Chokes and
consciousness

If you're choking somebody, their consciousness is your responsibility. You're the one with the clear head — they're occupied.

Chokes are one of the things we're deliberately doing in jiu-jitsu. Done properly, a choke takes somebody's consciousness. That's the technique working, and it's a normal part of training.

Which means it needs understanding from both ends, and most people only ever think about one.

A blood choke closes off the supply at the sides of the neck. It doesn't really hurt. It isn't frightening. You simply start to fade — and if it goes all the way, you go to sleep and wake up a few seconds later, and once the pressure comes off the blood returns and you're back to normal quickly. There's no lasting pain because nothing was damaged. Almost anybody can handle being in one.

An air choke is something crushing the front of your throat — a wrist bone, a forearm, whatever's there. That's a completely different experience. It hurts, it feels like suffocation, and it's frightening in a way a blood choke isn't. Staying calm inside one is far harder, and there's a real structure at the front of your neck taking that pressure.

One is a smooth transition to unconscious. The other is squeezing somebody's throat until they can't stand it.

They get lumped together under the same word and they shouldn't be. If you're the one applying it, know which one you're doing.

Plenty of instructors teach that the tap is the goal, full stop. Got the tap? Good. Technique worked, move on.

I disagree with that, and here's why it matters.

You can tap somebody by cleanly cutting off the blood supply. You can also tap them by crushing their throat until they can't take it, or simply by frightening them with the prospect of it. All three get you the same result on the scoreboard, and they are not the same thing.

Cutting the blood supply is supposed to be the goal. It's the version with no cost attached — you let go, blood returns, they're fine. The other versions get you a tap by hurting somebody or scaring them, and you've learned nothing about whether your technique was any good.

When the tap becomes the only goal, the person you're tapping stops being part of the equation.

So a lot of this comes down to how it's taught in a given room. Are these presented as two different things with different consequences, or is it all just a choke is a choke, did you tap or not? That distinction shapes how an entire gym treats each other.

You can see it, and you can mostly see it in the tap itself. Frantic tapping — fast, hard, repeated — usually means somebody who isn't comfortable being there.

The rest of it shows in the body. Grabbing at anything within reach. Muscling and fighting tooth and nail. Fingernails digging in, scratching and clawing at the arm. That's fight-or-flight, plainly visible, and it's somebody treating a training round as life or death.

It fades with time. Once people have been caught enough times and had enough partners let go the instant they tapped, they work out that there are safety measures in place and that those measures hold. Then they settle.

But don't assume the panic came from them.

Somebody applying an air choke aggressively, or coming after a choke wide open, will produce exactly that reaction in almost anybody. That's not a nervous training partner — that's a predictable response to how they're being treated.

And panic brings emotion with it. People lose their composure, and rounds occasionally get heated afterwards because of something that started as one person going too hard at a choke.

There's no stopwatch for it. You read the person, and it takes time to learn — I only started paying proper attention after being on both sides of it a few times.

What you're watching for:

There's an earlier signal too, and it's the useful one: watch their hands. People almost always raise a hand before they tap. If you see it start to come up, you can let go right then — you already know what's coming, and you've saved everybody the last half-second.

Let go at the right moment and almost nothing happens. They're a little foggy for a second, they know you had it, and to everybody else in the room it looked like a perfectly normal submission. Nobody notices how close it got.

Hang on for another three, four, five seconds after they've gone out and it looks entirely different. Heavier breathing. Sometimes snoring. Frequently the body convulsing as it works to reboot itself — legs kicking, arms and torso jerking.

And it changes the room.

Everybody stops and watches, and for a moment the whole gym is looking straight at the reality of what we do to each other. For plenty of people it's the first time they've seen somebody go unconscious, and that's genuinely alarming. It can frighten people off training entirely, or leave them scared of what might happen to them.

The person always wakes up and is fine. That isn't the point. The point is that the difference between those two outcomes is a couple of seconds of attention, and it's entirely on the person holding the choke.

From the other side: you need to know your own signal, and the honest way to say this is that I learned mine the hard way.

I've been choked unconscious more than once, and I've pushed most chokes I've tapped to close to that line. My own marker is seeing stars — the moment that starts, I'm out of time and I tap immediately, no more thinking about it.

I know that's the marker because I once went well past it. I saw the stars, decided I was going to escape anyway, and did — but I came out of the position with no vision at all. I could hear everything in the room, I was aware of my own body, and I couldn't see or speak. It came back, and it was an education.

Twenty years in, I pay close attention to that signal. Don't spend twenty years finding yours.

Everybody's is slightly different — stars, a narrowing of vision, sound going distant. Learn what yours is early, and once you know it, treat it as the end of the conversation rather than the start of one.

Don't make a scene of it. The more attention it gets, the worse it is for everybody — especially the person it happened to.

This part gets missed. Choking somebody unconscious can shake the person who did it more than the person it happened to. They felt a body go limp in their arms because of something they did, and a lot of people get quietly skittish afterwards.

What I tell them: if you applied it with control and you let go as soon as you realized, there is nothing more you could have done. The other person chose not to tap. You didn't do anything wrong. Take a breath and carry on.

Because that's the standard — did you control it, and did you release it as soon as you knew? If yes, that's all anybody can ask. You can tell somebody to ease off when their partner won't tap, and you can only say that so many times before the lesson has to land on the person refusing to learn it.

Everybody is accountable for themselves. Some people only learn that the hard way, and the hard way here is waking up on the mat.

None of which changes your job when you're the one holding it. Watch them, not the technique. Let go when you know. And if you can't tell yet whether somebody is fading, that's the thing to work on — it's the difference between a normal round and the one everybody remembers for the wrong reasons.

More on why pain is the system doing this work, and what happens when it isn't available: pain and pressure.