The September Phone Call I Get Every Year
Every September I get the same phone call. Some guy from Cranford or Union just got his kids back into a school routine, his 6pm slot opened back up, and he finally decides this is the year he tries the Muay Thai class he’s been putting off since spring. Good instinct. September is genuinely the best month to start — the summer chaos is over, the schedule is set, and you’ve got a real shot at showing up twice a week without your life blowing it up.
But here’s what actually separates the guy who sticks around from the guy who takes one hard leg kick to the thigh in week two and quietly disappears: learning to check.
What a Check Actually Is
A check is simple. When someone throws a leg kick at your thigh, instead of standing there and eating it with soft muscle tissue, you lift your own shin and meet their shin with yours. Bone on bone. Think of it like a car bumper versus a door panel. The bumper is built to take the hit and shrug it off. The door panel is not — one solid impact and it’s crumpled, or in this case, it’s a dead leg that doesn’t work right for the next three days.
That’s the whole concept. You’re not blocking a kick like you’d block a punch with your hands. You’re turning your own leg into the thing that absorbs the impact instead of the thing that gets destroyed by it.
Sounds easy when I explain it in a blog post. It is not easy to do live, under pressure, when someone’s leg is coming at you fast. That’s the whole game.
The Timing Problem — Why Flinching Isn’t Checking
Here’s where beginners get it wrong every single time, and it’s not their fault — nobody tells them this part.
A check has to happen before the kick arrives. Not as the kick lands. Not a half-second after you feel the impact starting. Before.
What almost every new student does instead is flinch. They see the kick coming, their leg jerks up in a panic reaction, and half the time they’re too late — the kick’s already connecting with the thigh by the time the shin gets there. That’s not a check. That’s a flinch with good intentions.
A real check is a read. You see the kick start — the hip turning, the weight shifting — and your shin is already rising to meet it before the kick has traveled halfway. That’s the difference between someone with two weeks of mat time and someone with six months. It’s not that the six-month guy is tougher. His timing changed. His eyes learned to read the kick earlier, and his body learned to respond without thinking about it.
That second part — without thinking about it — is the whole point of how we train it.
How We Actually Drill This at All Star
We don’t put a brand-new student in front of a live partner throwing kicks at their leg. That’s how people get hurt and how people quit on day one.
We start on the heavy bag. Hundreds of reps. I’ll have a guy just sit in a fighting stance and check an imaginary kick, then check a bag that’s swinging, then check while I’m calling out random timing so his body starts reacting instead of guessing. We’re building the muscle memory before we ever introduce a partner, because muscle memory has to exist before the nerves show up. If the first time your body ever attempts a check is against a live person who might actually hurt you, your nervous system is going to override whatever technique you think you know. You’ll flinch. Everybody flinches the first time, that’s normal — but hundreds of bag reps means the flinch turns into an actual check a lot faster than it would if you skipped straight to sparring.
By the time we pair students up for controlled kick-check drills, most of them have already checked a version of that kick a few hundred times without a person attached to it. The transfer is faster than you’d think.
I’ve been doing this a long time — I came up under Renzo Gracie, I went 6-3 as a pro fighting in the IFL, Bellator, and the UWC where I won the light heavyweight title — and the leg kick exchange is one of those things that looks basic on paper and takes people years to actually get comfortable with live. There’s no shortcut. There’s just correct reps, in the right order, enough times that your body stops asking your brain for permission.
Why This Fits Where You Are Right Now
If you’re a 35-year-old guy in Cranford who hasn’t done a full-contact sport since high school, you don’t need to walk in already knowing how to check a kick. Nobody expects that. What you need is a room that’s going to walk you through it in the right order — bag first, timing drills second, live partner work once your body’s ready for it — instead of throwing you to the wolves on night one.
That’s how we run the adult Muay Thai program at All Star. It’s also exactly why September works so well to start. You’ve got a fresh routine, a fresh schedule, and enough of the year left to actually put in the hundred-plus reps it takes before this stuff feels automatic instead of theoretical.
Come try a class this week. It’s free, no pressure, no gear required on day one. Mention this post at the door and I’ll walk you through your first check on the bag myself. Call or text (908) 341-1131 to grab a spot.
