Muay Thai Parents: The 95/5 Rule for Real Progress

Training like you did before having kids isn’t making you better… It’s the reason you’re not progressing.

There’s a tiny slice of your training that actually moves the needle, and most parents are burying it under the wrong work.

The fighters with kids who compete don’t do more, they’re ruthlessly efficient and do less.

In this video, I’ll show you what the critical training really is, and how to compete even working full time with kids under three—by adding micro sessions that target Muay Thai skill development.

This approach took me all the way to the amateur world championships in Bangkok… My son was three, my daughter was two, and I was working full time as a design engineer. It works. And crucially, its worked over the last 12 years for my online fighters too.

Here’s the problem. You’re comparing yourself to your pre-kids self, or to single fighters with far more freedom, or those without a family. But, that’s the wrong comparison.

The training model that worked when you were 23 doesn’t work when you’re 33 with a two-year-old and a full-time job.

Sleep, your recovery bedrock is compromised while your family commitments have scaled considerably—little people are very demanding.

You’re under-recovered and overcommitted. Different life demands require a different training model.

Strip back to the highest leverage training minutes possible. Find the critical five percent of your training that actually moves the needle—and protect that floor at all costs.

And what most people miss, is that classes give you exposure to new techniques, coaching, and live testing. But the skill that survives under pressure in a fight, gets installed between classes. In brief, targeted sessions at home. That’s the missing layer. It’s where the five percent lives.

Here’s the model… Three levels of training.

Level 1: Anchor Sessions. These are your non-negotiables. The critical five percent.

• Two Muay Thai classes per week
• Two strength sessions
• One conditioning session

If these happen, the week is a win. You protected your floor.

Level 2: Micro sessions. Ten to twenty minutes, when life allows.

• Bag rounds
• Shadowboxing
• Mobility
• Extra cardio conditioning

These are opportunistic—not scheduled, not required. They fit in the gaps. They’re where you build from.

Level 3: Bonus Sessions. Anything extra is a bonus. Not a failure if missed.

Your goal isn’t perfection, it’s protecting the floor.

[On-screen text: “Never drop below the 5% floor.”]

Here’s why this specific combination works.

Skill sessions give you discovery and live validation. You learn new techniques, you test them under pressure. Skill sessions remain the priority.

Strength sessions preserve what matters most for a fighter: power, muscle, injury resilience, and confidence. Missed strength sessions don’t just cost you muscle—they cost you the ability to take a punch and give one back.

Conditioning sessions keep your engine alive. Without them, your pace falls apart in round three.

One important rule: strength sessions can’t be performed on consecutive days. You need at least 48 hours between full-body resistance sessions. That’s non-negotiable—it’s where the adaptation actually happens.

Classes are your discovery and validation environment.

But motor learning research shows that skills don’t become reliable through exposure alone. They become reliable through distributed repetition—hundreds of consistent, focused reps, spread across time. Compounded and consolidated with sleep.

Your classes give you the discovery. Your micro sessions give you the installation–skill that shows up. That’s the difference between training that merely accumulates and training that compounds. You’re shooting at the critical 5% not the remaining 95.

Daan trained twice a week at his gym in the Netherlands and did the rest at home. In twelve weeks, he increased his Cooper run distance by eleven percent, improved his Wingate test results, and reported noticeable improvements in speed and fluidity on the bag.

Jonathan came to the program with an ACL reconstruction, an eight-month-old teething child, and unfinished business. Six months later, he won the NSW State Championship.

Both of them protected their five percent floor. Both of them built something that held up under pressure.

Train in the window life is least likely to steal. Early mornings are for reliability—strength work, conditioning, bag rounds. Fewer interruptions. You can focus on quality.

For most parents, two to three early sessions per week works well. Not daily. Selectively. And keep them for strength, aerobic conditioning, and maybe drilling skills—not emotionally demanding sessions.

Evenings are for your classes—where you need coaching, feedback, and live pressure. This window is one you need to negotiate with your partner, so they can take the kids.

Late nights are for recovery, not intensity. If you find hard training later-on disrupts sleep, save those hours for technique work, mobility, or light flow.

Here’s a template. But first—the most important rule:

Don’t be rigid on which day each session happens. Your priority is to check off the number of anchor sessions each week. Make that your streak.

If you hit all five anchors, the week is a win—even if Tuesday became Thursday and Friday became Saturday.

