The choker hold is probably the easiest one to try. It’s not the best but it’s the simplest. Think back to when you’ve seen a bloke in a movie wrap one arm under a bloke’s chin and other around the back of his head, then goes to snap his neck. Instead of snapping the neck, you just squeeze the larynx with your lower arm and that chokes ’em till they pass out. You’ve just got to learn how long to put it on for. You can feel the body weight drop as they go unconscious, so you don’t want to go too far past that.
I always take them straight to the ground so they’re easier to control. I know a lot of blokes do it standing up. But there’s a risk there that if all his body weight is being supported through the throat, you can crush his larynx as he drops. He can choke on his own blood. So that’s why I always take them straight to ground.
You can do it so you can knock a bloke out for 15 to 20 minutes, but you’ve got to be careful because if you go that little bit too long then you’ll croak ’em.
The better sleeper hold is where you put your hand under the bloke’s chin same as the other way, with your other hand over the top, but you get your fingers around their vagus nerve and the artery. As you squeeze them with the arm to choke them out, you also squeeze the nerve and the artery. You can knock them out for an hour if you do it that way and you also paralyse the left arm and left leg, so it puts them out of action for some time.
But this isn’t something that anybody can just do. I practised it for years when I was doing the kyite. We’d do special exercises for the strength in our fingers. All the fellers in the dojo were super strong in their wrists, hands and fingers. So we could do it pretty easy whereas the average bloke wouldn’t be able to do it. We used to have blokes that would come in and we’d practice on them. I don’t know why they did it. They were all Korean and they’d just march up and pay their respects to the sensei. But they’d let us get in and find the vagus nerve and the carotid artery on the left of the neck. There was no way I’d let anyone knock me out. That’s a sensation I’ve never felt.