The Missing Technique Hiding in Plain Sight 

If you’re familiar with Lethwei fights, there may be an element you rarely think about, despite seeing it every time you watch a match.

That element is that Lethwei fighters do not use open-hand attacks.

You may ask, “What’s so peculiar about that? Lethwei is a boxing-adjacent martial art. It’s not strange that it doesn’t include open-hand techniques.”

However, if you peel back the layers, there are some fascinating factors to consider, including how Lethwei could take shape in the future.

The statement above that “Lethwei fighters do not use open-hand techniques” is actually imprecise.
Concerning only hands, while Lethwei fighters almost exclusively attack with their fists, they regularly use open hands for blocking, parrying, catching, and clinching. You may realize that these are all defensive or supportive techniques.
A more accurate statement would be: “Lethwei fighters almost never use open-hand techniques offensively.”

A Strange Absence in a Sport With Few Restrictions 

For the purposes of this article, “open-hand techniques” refers to any technique performed with the hand and fingers open, including palm strikes, knife-hand strikes, and finger strikes. Martial arts that do incorporate palm strikes in their arsenal such as Karate and Kempo categorize these techniques separately, but this article will group them together for simplicity. 

In Lethwei, you will almost never see a fighter use a palm strike or knife-hand strike offensively.
What makes this so interesting is that Lethwei has very few prohibitions. Fighters are allowed to use almost every part of their body, most famously the head.

Traditionally, Lethwei’s core forbidden actions are:

“No biting. No scratching. No pulling hair. No eye-gouging. No striking inappropriate places. No taking advantage of someone who has fallen down.”

No known Lethwei ruleset has prohibited open-hand attacks.

This creates a situation somewhat similar to ground fighting in Lethwei – a major technical and tactical domain is absent in a combat sport that allows many other techniques banned under other combat sports. 

The difference is that ground fighting never developed because Lethwei’s rules explicitly prevent it, whereas open-hand attacks remain absent despite being legal.

The Compatibility Paradox 

The absence is so complete and naturalized that many people may never question it. They simply associate Lethwei with similar sports like modern boxing, kickboxing, or Muay Thai and accept the lack of open-hand attacks at face value.

However, there is a significant difference.
Those sports use gloves, which dramatically change hand-attack dynamics and reduce the practicality of open-hand techniques.
Lethwei, by contrast, is fought bare-knuckle with only bandage wraps and tape. This gives fighters greater finger dexterity and makes open-hand techniques more viable. It is one reason why parrying, blocking, and clinching in Lethwei benefit from improved grip than in glove-based sports.

In other words, Lethwei appears surprisingly compatible with open-hand techniques despite their near-total absence from the sport.
The rules do not prohibit them. Fighters already use open hands extensively for defense and control. Yet that is where their role ends, and offensive open-hand striking never became part of the Lethwei technique repertoire.

Why Did Open-Hand Attacks Never Develop? 

All of this so far has hopefully illustrated why the absence of open-hand attacks in Lethwei is a fascinating point to discuss. 

The natural question to follow is, “Well, why did they not become a part of Lethwei if they were not forbidden?”

There are a few possibilities that can be considered.
Perhaps, in the past, when Lethwei was transmitted, a hard divide was set with palm techniques being reserved for defensive techniques and fists being reserved for offensive techniques.
Maybe there was some kind of forbiddance in ancient times but records of the rule disappeared over time, but the practice of not using palm strikes remained.

The most likely reason could be that it is due to cultural optics.
Palm attacks, compared to punches, were likely culturally seen as soft, gentle or even weak. And thus as unfitting to be used amidst a high octane fighting sport as Lethwei while showcasing ferocity.

This would root beyond just Lethwei context. An action like slapping someone’s face is seen as extremely undignified and insulting in the wider Myanmar cultural optics. Palm strikes, even if they were not at all like slaps to the face, could have been seen unfavourably as being similar enough regardless. 

The Hand-Wrapping Factor

On a practical level, it could simply be that traditional Lethwei fighters did not find open-hand strikes effective. Or rather, fighters found them difficult to execute.

