, what I wanted was more akin to a supercomputer, fast fluid decisionmaking that looked otherworldly.
The reality was that I had learnt enough that if it was possible, I should be able to figure it out.
Vietnam and the Breakdown of the System
After my time in Thailand, I travelled to Vietnam. My visa situation in Bangkok had become unstable, and after a difficult period of attempting to secure accommodation and support, I had to leave quickly. I spent time in Bangkok airport over a two-day period trying to resolve my situation before relocating.
The transition was financially and psychologically strained. Throughout the broader trip, I was often operating with very limited resources, occasionally relying on emergency work opportunities to continue.
In Vietnam, the consequences of the earlier phase became more visible.
My assessment of myself deteriorated significantly. The failure to establish myself properly as a fighter in Thailand caused me to double down on internal analysis rather than external engagement. Instead of adjusting my approach through increased social or training exposure, I became more focused on refining knowledge.
I began to focus heavily on perceived internal weaknesses — tension, sensation in the body, small physical cues like joint “clicking.” I interpreted these as indicators of deeper structural problems in my fighting ability.
This led to long periods of intense internal focus, even while living in environments that should have encouraged external engagement and experience.
Cost of Time and Cognitive Drift
The dominant cost of this entire period was time.
Without exaggeration, hundreds of hours were spent reading, thinking, mapping, and reprocessing ideas about fighting, violence, and human behaviour. Much of this occurred in isolation, in a mental state heavily absorbed in conceptual analysis.
The subject matter itself was not neutral. It involved sustained focus on violence, physical harm, and competitive conflict. Over time, this shaped both perception and internal tone.
It also created a psychological drift: the more time spent in abstract analysis, the further removed the thinking became from direct physical experience.
At a certain point, I became aware that this mode of thinking could distort judgment and emotional calibration.
And was it worth it? The deeper I went into theoretical models, the less immediate connection there was to the practical reality of fighting. An early idea I had was that fighting was, before a fighter, even got the chance to fight an opponent, self-inflicted injury. Even basic preparation — conditioning, impact training, repeated physical stress — involves controlled self-inflicted strain. Fighting, by nature, was hurtful.
Closing Position
I learned a significant amount during this period. I learnt, quite honestly, the theory of everything, to a certain extent. I surveyed anything and everything. It was a journey thatwas painful - genuinely a tale, a hero's journey maybe, but really something more akin to Odin's journey around the world, and whether I had lost the equivalent of an eye, is up for debate, but sometimes it feels like it.
But, as I said while hitting the heavy bag, in one of those rare sessions I had managed to get in an mma club, I would give up an eye for this, not for the knowledge, or the understanding, but for the ability to fight - fight IQ, learning with ChatGPT and Anki was merely the route that the constraints I faced had left me.