A muay thai version of Shadow Boxing Workout App

The request, in their words

Thirteen reviews in our corpus ask a boxing app for muay thai or for kicks. Not one of them is a negative review. The clearest is a five-star from Canada, and it is worth reading whole because it also explains why the person has not simply gone elsewhere:

Two more, shorter, saying the same thing:

“I tend to do what's called and add kicks” is the sentence that matters. People are doing the translation in their own heads, mid-round, while a clock runs. That works until the moment it stops being free: a low kick is not a punch with a different name, and what it costs is the whole problem.

Why adding the kicks yourself does not work

A boxing app can call on a steady beat because every punch costs roughly the same. In this app's own measurements — taken from the studies, not estimated — a punch inside a combination is 350 ms contact to contact (Piorkowski, Lees & Barton, 2011, ten competition boxers at 240 Hz). A muay thai roundhouse is 1,020 ms, heel-down to heel-down (Gavagan & Sayers, 2017, at 500 Hz). Then the bag swings away and comes back, which is another 650 ms before the next strike has anything to hit.

So jab, cross takes 0.70 s and jab, cross, hook, low kick takes 2.73 s. Across the whole catalogue the shortest call is 0.35 s and the longest is 4.95 s. That is a factor of fourteen between one call and another. Any fixed beat you choose is either rushing the long ones or leaving you standing on the short ones, and it is the reason a boxing app with kicks bolted on by the user does not become a muay thai app.

Side by side

Listing facts from Apple's lookup API on 16 September 2026, checkable on either listing. Review counts are of reviews we read, not of all reviews.

What Shadow Boxing does better, and it is not close

Five years of work shows. It has a filmed library, a strength section, a following, and a track record of not breaking. Its reviews are the calmest in the whole corpus: three one-stars out of 507 read, against 82 out of 215 for the fifteen-year-old timer down the list. If you box and you are happy there, nothing on this page is an argument to leave.

It also does one thing that this app copied on purpose. It leaves your playlist alone, and its customers cite that first, ahead of the content. Twelve reviews across the category are about music being cut; PunchLab collects them by the handful. That got treated here as a requirement rather than a nicety.

It is worth saying plainly: Shadow Boxing Workout App has not been installed and run round by round for this page. Everything above comes from its App Store listing and from 507 reviews its own customers wrote. Where a fair comparison would have needed a hands-on session, no claim is made.

What changes when muay thai is the brief

The catalogue has legs in it, from sources

Eighty-nine combinations: numbered hands, hands into legs, the Dutch four-count, elbows and knees, clinch entries, counters and feints. Every one is there because a named coach or a published curriculum put it there, and every one has a screen saying what it does, who it works on, and how to stand to throw it. A program with no source fails the app's own test suite, which is how the rule is kept by the data instead of by good intentions.

A feint is one call, never two

A fake teep and the knee it buys are thrown as one motion, so they are called as one call and the build-up never cuts between them. A combination you have not been called before arrives short the first few times and grows a strike at a time — but it only ever stops on a group boundary.

It runs in a pocket

The screen can lock. The silent switch does not mute it. The lock screen carries the round, the clock, pause and skip. Thirty-one reviews in this category describe a session going quiet partway through; that is the defect this was built to not have.