Monday: 05:30, strength training (45 minutes)

Tuesday: Evening Muay Thai class

Wednesday: 05:30, conditioning and bag work

Thursday: Evening Muay Thai class or sparring

Friday: 05:30, strength training

Saturday: Twenty minutes solo—shadowboxing or bag rounds

Sunday: Rest, mobility, or family walk

Not glamorous. Highly repeatable. Protects your 5% floor.

And outperforms random hard weeks followed by burnout.

Here’s how to adapt each session when time or recovery is compromised.

Strength sessions can be 80/20’d.

If time is tight or recovery is poor, do just the strength exercise sets (like deadlift, squats, presses, chin ups). That’s the essential 20 percent—the work that actually drives adaptation. If you’ve a little more time, add one high intensity set each of the speed exercises (like plyos and med ball throws) and power exercises (like loaded jumbs or kettlebell swings). If you have less time, just stick with the foundation strength work.

Mobility can be a micro session or a bonus. If mobility isn’t a current limiting factor for you, treat it as optional. If it is—if you’re tight, if it’s affecting your technique—put it into the Level 2 micro category. The same applies when life goes wrong.

Here’s the part most plans leave out. If sleep was terrible? Cut volume by a third.

Kids kept you up all night? Walk and mobility instead.

Work exploded? Ten to fifteen minutes at home.

Motivation low? Start the warm-up. Momentum will do the rest. Keep that anchor session streak alive.

The system only works if it survives real life. That’s why the floor exists—so there’s always something to fall back to that still generates reliable progress.

When sleep is consistently interrupted—and for parents of young children, that’s the default—there are two tools that genuinely help.

First: strategic naps. During the week, at lunchtime at work. I used to head out to my car, set an alarm for thirty to forty minutes, and sleep. That’s enough to reset cognitively without entering deep sleep and waking up more groggy than before.

Second: creatine monohydrate. Increase your daily dose to between ten and twenty grams on days where sleep is wrecked. The research on creatine offsetting the cognitive and physical effects of sleep deprivation is solid. It wasn’t something understood when I was fighting… But I do it now.

These aren’t magic. But they’re the difference between running on empty and running on six out of ten.

Now, two Muay Thai classes a week sounds small. And for certain goals—maybe it is.

But your intended level of competition dictates what the minimum really is. What matters is training the right things, not training everything.

Here’s the thing though. I was in a noisy, open-matted gym—sweat-soaked floor, slippery patches everywhere—when my sparring partner Jack came forward, sensing blood, wanting to impose his hands on me. He’s taller and heavier than me. Better with his boxing.

We’d been going for a couple of rounds. I started just out of range, as I shuffled back I let my head drift forward and my hands drop slightly to fake fatigue. The trap was set.

He came… miss… miss… and as his cross slipped past my face—close enough to kiss my guard—I’d dropped into flow. The knee was already there. On autopilot.

“What the hell was that!” Jack laughed, shocked.

“A tricky little drill I’ve been playing with on my heavy bag,” I said. “I can’t believe it worked.”

And in that moment, standing on a wet patch of mat with Jack asking me to show him again, I realised something that changed everything:

I could evolve as a fighter alone in my garage—with a heavy bag, some creativity, and ten-minute windows—without waiting for a class to give me permission.

That realization—that I could build a fight game in the gaps of a busy life—is what took me all the way to the amateur world championships in Bangkok. My son was three, my daughter was two, I was working full-time. I didn’t have the “perfect” camp. I had a system that worked when life didn’t.

And here’s the thing: it is possible—even working full-time with kids under three—to compete. You just need to add more micro sessions that target Muay Thai skill development specifically. More on that in a moment.

So you can still compete. But not in permanent fight-camp mode. Build your base year-round. Then run focused eight-to-twelve-week camps when family timing allows.

Use your support wisely. Protect your relationships—this matters as much as your training.

You may feel like you’re behind right now. But many people quit completely during this phase. If you stay consistent—even imperfectly—in two years, you’ll be fitter, sharper, and more dangerous than the people who gave up. This season is temporary. Stay in the game. And that discipline you build now will turn you into a monster when you find your constraints are lifted.

If you want to uncover your limiting factors, and get training to plug those gaps, take the free Muay Thai performance scorecard—check the link below.

And if you’re thinking “okay, but will micro sessions actually build real fight skills?”—watch this next. I’ll show you the motor learning research behind why short, distributed, focused reps install skills that hold up under pressure. That’s where the real leverage is if you’re competing, or sparring regularly.