We were lucky to catch up with Aaron Veverka recently and have shared our conversation below.

Aaron, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I was a young child sitting down with my father watching David Carradine help people use Kung Fu. There was something about that, the fact these combat forms were in use to better the lives of those in distress.
I wanted to learn how to do that.
My mother however wouldn’t let me learn martial arts, as she said it had a Buddhist influence.
However she would let me take whatever I wanted out of the library; so I learned the entire Kenpo Karate system by Ed Parker through his materials.

After I left home and moved in with my grandfather I found my first teacher.
This was Jeet Kune Do Concepts.
Muay Thai is part of this beautiful mishmash of pugilistic artistry.
I was studying with a friend of mine, and we saw that we saw that a Muay Thai seminar was coming to PA, and so we decided to go out to attend.
We went out and were only able to train for one day, and I was sore for two.
This was everything I wanted,

This was the Ajarn Surachai Sirisute in 1994.
I have trained under him ever since.

Aaron, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Muay Thaibata is the world’s first HIIT-based system for Muay Thai. This program was developed by Ajarn Aaron Veverka, “Kru Juice” to his friends and students. He had been looking for a HIIT program (High-Intensity Interval Training) for his students so they would be able to train on a higher level in a shorter amount of time; both for his fighters and his fitness-based students, as many of them were limited on training time.

Being a senior instructor with the World Thaiboxing Association, he had contacts around the world in eighteen countries, and no one had developed one specifically for Muay Thai. So he started working on one with his students in a series of different trials for several years.

Kru Russ Herbert was able to assist in these, critiquing the things that didn’t work and reinforcing the ones that did. Slowly, the formula was created to build not only athleticism over time but how to teach Muay Thai in a progressive manner, so that the skillsets could be learned more quickly and efficiently with a better understanding of the body mechanics involved.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I was looking around for a conditioning system for my students, as many of them didn’t have a lot of time to train outside of the gym. Being part of the World Thaiboxing Association I knew people across eighteen countries.
So I decided to look for a HIIT system ( High intensity Interval Training) I could purchase.
No one had one.
So out of necessity I ran trials on my classes.
And something happened: my classes grew by 300%!
On top of this my retention was nearly 100%!

I realized I stumbled on something that people really benefited from and enjoyed.
This was the birth of Muay Thaibata.
The word itself is a play on words; HIIT workouts are often called “Tabata” workouts, because Dr. Tabata came up with the idea.
So when looking for an idea for the name, we realized the name already explained the program, letting people know upfront what we were doing.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

To bring Muay Thai to people, and help them learn it in a systematized way where they can learn efficiently and correctly, with the conditioning being the byproduct. This is the world’s first progressive HIIT system for Muay Thai.
The student is being rebuilt from the ground up during their training to harness the best of themselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://muaythaibata.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/muaythaibata/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/muaythaibata/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/muaythaibata

Image Credits
Aaron Veverka