Muay Thai training holidays in Thailand

One of the few established camps in Krabi, which is the appeal: mainland scenery and climbing on the doorstep without the density of the Phuket scene. Smaller trainee pool means fewer partners at your exact level. The same operator runs a second camp at Rawai Beach in Phuket, so confirm which of the two you are booking. English on the pads is in writing but rests on one named head trainer rather than the whole floor.

A small Ao Nang gym that publishes a daily rate and nothing else: train once a day or twice, and pay by the day. There is no week, month or private price on the site, and the rooms beside the gym are quoted on request, so the cost of a long stay has to be asked for rather than read. Suits somebody already in Ao Nang who wants to train while they are there more than somebody planning a month around a camp.

Two two-hour sessions a day, six days a week, and a price list three lines long: a class, a day pass, and a private for two students sharing one coach. No week or month rate makes a long stay awkward to budget, and the gym has no accommodation of its own. It reads as the daily training option for somebody already staying in Ao Nang.

Four public classes a day, two of them labelled beginner, and beds on the gym's own plot rather than farmed out to partner hotels. The rooms are priced by the night and published, which almost no camp in Thailand bothers to do. Fighter classes run but are not open to drop-ins, so the public timetable is the beginner and advanced sessions, six days a week. The gym is mid-move to a second site three and a half kilometres away and its own pages disagree about which address the classes run at, so confirm before booking. It also answers the two questions most camps dodge: the trainers have basic English with the fluent English at the desk, and there are no women-only classes but women train in every session.

Closer to a fitness retreat than a fight camp, and open about it: the programmes it sells are built around weight loss, rehabilitation and holiday training, with Muay Thai as the main activity rather than the only one. Classes, private sessions and rooms are priced separately and published, which is rarer than it should be. Suits someone who wants to train every day and get fit in Thailand, and is not where you go to be matched for a fight.

Runs structured multi-week training and weight-loss camps as packaged programmes rather than open drop-in training. Suits people who want the schedule decided for them.

MMA-first gym rather than a Muay Thai camp that added MMA. The right pick if mixed martial arts is the actual goal and Muay Thai is one component of it. A poor pick if you want a traditional Thai Muay Thai experience. The address the gym used to publish is no longer theirs: the domain lapsed and now serves an unrelated gambling site, so we removed the link rather than send anyone there. Nothing under that address has any connection to the gym.

A Bangkok gym with a real stable of professional Thai fighters rather than a foreigner-first operation. Training alongside working pros is the draw. Expect to be the weakest person in the room for a while, which is the point.

Attached to one of the most significant promoters and stables in Thai Muay Thai. The pedigree is the reason to go. Not designed as a soft landing for a first-time trainee.

A city gym two minutes from On Nut BTS that leads with Brazilian jiu-jitsu and runs Muay Thai alongside it, rather than the other way round. That makes it a poor substitute for a traditional Thai camp and a good fit for anyone living in Bangkok who wants more than one art on the same membership. Its own site says beginners are welcome, and there are kids classes and private sessions.

A fighters' stable at the end of a residential lane off Sukhumvit 101, founded in 1997 by a Lumpini promoter and named after the air conditioner brand that has sponsored it ever since. One ring under a pitched roof with the sides open, walls carrying three decades of fight photographs, and a roster of stadium champions the gym names itself. The record has a gap worth reading twice: the only timetable published is labelled fighters' training, twice a day with sparring and clinching in both sessions, and a single session is sold to anybody who turns up for 500 baht. Nothing on the page says which of those two things a visitor gets. Closed Saturday and Sunday.

A family-run camp on the mountain at Khao Yai Thiang, which its own site puts about three hours by road northeast of Bangkok. Two full rings and sixteen bags, and training is sold either by the single session or inside a package that bundles the room and two meals a day. The isolation is the draw and the catch at once: there is no town attached to it, so a month here is training, eating and sleeping.

A second-floor gym inside the Old City moat, built around an education visa rather than around a holiday. Kru O runs the training, but the product on sale is a year in Thailand with a gym attached, and the pricing is shaped accordingly.

A family camp on the quiet western edge of Bangkok, running since 2008, where visitors train in the same two sessions as the resident Thai fight team and a room is sold inside the stay rather than by the night. Suits someone who wants a small camp and a fixed daily rhythm more than someone who wants to be in the middle of the city.