Lethwei

• Photographer
  Adam Hinton, United Kingdom

A project from Myanmar on a local from of kick boxing called
Lethwei. I asked my fixer to find me a good local gym in
Yangon. There we found around half a dozen boys and young
men engaging in one of the toughest work outs I've ever
witnessed. Punch bags weren't hard enough so the trainer had
a frame built to hold truck tyres to that the boys would have to
kick and punch.
Mao, my fixer, had managed to get me a ringside pass to a
Myanmar-Japan tournament that weekend. As a great
coincidence one of the boys was fighting in it and I was able to
follow him into the ring.
It was the most brutal fighting I've ever seen.