Collaborative Leadership and Community Engagement
From the start, Living Muay Thai placed being a relationship above being an organization. Across the years before LMT had a name, our growing group of Muay Thai educators began to blossom. We found each other at training camps, competitions, and events across the United States and Thailand. Year after year, the same gyms showed up and began to share corner staff, warm up each other's fighters, and trade skills between rounds or bouts. Trust grew, friendships budded, and Ideas about what martial education could be began to form in the space between training sessions and long drives home.
No one assigned a name. It was just a group of educators and practitioners who were living Muay Thai in the best ways they knew how. As time went on, we recognized a shared desire for open lines of communication, bridges between diverse philosophies, and a shared realization that the work was better when it was done together.
Then the world shut down.
In April of 2020, during the COVID pandemic, gyms across the United States closed their doors. Students disappeared overnight. Overhead kept coming. For most martial educators, there was no safety net. There were few avenues of support, and no governing body that could step in and help. No one was coming to the rescue. Nine of us decided to help each other. We each committed to teaching two live online classes per week via Zoom. That gave our combined students 18 diverse Muay Thai classes weekly, taught by nine experienced instructors, with a growing library of recorded content to fill the gaps.
Living Muay Thai, as we came to call it, was built for survival, but it quickly became an opportunity to thrive. LMT evolved into a pressure-tester for the community, tools, and methods for which we all had long yearned.
With the threat of COVID gone, rather than disbanding, the LMT team sharpened. One by one, the ideas that had been forming for years began to take real shape. Accessible community, a shared adaptive curriculum, structured educator training, collaborative events, open training exchanges grew around the test group that became the LMT Board of Educators.
The pandemic survival team became a governing organization, and the decades-long hungers of struggling educators became intentional programming. Today, LMT is more than a treaty for survival, it is the collected community and programming we wish we always had on our journey as educators in Muay Thai.
The power of Living Muay Thai lives in collaborative leadership and community engagement.
We believe that every individual carries unique value. LMT’s board of instructors is composed of specialists, each skilled in a diverse aspect of Muay Thai. Our department heads, whether they practice Muay Thai or share connections within the wider culture, bring personalized skill and a love for the culture that is necessary to create powerful change. Our affiliates, our students, and our stakeholders are the living foundation upon which the organization is built. LMT is a community of contributors, dynamic and transformative.
LMT is not a structure built around a single personality, but around people. Members care for one another's well-being beyond professional development. Knowledge is shared openly. Questions are welcome at every level. Educators who once worked in isolation now have peers, mentors, and collaborators they can access at any time. Students become the teachers, and teachers become the practitioners they always wanted to be.
In the classroom, LMT digs deeper than the combos. We want to know why and believe our students can know too. It is our core belief that every lesson should be transformative, and that every student should be one half of the learning team. We are all, after all, living Muay Thai together.
Education, especially martial education, is not a problem that can be solved once. With countless voices, endless passions, and ever-shifting market conditions, every proposed solution creates new questions, and every answer reveals new needs. These emergent needs fuel LMT’s community, programming, and dreams. Listening, refining, and innovating based on the experiences of our educators and students allows us to turn what worked last year into what is needed next year. We are not the only voice in Muay Thai education. We are here to give a voice to all Muay Thai stakeholders. Collaborative, community-driven, evidence-based education works, and LMT is here to work for you.
The Thai American Cultural Arts Foundation (TACAF) promotes Thai culture and art forms in the Western world. TACAF recognized that supporting Thai cultural arts and community building in the West requires more than events and seminars. It requires a platform that enables educators to connect, develop, and grow together across what were once geographic and organizational boundaries, as well as providing support for resource building and allocation.
TACAF supports this vision through two key programs. The Muay Thai Legacy Fund is an in-development fund that seeks to build resources to support the spread of Muay Thai and the stories of those who are part of its legacy. Living Muay Thai (LMT) is the martial education arm of TACAF.
Muay Thai, as a living piece of Thailand's cultural heritage, carries centuries of history, spirituality, and national identity across the globe along with its increasingly popular practice. TACAF ensures that this is done with respect, love, and integrity.
LMT's programming is nourished by tradition and grounded in research.
Starting in 2019, before LMT formally manifested, its programming design began taking shape around proprietary research into martial education. Extensive comparative analyses of existing outcomes systems, interviews with martial stakeholders, and internal systems testing led to the design and development of all key aspects of LMT’s initial programming, including its Summits, the Curriculum and Outcomes Program, and community design methodologies.
In 2025, LMT co-founder Dr. Justin Markus continued his martial education research by conducting a comprehensive study examining LMT's impact on martial educators across its first five years of operation. The study dove into the lived experience of educators from seven different facilities to reveal LMT’s real-world impact, and to direct LMT’s development over the coming years.
The findings confirmed what LMT has been fighting for all along: when martial educators have access to real professional development, a structured curriculum, and genuine peer connection, the impact goes beyond better teaching. Educators described professional growth, pedagogical freedom, and a transformation in how they see themselves and their role in the art. The research identified clear objectives for LMT's continued development. Those recommendations are actively shaping the programming you see today.
LMT's design is backed by a board of instructors with 235+ combined years of training time AND by rigorous academic research. LMT is the only Muay Thai organization in the United States that can point to a completed doctoral study of its own programming. Only Living Muay Thai can deliver educator and student development programs backed by comprehensive educational research from across the field of education. The combination of experience and evidence working together allows LMT’s programming to actually serve the people it's built for.