What is the clinch?
Standing striking range where you are grabbing each other. Knees, elbows, short punches, and the doorway into takedowns.
The clinch is what is left when striking range collapses and you are both still upright, holding on to each other. Nobody can throw anything long. Knees, elbows, short hooks and body shots live here, and so does every takedown ever hit.
In Muay Thai the famous version is the plum. Both hands behind the head, elbows squeezed together in front, breaking their posture down while your knees come up into them. In wrestling the same distance is about underhooks, overhooks and body locks, and the prize is a trip or a lift instead of a knee.
Here is why it matters more than it looks like it should. Almost every real fight is in this range within seconds. People close, they grab, they get tangled up. If you have never trained here, that is the moment you freeze, and freezing is how people get hurt.
What you learn first is not offense. It is posture and hand position. Chin down, head up, hips in and not bent at the waist, your hands beating theirs to the inside. Then how to get out. Breaking the grip and circling away is very often the smartest thing available to you, and it is the first clinch skill I teach anybody who is here for self-defense.
This is also where the two halves of what I teach meet. It is striking and grappling inside the same grip, which is why no-gi and Muay Thai belong in one session rather than in two separate classes on two different nights.
On the striking side it is the thing boxing simply does not have, and one of the real differences between the two arts: boxing or Muay Thai, where to start. On the grappling side it is where the grip fight happens, and the grip fight decides whether anybody gets taken down at all: takedowns or pull guard.
It is also the clearest answer to people who think sport training does not transfer. Nobody stands at range in a parking lot. They close and they grab. See does sport martial arts work in a real situation.
The clinch is a feel more than a set of moves, and feel comes from somebody’s hands actually being on you. See everything you can train.
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