The Simple Secret to Escaping from a Straitjacket

I learned how to escape from a straitjacket not because I can’t afford a shiny little sports car, but because I really don’t care about sports cars. Or any kind of car, for that matter. As far as I’m concerned, a car is just an expensive toaster: it serves a purpose but anyone who let it defines them is facing some very serious personality disorders.

When some men hit middle age and are facing the prospect that the rest of their life is all downhill, they go out and buy a pretty little foreign job. Or they dump the wife and marry a pretty little foreign job. Other men attack the numbing realization that senior citizenry is fast approaching by doing something even more crazy like jumping out of an airplane, climbing Mt. Everest or running a marathon.

My mid-life desire to do something unexpected and pointless resulted in my learning how to escape from a straitjacket. Considering the precarious position of my mental health, I figured it might one day actually come in handy. More than that, however, learning to free yourself from this accessory of the old-school madhouse is just plain cool. Amaze your friends and family after they have strapped you into a straightjacket and locked the room behind them by suddenly walking through the door free as a bird.

The process of escaping the confinement of a straitjacket is easy enough, but the level of difficulty increases according to the quality of the jacket itself. You can cheaply buy a suitable straitjacket on eBay for less than a hundred bucks. This type of straitjacket is unlikely to keep a deranged mental patient at bay for long, but it should be good enough to impress your audience. Better to start with a low quality model and then work your way up to mental hospital quality confinement.

You want to make sure that you get your buddies to strap you in as tightly as possible in order to alleviate later derision that what you did really wasn’t that impressive. The key is to subtly exhale and expand your chest as well as any other part of your upper body that makes you bigger. This is not as tricky as it sounds as expanding your body helps create the illusion that your friends are strapping you in very tightly with barely any room to breathe. Obviously, a bigger body is going to have less room in which to move than a skinny one, right? That’s what you want those tightening the straps to think.

The secret is that once you are fully strapped inside the straitjacket and the straps are locked tight, you take the opportunity to shrink the size of your chest when your audience is out of sight. Keep in mind that part of the thrill of escaping from a straitjacket is creating an aura of mystery about how you did it. Or you can go the other way as described below. The point is that suddenly, reducing your load, you are no longer strapped in as tightly as possible, but instantly have wiggle room. And escaping from a straitjacket is all about the wiggle room.

The wiggle room needs to be exploited to the utmost, which means some rather rough movement of the shoulders back and forth to give you even more wiggle room. This doesn’t mean shrugging your shoulders, but whipping your arms back and forth as best you can so that your torso shakes violently enough to force one arm looser and looser. The object is to focus on freeing one arm from its constricted holding area so that you can lift up your elbow high enough to slip your head beneath it. Keep in mind that the violent behavior involved in freeing yourself from a straitjacket can potentially have the effect of ripping the fabric of a cheaper model which thoroughly undermines the wow factor of your accomplishment.

Once you’ve managed to work your head beneath the elbow, your escape is basically done. At this point, you can free up both arms enough to star working on unlocking whatever type of mechanism is keeping the straps firmly in place. Your basic eBay level of straitjacket is going to be buckles and this can easily be accomplished in just a few minutes even the first time out. Once you get really good, you can learn how to deal with straitjacket straps that have been clamped shut with locks, but that’s another trick entirely.

The reaction of your audience will most likely be greatest if you can convince them to leave you alone in your straitjacket in circumstances where nothing around you could be used as an accomplice in your escape. However, if you are of the more exhibitionistic and melodramatic mode of personality, you can escape from a straitjacket in the exact same way but with the significant difference that you make your effort to get your head up under your elbow seem as if it is putting you through almost unbearable pain and looks nearly impossible to actually accomplish.