The rear naked strangle from back control

Back control is a chest connection with two legs attached to it. The seat belt, with one arm over a shoulder and the other under the opposite armpit, is what keeps you behind somebody; the legs stop them running forward. That ordering is not a preference, and the rule books agree with it more explicitly than most coaching does.

United World Wrestling's grappling rules define the back mount as controlling the opponent from the back with your chest to their back and your heels between both of their thighs, or in a body triangle, with the legs in a position to trap up to one of their arms, held for three seconds. The chest connection is the first clause. The IBJJF requires the heels between the thighs without the legs crossed, and treats crossed feet as an advantage rather than four points. The ADCC rules score back mount with hooks at three points, accept both hooks or a body triangle, and add that the hooks must not be over either shoulder.

Three organisations, three scoring tables, and the same picture in each: chest to back, legs inside the thighs, not above the shoulder line. If you are hunting a strangle from a position that would not score in any of them, the strangle is not the problem you have.

That is the practical frame for everything below. A rear strangle applied from a position that is coming apart is a race, and races are where people get hurt, because both people are moving fast and neither is managing the neck.

The choking arm goes around the front of the neck so that the crook of the elbow sits in front of the throat, not the forearm bone. Everything about the alignment follows from that one relationship. The forearm and the bicep close on either side; the space in the middle is the gap the throat occupies rather than the surface being pressed.

The hand of that arm goes to your own opposite bicep. The second hand goes behind their head, palm against the back of the skull, and the structure is closed. Until that circuit exists, pulling is effort without direction. This is why an attacker who cannot get the hand connected should be improving the connection rather than adding force, and why the standard advice to squeeze with the chest and back rather than the arms is about durability as much as strength: an arm-only effort fatigues in seconds and a closed structure does not need much.

The chin is the obstacle and it decides more of these exchanges than anything else. A defender who gets their chin down onto your forearm has put a bone between your arm and the position it needs. The mechanical answers are to move their head, to change your angle, or to attack the defending hands, and none of those is to drive through the chin. Driving through it produces pressure on the front of the throat, which is the wrong structure, and it is where people start improvising.

There is one detail worth stating on its own. The hand that goes behind the head is there to close the structure, not to pull the head down as hard as possible. What that second hand does is the difference between the technique and the thing described in the next section.

This distinction is the reason this article exists, and it is not a matter of taste. It is written into every major rule book, in similar language, and the reason those documents bothered is that one of the two is a permitted finish and the other is an action they will disqualify a competitor for.

United World Wrestling's grappling rules prohibit neck cranks and any submission deemed to apply pressure to the spine, and name examples: crucifix, full nelson, twister neck crank, can opener, chin ripping. They then add a footnote in the same list, which is the clearest sentence any of these documents contains: it is legal and not considered a neck crank if pressure is applied to the neck during a choking technique, and they name the guillotine and the rear naked choke as their examples. The IBJJF rule book's illegal-moves table lists a choke with spinal lock and a spinal lock without choke as separate prohibited entries. The ADCC rules ban neck cranks that trap both shoulders and put downward pressure on the neck. The IJF's rules make it a direct disqualification to take any action that may endanger or injure the opponent, and single out the neck and the spinal vertebrae.

Put in practical terms: the technique is a closure applied across the sides of the neck by a structure that is shut. The prohibited thing is a lever applied to the spine, usually by pulling or twisting a head that has nowhere to go because the shoulders are trapped. The transition between the two is small, fast, and entirely within the attacker's control. It happens when the strangle is not working, the attacker is frustrated, and the second hand starts pulling the head as a substitute for fixing the arm.

So the rule that follows is specific rather than general. If it is not finishing, re-place the arm. Do not convert. An attacker who adds head pressure to a stalled strangle has stopped doing the technique this article describes and started doing one that several governing bodies prohibit and that can injure a training partner who has no way to relieve it.

The second thing all four documents agree on is narrower and easy to state. Hands do not go on windpipes.

The ADCC rules permit any kind of choke except using the hand to close the windpipe. The IBJJF classes it as a severe foul when an athlete strangles an opponent without the gi with one or both hands around the neck, or applies pressure to the windpipe with the thumb. United World Wrestling's grappling rules list the use of the fingers for throat or trachea choking techniques among illegal actions. The Unified Rules of MMA, in a sport that permits a great deal, still specify that a fighter may not gouge fingers or a thumb into an opponent's neck or trachea in an attempt to submit them.

Four organisations with different priorities and different histories arrived at the same clause. In a room, the same rule reads as follows: the finish comes from an arm arranged correctly, not from a hand pressing on the front of somebody's throat, and an attempt that has degenerated into the second is one to abandon rather than adjust.

Neck attacks are the category where training conventions do the most work, and where the conventions are most often quietly ignored by people who want to prove they can survive one.

Learn this from a qualified coach, in a supervised room, with a partner who has agreed to the terms of the round. Start with the arm placed and no pressure at all, and have your partner tell you where they feel contact. Repeat the entry without finishing until the position of your elbow relative to their throat is consistent. Add pressure gradually and in small increments, with the explicit agreement that the person receiving it taps at the first sign rather than the last.

Release fully and instantly on any tap, verbal or physical, with no final squeeze and no easing off. If a partner stops responding, goes limp or stops defending, let go immediately and get a coach, without waiting to be sure of what you are seeing. Do not train this on someone who has not agreed to it, do not apply it to a person you cannot see the face of, and do not treat surviving one as a skill worth demonstrating.

The other conventions are about the position rather than the finish. Do not cross your ankles in front of somebody's body: it is a weaker structure and it hands over an attack for nothing. And note that both ADCC and the IJF have written rules about what the person on the bottom may do with somebody attached to their back. ADCC prohibits rolling forward while an opponent is on your back and prohibits spiking their head. The IJF makes it a direct disqualification to intentionally fall backwards when the other athlete is clinging to your back and either has control of the other's movement. Those clauses exist because that is where this position injures people, and the injury usually lands on the person doing the attacking.

The English name is a poor one and the argument about it is older than most people assume. Judo's nomenclature calls the technique hadaka-jime, which the IJF rules use directly when describing a strangle applied with the attacker on the opponent's back. Whether the English rendering describes the absence of a gi grip or is a mistranslation of something else is not something this article can settle, and no source consulted for it does.

The choke-versus-strangle distinction has the same character. Many coaches, following judo usage, reserve strangle for the technique described here and choke for pressure on the airway. Ordinary gym speech calls all of them chokes, and so do several of the rule books quoted above, including the sentence from United World Wrestling that draws the crank line. This site uses strangle where it can, not to correct anybody, but because the vocabulary makes the mechanical difference visible.

What is not a matter of naming is the boundary in the rule books. Whatever anyone calls it, a closed structure applied across the sides of the neck and a lever applied to a spine are different actions, and the documents that govern competition treat them differently. That is the part worth carrying out of this article.