These Are The Best Ways To Stop Your Pulse With Magic Methods

NOTE: This post includes adult topics.

Magicians have been doing this for a while. Not enough, though. I don’t think so, anyways. We all have the power to stop our pulses. Stop our hearts from beating on command. With a friend taking our pulse as it slows and stops, watching us stop breathing and slump back lifeless.

Usually, a pulse stop involves a participant taking your pulse via your wrist. The magician does some deep breathing, closes their eyes, and then slowly stops breathing. As they do so, their pulse slows to a complete stop.

Why do I like this trick so much? Well, for a start—no one is doing it. Wouldn’t it be nice to do something no one else is doing? Secondly, it’s bloody good. There’s something so visceral about it. We’ve all thought about death, and we’ve all exercised and felt our pulse rate increase or tried to lower it when stressed. It has the same vibes as holding your breath for a stunt but with more magical and higher stakes.

There are downsides—most notably, that only one person can fully experience the trick. That’s the person taking your pulse. The rest of the viewers will need to trust the hero participant to find the trick interesting or fooling. You might wonder if this is different to watching almost any other mentalism routine. Well, yes, because stopping your pulse can’t help but feel more impossible than reading someone’s mind. It's funny that—because if you think about it long as hard, it should be the other way around.

So you’re left relying on the audience trusting that the hero can take not only someone’s pulse but also tell the truth about your pulse coming to a slow end. We’re hoping they’ll react well, but they’re also pretty busy paying close attention to your pulse.

Mentalists have found ways to make the trick telegraph beyond the hero participant. The first way is to add a visual element to the routine. You might ask the participant to raise their other hand and lift it up and down for each pulse. The audience sees their arm slowly come to a stop with their pulse.

Another option is to use sound. In this scenario, you might ask them to make a noise, perhaps count, or use a percussion instrument to televise your heart rate to an audience.

You can add a secondary source to add more trust to the routine. Perhaps hook yourself up to a heart rate monitor you’ve rigged to slow while you slow your pulse. This adds visual and noise elements and validates the effect beyond our trust in the hero participant.

I have many ideas for magic products I’ve never made because I assume someone else must be working on them. I’m forever surprised we have not seen a fake Apple Watch heart rate app. Imagine performing a pulse stop in the pub, with one mate feeling one wrist as the rest of your mates see the beats on your apple watch stop on the other.

Another and perhaps more cunning way to make the routine visual and enhance it is to combine it with another trick. I often think back to watching Paul Zenon stop his pulse simultaneously with a spectator’s watch held in his other hand. I like this. I can strongly recall seeing this for the first time as a kid and thinking how smart it was to combine these two effects.

So let’s talk about three methods. The tried and true method, the best underground method on the magic market (released in the 2,000s), and a totally new concept.

The most openly exposed method is to shove a squash ball up your armpit and squeeze down. As a child, I can tell you that I would confidently perform this and look like such a tit. I can’t imagine anyone was fooled by baby Rory squeezing down like he was trying to make an armpit fart sound.

But this method can be fooling, and it does work. Squeezing down on the ball presses into the correct vein and temporarily slows and stops your pulse where the spectator is taking it from on your wrist.

My concern with this method is that it’s openly exposed. It gets used as a ploy in many crime and detective telly shows, like Sherlock (spoilers).

It’s also not that fun to carry around a squash ball in your armpit.

The best method for a pulse stop is Wayne Houchin’s for several excellent reasons. The good news is you can purchase the tutorial from him for a great price. It’s a brilliant method because there are zero gimmicks. The mechanics involved mean that spectators can also find your pulse much easier. An issue with the squash method is that it remains pretty tricky for spectators to find your pulse in the first place.

I have a method for a pulse stop that I’ve held onto for quite some time. The technique involves vibration. The performer secretly holds a tiny skin-toned vibrator in their closed fist when their pulse gets taken. Correctly programmed beats powering through your first do feel like a pulse at your wrist.

The small gimmick is programmed to beat normally, and then every twenty seconds, it slows to a complete stop for five seconds. Looping this is much easier than triggering the sequence with a button. Yes, I did get my pulse stopping gimmick built by the same company that makes vibrating cock rings.

I want you to know that I spent about ten minutes googling to search for a more PG term for a cock ring. It doesn't sound very nice. Bullet and rabbit vibrators sound lovely—cock ring does not. Google tells me the only other terms are C-ring, which only the most perverse of you would have immediately understood, and also shaft rings. Many apologies.

If you want to play with the vibration concept, you can download a massager app and squeeze your phone inside your wrist. This particular app has a heartbeat mode, so I used it to test the method initially. I swear I only downloaded it to test the method.

Let me know if you’re interested in us pulling together as a community and ordering a batch of the custom pulse stopping gimmicks? In the meantime, I recommend the other two methods described in this article, and I’ll leave you with some of my favourite app store reviews for the vibrator app.