Lethwei is a kickboxing style martial art from Burma, which shares connections to other Indo-Chinese kickboxing styles like Muay Thai, Muay Lao and Pradal Serey. The sport that was founded in Myanmar has been practiced in the country from early times.
The only equipment used by the fighters in the sport is a new version of boxing gloves. At a junior level, the participants use the head and the shin guards for protection against injury.
Punches, kicks, elbow attacks, and knee attacks are the hits that are the part of basic kickboxing are also a used in Lethwei. It addition to all of them, strikes like head butts and knuckle strikes are generally used by practitioners as part of takedowns due to which it is also knowna as "The Art of 9 limbs" Some of the unique Lethwei moves are, roundhouse kick, knee and punch, spinning elbow strike, back hook kick, knee and elbow strike, and jumping knee and elbow.
Today, Lethwei matches are conducted in two different formats-
- The traditional format and the second one,
- The modernized offshoot, which was started in 1996 and was named as "Myanmar traditional boxing".
The modernized version uses a point based system which is the adoption from Muay Thai for calling the winner. On the other hand, the traditional version had no scoring system for fights. Instead, the winner was decided based on which fighter drew first blood.
