The Rear Naked Choke

Above is a stock photo of some no doubt amazing martial artists, nothing like my rag-tag group of kids we called a class. My group was a mix of overweight juveniles and bullied tweens whose parents just wanted their lives to be better. One in particular was both overweight and bullied, weighing as much as I did but being 15 years younger and 8 inches shorter.

We'll call him Johnny.

I'm not here to fat shame, Johnny was overweight and he knew it and was doing everything in his power to amend that. Unfortunately for him, a 10 year old only knows what his parents tell him and only does what his parents allow or encourage. His parent's understanding of nutrition, much like other American adults, was severely lacking.

That is a different essay though.

This one is a story about how we were training the rear naked choke with Johnny. There's plenty to say about teaching a group of 6-15 year olds how to choke each other out but that, once again, is another essay.

Johnny was good at the rear naked choke, due to his size and weight he was able to choke out even some of the adult instructors without issue. We always taught it as a self defense, for instance: an attacker shoves or hits you, we'd teach a very simple maneuver to use the attacker's momentum to spin them around and lock in the choke. It works well if the attacker isn't expecting it or over commits to their attack as inexperienced fighters (and children) tend to do.

The day after we taught the rear naked choke and before classes were scheduled, Johnny was brought in by his father. Johnny's father insisted we speak with him about an incident that had happened at home. Johnny had choked out his neighbor, he had choked them until they had passed out then Johnny ran home. The attacker was fine, Johnny had acted in self defense. His attacker started by calling him names like fatty, fat fatty and big fat fatty. It quickly escalated to shoving and after a short time Johnny had had enough and employed the technique he had learned in class.

I have to say, I was proud.

Proud that one of my students had actually used the techniques we taught in class him for self defense. That was until we learned his attacker was an 8 year old girl and about 40 pounds lighter.

Ouch.

Though...I think we can all agree that little Kimberly is a bitch and that she fucking deserved it.