Atascadero mom trains for Muay Thai in Thailand

Posted: 8:57 am, October 21, 2015 by Heather Young

Julia “Jewels” Perez trains with the main instructor, Kru Dam, at Sitmonchai in Tha Maka Thailand.

–Julia “Jewels” Perez is not only mom to a 13-year-old daughter, but she’s also an undefeated amateur Muay Thai fighter. To improve her skills, she headed to Thailand for a little over week. She spent nearly the whole time eating, breathing and living Muay Thai. She’s staying at the camp, Stimonchai, in Tha Maka, which is about 60 miles outside of Bangkok.

Each day Perez, along with the other trainees, warm up on their own in the morning, work out in the shadow box, do heavy pad work and then lift weights. “It’s pretty casual,” she said halfway through her training in Thailand. In the afternoon, she repeats most of the morning training with a warmup, shadow box, heavy pad work, followed by clinching and sparing. She heads back to Atascadero on Tuesday.

“The 1:1 pad work with the main [trainer] because he’s so knowledgable and he’s trained [people] in the U.S.,” Perez said. “The whole thing has given me a different perspective on how Americans fight.”

Julia “Jewels” Perez with the main instructor, Kru Dam, at Sitmonchai in Tha Maka Thailand.

The opportunity to train in Thailand came up in April when she was at an event in Los Angeles for Thai New Year. She and her trainer, Kru Albert Malatamban, met a Thai trainer who said she was getting a group together to go to Thailand to train. She started raising funds to go before the group fell apart. “But I still wanted to go,” Perez said. So she arranged her own trip, choosing one of the gyms on the trip to spend her whole time at.

Perez has been training in Muay Thai since June 2013 and has been fighting since April 2014. Before transitioning to Muay Thai, she trained in American Freestyle Karate for three years. She got into martial arts because she was looking for a cardio kickboxing class to stay fit over the summer. Her instructor said she was doing great and asked if she wanted to take karate classes, so she trained in American Freestyle Karate.

“Karate sparring was not challenging, which brought me to Muay Thai,” Perez said. She’s been training Elite Muay Thai Academy in San Luis Obispo with Malatamban since she changed. Jewels is also the current Muay Thai, Ultimate Women’s Bantamweight Champion. In addition to training at the SLO gym, she also trains at the Templeton location every Tuesday.

Perez had her daughter at 16 and graduated from Del Rio Continuation High School a semester early. As a single mom from her teenaged years, she worked hard to finish high school and then obtained her paralegal degree. She works full-time for Cal Poly in accounts receivable. Now that her daughter is older, she said she focusing more on her own dreams.

“She’s excited about it, [though] obviously she misses me,” Perez said about her daughter, who is staying with Perez’s parents. Her daughter’s English teacher assigned the students current event projects and said that her daughter could write on Perez since she’s been in the news recently.

For more information about Perez and Elite Muay Thai Academy, go to elitemuaythaiacademy.com.