CURRICULUM & LEVELS
Living Muay Thai is revolutionizing instructional design. The LMT Curriculum and Outcomes Program is a complete educational architecture. From the first class to instructor certification, past achievements and next steps are at your fingertips. Every student and every educator knows where they are, where they’re going, and how to get there at all times. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is arbitrary. Nothing is left behind as you grow. Whether you are a student or a teacher, the path is yours to walk, at your pace, in your way.
How the Curriculum Works
LMT’s curriculum is a cumulative process. Concepts carry and build from one level to the next, deepening as your experience grows. Martial standards build on one another, filling your toolbox and evolving alongside your capabilities. Beginner material, instead of being left behind, becomes essential to the advanced student. Everything is nurtured, and nothing is lost. As you live Muay Thai, the LMT curriculum lives with you.
JMuay Thai, boxing, and clinch technique, fitness, culture, and more progress at the same time, awarding achievement levels for each category that are visible to both student and teacher. Becoming a complete martial artist or educator has never been a single-track process, and every journey is unique. LMT’s curriculum reflects that reality, tracking development across multiple dimensions simultaneously, iteratively, and digitally so you don’t have to.
Progression is attainment-based. Advancement happens alongside mastery, not on a schedule. How a student demonstrates that mastery is flexible, supported by multiple testing formats and elective standards. The LMT Curriculum and Outcomes Program supports individual gym testing cultures while allowing diverse students to show what they know in ways that fit who they are. The standards are consistent across every LMT gym. The path to meeting them is yours.
Justin taught his first striking class in 1988 and launched his own programming in 2003 through what is now MX Gym, an experimental martial education facility in Northern Minnesota. MX Gym nurtures fighters, teachers, hobbyists, and fitness enthusiasts. MX Gym is built on the belief that every student can understand the “Why” and deserves education that challenges them where they are.
LMT’s curriculum champions high agency for the learner and the educator. The curriculum provides the map, but you, as the educational user, decide the route. The student and instructor collaborate by design using built-in tracking tools so that we all move forward when we are ready. Together.
The Levels
LMT uses armbands called prajeat to signify progression through Muay Thai skill and the journey of martial knowledge. There are nine student levels, each using a different color prajeat, broken into four development categories as follows:
Beginner — White, Yellow, Orange, Green Prajeats — approximately 12 months. Building foundations. The habits, the language, and bedrock of all ongoing Muay Thai development.
Intermediate — Blue & Purple Prajeats — approximately 12 months. Students at this level are building dynamically on a solid foundation. The path to fighting and coaching often manifests as an intermediate student. Techniques are beginning to work, and concepts can be used dynamically.
Advanced — Red, Brown — approximately 12 months. Skills learned from the first class are sharpened and pressure-tested. Capacity for dynamic combat decisions grows, and individual character within the art reveals itself. Conditioning and fitness are typically high.
Instructor Candidate — Black — minimum 12 months: For those not currently interested in teaching, the black armband provides a cap to years of progress. Growth as an artist changes and a new learning journey begins. For those interested in teaching, black armband becomes a launch platform, beginning a year-long preparation for instructor certification.
Level 1 White Armband 
Level 2 Yellow Armband 
Level 3 Orange Armband 
Level 4 Green Armband 
Level 5 Blue Armband 
Level 6 Purple Armband 
Level 7 Red Armband 
Level 8 Brown Armband Student Level I 
Level 9 Black Armband Student Level II 
Level 10 Apprentice Instructor Student Level III 
Level 11 Associate Instructor 
Level 12 Full Instructor 
Level 13 Senior Instructor / Ajarn 
The Four Corners
LMT’s Four Corners framework unlocks the door to the inner workings of combat sport. Digging into four key universal aspects of combat science—Structure, Force, Time, and Space—the Four Corners becomes a scaffold that guides practitioners toward difficult-to-teach concepts, and into essential skills and knowledge that are often mentioned but rarely described. Learn deeper, reinforce your strengths, pinpoint your weaknesses, and know the “Why” every time.
With LMT, Four Corners concepts, as the science of combat sport, are introduced and revisited throughout a learner’s Muay Thai journey. They are broken down within the curriculum into specific items students must know and specific abilities students must possess. Instructors know where students are and what they need next. Plucking a concept to teach in a class for all levels, or tailoring a lesson around each student’s personal needs, is easy when you know what is expected and why.
The Four Corners offers every student and educator a shared language for understanding Muay Thai at the deepest levels of combat science. When you travel between LMT gyms, the language travels with you. When you wonder why, there is an answer. When you step into the ring, you fight within the Four Corners.
Professional Development
Prajeat ranks track your growth in Muay Thai performance, but Muay Thai asks more of its practitioners than combat-skill. A single fighter, gym, or student requires layers of support. Coaches, cornermen, padholders, fitness trainers, and educators each carry indispensable value in the collective learning pathway. Such roles require skills that the mat alone does not teach. LMT knows that your path is your own. It is our responsibility to provide intentional development programming so that you can share it effectively, whatever path you choose.
LMT’s professional development offerings are modular. While there are common entry points, they are not tied to specific armbands or levels. A student at Level 5 might begin coaching training while a student at Level 8 has not. Different people, different goals, with different supported paths. The system is designed to help you build the skill set that matches your ambitions, on your timeline. LMT helps you develop the skills you need and connects you to the art in a way that is the most you.
In-development offerings include coaching preparation, padholding, cornerman training, comprehensive educator training for those who want to lead classes and run programs, and high-intensity fitness conditioning through LMT’s integration with Thaibata — the world’s first HIIT-based Muay Thai training program, created by LMT co-founder Ajarn Juice Veverka. These modules can be combined, stacked, and customized, revealing new pathways and unique specializations.
LMT’s menu of certifications is growing. As our professional development programs expand through 2026 and beyond, new modules are added and existing ones refined. We guarantee that when we build for you, it will always be based on genuine research, educator feedback, and the needs of the real people doing the work. Professional development within LMT is not a credential mill. It is a commitment to ensuring that the people who live Muay Thai are equipped to thrive.
Armbands and Ranking
Armbands called prajeat, are culturally significant in Thailand. A soldier’s mother would braid them from her clothing, have them blessed, and send her son to war with a prayer that the prajeat would protect him and the hope that he would bring them home to her. Today, prajeat are worn in the ring, as with the warriors of old. Over the past twenty years, with the introduction of curricular systems in the West, the Thai armband has become a way to remember tradition while showing the progress students make on their Muay Thai journey.
In LMT, each skill level has a color, and each color has a corresponding prajeat. This method makes LMT’s system compatible with multiple gym cultures, whether they choose to use armband ranking or another method.
LMT’s armbands are hand-braided and made from cloth to honor the tradition of the prajeat.
What’s Under the Hood
When you join LMT, as a student or an educator, you experience how far transformed education can go. What members feel, as they make new connections to the art, is paralleled only by the magnitude of what they can learn and do. Within every armband level is a multi-dimensional progression system that tracks development across technique, fitness, culture, pressure testing, and more. Behind those modular elements, gamified tracking opens students and educators to the roads ahead and behind, and what needs to be done now to unlock functional skill and knowledge. LMT’s curriculum architecture is the most advanced adaptive outcomes system in martial education. Step into it and start Living Muay Thai.