Welcome to Episode #112 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Lessons From Being Choked Out.”

When I started training in the martial arts, I practiced a long list of moves to escape from chokes. No air, no problem… right?

WRONG!

It turned out that there’s a big difference between a “practice choke” and a REAL strangulation. Thankfully, I found out before someone tried to really kill me!

Thanks to teachers like Carl Cestari and “Judo Gene” LeBell, I had the chance to feel how effective (and terrifying!) being choked out can be. Those experiences also taught me a few good life lessons, which I’d like to share with you.

Before you listen to the podcast, you might also want to check out my video, How to Survive a Choke. It might come in handy!

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Lessons From Being Choked Out

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

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As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

TRANSCRIPT

Howdy, my friend! Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

Sad news in the martial arts world. As you’ve probably already heard, the legend, Judo Gene LeBell, has passed away at the age of 89. Now, there are so many stories about Judo Gene LeBell, and I’m going to add another one to the library today.

Judo Gene was, of course, a pioneer in cross training in the martial arts. He made a name for himself in the sports world, the entertainment world, and of course, the teaching world.

It seems that Judo Gene worked with everybody who’s anybody, and it’s just an incredible legacy that he has left behind, the influence that he has had on the martial arts world. But more than that, what I was probably most impressed by was the fact that he always carried himself with a sense of humor.

Martial arts is a serious topic, self-defense is a serious topic, but he found a way to make it very human and to balance out that energy that can sometimes run away to being too aggressive or frightening. And he made it very human. At least that was my take on it.

As it happens, I was lucky enough to meet him one time. Just once, but once might have been enough because he choked me out. I’m going to tell you that story and the lessons that I took away from it in one moment, but first let me back up and give you my quick history on chokes in general.

Now, forgive me, when I say chokes, we’re really talking more properly, probably about strangulations, but common usage, I’m saying chokes, so let’s not get too technical about it at the moment.

Now, my first formal schooling was in Taekwondo, and in our Taekwondo program, we did practice choke defenses. So you know, two hands on a throat, arm around your neck. But I would say even though we were practicing choke defenses, I was never really choked.

So you’d get a little squeeze, you’d say, oh okay, Yeah, I get it. But to me, I didn’t have a lot of extra respect for choking as opposed to a wrist grab or a collar grab or any other kind of grab. It just seemed like, Okay, well here’s what you do for a choke, just like any other attack. I just do this, I do that.

Now, of course, that’s a bit of a problem, a bit of a blind spot to not take chokes more seriously. And my attitude changed forever when I went to a seminar with Carl Cestari. Now, I don’t know if you know about Carl Cestari, but he was a highly trained martial artist. He was more of a pioneer in the combatives field.

He popularized or brought back to life a lot of the teachings from World War II, the work of people like Fairbairn and Applegate, and so he came in with a really practical, tough-edged type of training.

Now, I was still a young Taekwondo belt at the time and I didn’t know what I was looking at here. I just knew this guy’s tough.

And at one point during the seminar, he was in a mount position on the ground and he put a choke on a guy. And to my ignorant eyes, I thought, well, the guy’s hands are both free, his legs are both free. We’ve done choke defenses. Surely that guy can get out of there.

And so I asked that question. Yes, my friend, I asked that foolish question. And I, with respect, I said, Gee, you got that choke, but why can’t he just get out of that? And Sensei Carl said, Oh, come here. And I lay down on the ground.

He got into the mount. He basically prepared his hands and he said, tell me when you’re ready and then you could do whatever you want. As soon as you feel the choke, you do whatever you want. And I said, okay. Go!

And I kid you not, what happened was, I think I’ve told this story before, my arms not only did not click into some automatic choke defense, my body actually extended! To my horror, my arms shot out and my legs shot out because he put that choke on and it felt more like a punch to the throat than a choke.

So I would say that was the first time I was ever really choked. It was terrifying. I immediately had respect for chokes and put them in a different class than a wrist grab or a collar grab. Chokes are terrifying when applied fully and properly and with bad intent.

All right, so I’m a little slow on that, but I figured it out. Now, back to my Taekwondo class. Our class was held in a school. They shared the rent with a Judo program and I was friendly with a couple of the guys in the Judo program. At one point they saw us working on choke defenses and one of the black belts offered, Would you like me to choke you out?

That’s right. That’s the kind of things that happen in a Judo school. It was just very normal. It was like he was getting a cup of coffee. He said, Would you like me to choke you out? And my knee-jerk response was no, because I was still living in terror from Carl Cestari’s choke.

I just thought, Oh my God, I don’t want that again. But more than the terror of being choked out, I didn’t really trust this guy. Nice guy, but I’d never seen him choke anybody else out. I had not been choked out fully when Sensei Carl put that choke on me.

I had tunnel vision and I saw stars and I was that close to going out, but he let it go. I presume he knows what he’s doing and he let me go just before I blacked out. I didn’t mention that detail, but that’s why it was so terrifying, because I was pretty much gone.

So when this guy said, I’m gonna complete it, seal the deal, I said no– no I don’t, because I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me and I certainly don’t trust you.

Now that was a decision that I regretted for years. Even though I was still learning other self-defense styles and still working through choke defenses, I always had that nagging voice in my head saying, you should have gotten choked out, you should have taken that opportunity, you should have said yes. Now you don’t know.

So I don’t know the full extent of what this choking experience is like, or strangulation. So that went on for years until, ta-da, here we go…

How I Was Choked Out by Gene LeBell

I went to a martial arts event in Las Vegas and Judo Gene had a station at a booth at the event. I think he was selling his book, maybe he had some DVDs. I didn’t buy those, but I did get the book– here it is. Gene LeBell’s Grappling World, The Encyclopedia of Finishing Holds.

The deal was, I’m a little foggy on this part,