Years ago when I was studying budo taijutsu, a friend of mine Rick, told me about the concept of aliveness, and after studying the concept, and then going to several seminars dealing with the subject, I made it the foundation of how I trained and taught martial arts.

Aliveness is training with resistance using energy, timing and motion. Aliveness is training with resistance using energy, timing and motion. Regardless of your martial art, it is critical to make functional and demonstrable improvements in performance. If the art you train does not include some form of unscripted pressure testing it is not functional and you will not be able to perform, that move, combination or movement in a real situation. For a Drill to be alive there must be variations in timing, energy, and motion,. It takes all for a drill to be alive.
Remember – ALL 3.
A choreographed assault that gets counted by a planned series of responses ending with a throw, such as you see in budo taijutsu or Krav Maga minus the throw, lacks timing, energy and motion. The assault is predictable. A realistic energy, as in a resistance, is non-existent, and the movement is, choreographed. Now in functional training, you do need to start out with a compliant partner and some predetermined sequences, however, the error is stopping there, when it is the actual starting point. In Muay Thai you may start by doing individual strikes or combinations, or grappling moves without any resistance, from a partner however, within a short amount of time you will add in unpredictable movement, additional moves or responses to more closely resemble a Muay Thai match or self-defense situation.

Aliveness is not just Sparring

I’ve noticed a discussion about aliveness does come up people make the mistaken assumption that  “aliveness” is just  “sparring”

You can drill with Aliveness but the drill has to contain timing, energy (resistance) and motion.

So you can have a drill where one guy is going to work the jab only.

The feeder has to move around and then hold up the target ever once in a while. (Movement and timing.)

The feeder, every once in a while, throws a shot back to make sure the jabber is covering properly. (Resistance.)

So while this is still just a very “light” drill it’s one done with Aliveness.

You then add onto it…jab, hook…etc. which will eventually lead to sparring.
In conclusion, if you want to develop real-world self-defense skills you need to include aliveness at every training session.

For Training Muay Thai in an alive fashion

For Kids Muay Thai training in Murfreesboro Tennessee: https://nakmartialartstn.com/kids-muay-thai-classes/

For Adult Muay Thai training in Murfreesboro Tennessee: https://nakmartialartstn.com/adult-muay-thai-classes/

Additional Reading on Aliveness

Why Aliveness? by Matt Thornton
It’s Aliveness – Still by Matt Thornton

Based on all of over a 2 decades working with a child development specialist. I was taught that children show developmental milestones based on specific age groups. For Martial arts ages, especially Muay Thai, I Believe the best age groups are:

4 & 6 
 7 to 9,
10 to 14.
15-17
This was unheard of  (And still unfortunately today) as most martial arts schools divided their children into two age groups: 6 and under and 7 and up.  Worse some schools for convenience would do ‘family style’ classes from age 3 all the way to adult.

By properly dividing up Children’s classes into more specific age groups I found that it solved many hair-pulling challenges that would occur daily in classes.  for the younger students EVERY drill was “too hard” and  “too easy” for the older students.

My Muay Thai Curriculum for children takes all that I learned from working with and teaching a child development program to applying it to my Muay Thai KIDZ program so that children could get the valuable self defense skills from Muay Thai kickboxing while doing so in an age-appropriate.  In other words teaching children real martial arts with a solid understanding of child development.

Muay Thai KIDZ is an integrating Systems That MAXIMIZES Learning. The curriculum includes ACTIVE LEARNING, and Game-Based Learning drills that kids “play” so that their WORKING MEMORY is stimulated. Not All Schools the same.  Even if a school properly Separates children into the correct age groups, they may not understand the child’s stage of development, and the Curriculum would reflect that. As you can see, Muay Thai KIDZ takes training to a whole new level! In fact, kids can’t even join their first class without an age-specific pre-evaluation to identify where his or her strengths are, and also how our program will help in his or her overall growth and development. Muay Thai KIDZ is a product with several decades of ongoing research and development in how children learn and grow. PLUS a deep understanding the art of Muay Thai.

The overall results are children that become the best versions of themselves: physically, intellectually, emotionally, and even socially!