At the top of this article, a point was made that, due to its bare-knuckle fighting nature, Lethwei was more suited for open-hand techniques than gloved sports. While that is true, a complete scope of the situation is to be considered. 

Lethwei is fought with hands wrapped with bandages. The bandages do allow more finger dexterity than full gloves.
However, the bandages are still wrapped with the function of binding the hands into a fist as the default position. Compared to complete full bare hands, bound hands are very likely difficult to fully extend their fingers and palms to maximum positions to execute effective open-hand attacks. 

Furthermore, the bandages are wrapped tightly around the wrists which make wrist movements difficult. To execute several basic types of open-hand strikes, fighters need to be able to easily bend their wrists in different directions. And without being fully able to commit to proper open-hand forms, trying to execute open-hand attacks becomes cumbersome, risks self-injury, and does not contribute to securing a win. 

In this sense, this ultimately brings Lethwei back to the position that other similar combat sports exist in. Compared to full gloves, hand wraps allow more dexterity that allows certain open-hand techniques to be viable. However, the hands are still immobilized enough that using open-hands offensively is not a practical option.

Once hand-wrapping became the norm, it is likely that fighters defaulted to using only defensive and supportive open-hand techniques which would use cupping the hand or fingers-interlocking for parrying and clinching instead of going for offensive open-hand techniques. This may have encouraged past fighters to favor defensive open-hand actions while abandoning offensive ones over time.

The Rare Exceptions 

That is not to say absolutely no one in Lethwei knows how to use palms offensively. One attack that could occasionally be observed is a cupped-hand strike to the ear intended to stun an opponent. This specific technique relies on sudden air pressure to rupture the tympanic membrane (eardrum) rather than concussive blunt force.
Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely to come across Karate or Kempo-like offensive open-hand techniques in Lethwei.

Could LFC Change Everything? 

However, that landscape may be challenged soon.

Nick Chapman’s Lethwei Fighting Championship (LFC) is gearing up to bring Lethwei to the wider world. According to Chapman, fights organized outside Myanmar will be using a modified ruleset to traditional Lethwei. One of the major modifications is that fighters will not be wrapping their hands. They will be fighting truly bare-handed.

This will remove the previous limitation against open-hand attacks put in place by hand-wrapping. Fighters, if they are willing, will now be able to fully utilize their palms completely.
And, as part of LFC’s goal is to bring Lethwei to the international stage, fighters from other fighting art disciplines will be brought to fight under the LFC Lethwei rules. This can include, beyond the expected boxers, kickboxers, and muay-thai fighters, martial artists fully familiar with open-hand techniques. 

Under that situation, we may see how Lethwei fighters adapt under a new ruleset that will allow them to face off against fighters potentially using palm strikes, knife-hand strikes, and other open-hand attacks.

Now, it is possible that LFC may ban open-hand strikes explicitly on the grounds that it does not fit what Lethwei traditionally is and for preservation of the essence of the sport.
But without such prohibition, as competition is shaped by rules, some fighters may use this opportunity to use open-hand techniques to their advantage. And this could pave the way to an evolution of Lethwei where its strategies, tactics, and techniques expand more to prepare for open-hand techniques as a combat domain.

FAQs

1. Are open-hand strikes illegal in Lethwei?
No. Traditional Lethwei rules do not prohibit palm strikes, knife-hand strikes, or other open-hand attacks.

2. If open-hand attacks are legal, why don’t Lethwei fighters use them?
Lethwei developed around punches, elbows, knees, kicks, and headbutts. Over time, open hands became associated with defense, clinching, and parrying rather than offensive striking.

3. Doesn’t bare-knuckle fighting make open-hand techniques more practical in Lethwei?
In theory, yes. Without gloves, fighters have more finger and wrist dexterity and control, which makes open-hand techniques more feasible than in full glove-based sports.

4. Do hand wraps affect the use of open-hand attacks?
Likely. Traditional wraps bind the hands and wrists, making it harder to fully extend the fingers or form certain palm-strike mechanics.

5. Could open-hand techniques become more common in Lethwei in the future?
Perhaps. If fighters compete under rules that remove hand wraps and allow fully bare-handed competition, offensive palm techniques may become more viable.