The heel hook belongs to no one, but the way a smaller no-gi grappler gets to it — off a knee shield, from underneath a standing passer, patient and calm — was codified by one Australian more clearly than by anyone. This is the entry architecture and control-first philosophy that carried Craig Jones to two ADCC finals and into a million hobbyists' games.
At ADCC 2019 in Anaheim, in the under-88-kilogram bracket, Craig Jones spent three matches doing the same thing to three different men and finishing each of them with it. Ben Dyson, Mason Fowler, Jon Blank — a physiotherapist-trained Australian nobody in Rio would have picked out of a lineup four years earlier submitted all three on his way to the final, each finish routing to a leg.
None of the entries looked dramatic. Jones did not blast doubles or dive for flying attacks. He sat down, framed a shin across a torso or slipped underneath a passing opponent's base, threaded into a leg entanglement, and waited — hunting the position, not the tap, until the position handed him the tap. By the time he reached the final he was the most active finisher in the division and, to the audience, the clearest demonstration in the building of what a modern no-gi leg game looked like when one person had organized it from the ground up.
Then Matheus Diniz beat him. In the final, the Marcelo Garcia black belt refused to engage the legs on Jones's terms, defended the entries, and won on a takedown deep in the second overtime period. Jones took silver — his first ADCC medal, and the first of two he would collect without ever standing on the top step.
That final is the whole story in miniature. The leg game Jones built is good enough to submit almost anyone who agrees to play it, and it has a documented ceiling against opponents who can keep it from ever starting. This is a story about the system, not the medals it did and did not win.
Craig Jones's contribution is not a new submission. It is the clearest codified answer in no-gi to a narrower question: how does a normal-sized grappler, from underneath, get to a leg entanglement safely and keep it — and what does he do when the roles reverse and it is his own heel that is exposed.
The heel hook has no single author, and the leg-lock revolution has a well-told origin on the East Coast of the United States — John Danaher and a cluster of his students at the Renzo Gracie Academy, systematizing the entanglements from around 2015. That story is told in the parent article on the heel hook. Craig Jones's system is a parallel branch, developed most of the way around the world from it, and its distinctness begins with its coach.
Jones came up in Adelaide and made the decisive move to Melbourne, to Absolute MMA under Lachlan Giles — a physiotherapist by training and one of the most analytically minded coaches in the sport. Giles built a program organized around leg entanglements and a systematic no-gi approach at a time when much of the grappling world still treated lower-body attacks as a novelty. Giles promoted Jones to black belt in . Australia had almost no ADCC pedigree; a year later Jones was the most talked-about new grappler at the world's premier no-gi event. The Absolute MMA leg-lock room, and Giles's own celebrated ADCC 2019 absolute-division bronze run, established that the entanglement game had more than one center of gravity.
What makes this a system rather than a personal knack is that Jones wrote it down. Beginning in 2018, he codified the game in a sequence of instructionals for BJJ Fanatics that became some of the best-selling paid grappling content of the era:
A fourth title, Power Ride: A New Philosophy on Pinning, sits deliberately outside the leg game — it is Jones's wrestling-derived top-control and pinning system, the answer to what he does after he passes rather than off his back — but it belongs in any honest account of his instruction, because it shows the system was always meant to be two-sided.
Jones then relocated to New York to train under Danaher, joining the group known as the Danaher Death Squad. The cross-pollination matters: the Giles-schooled Australian entered the room that had done more than anyone to systematize the same category of attack, and the two influences merged in his competition game through the late 2010s. When the squad fractured in July 2021, Jones co-founded B-Team Jiu-Jitsu in Austin, Texas, which became the room where his version of the game was trained and taught. The full arc of his career and the economics he later disrupted are covered on his athlete page, Craig Jones; what concerns us here is the machine he built to attack legs.
The generic heel-hook article can tell you what an entanglement is and why the finish is rotational. What it cannot tell you is how a specific coach solved the hardest part — getting there, from the bottom, against someone who does not want to go — and what to do when you lose the exchange. That is Jones's system, and it has four moving parts.
Most leg-lock instruction begins at the entanglement. Jones's begins a step earlier, at the two positions he uses to reach it, and this is the part of his game most copied by hobbyists.
The first is the Z-guard, a knee-shield half guard in which the bottom player's top shin is framed across the opponent's torso like the letter Z. In most gyms the knee shield is taught as a stall — a frame to keep from being flattened and passed. Jones treats it as an offensive hub. From the same shin frame he can elevate and sweep, wrestle up to the back, or collapse the frame downward into a leg entanglement, and because those three threats share a starting position, the opponent cannot commit to defending one without opening another. Make Z Guard Great Again is built entirely around converting that defensive-looking frame into an attacking platform.
The second is the single-leg-X and K-guard family — bottom positions reached by getting underneath a standing or posturing passer, framing the near leg, and threading into the entanglements from below. The K-guard, in which the legs form a "K" while the arms control a leg or an ankle, rose to prominence in the same late-2010s window as the leg game itself, and Jones is among the athletes most associated with weaponizing it. Where the Z-guard attacks a passer who has engaged your half guard, the K-guard and single-leg-X attack one who is still standing.
Two entry routes, two ranges. That redundancy is the point: the same finishing positions can be reached whether the opponent chooses to pressure you or stay off you.
Once inside, Jones's most identifiable finishing configuration is ashi-garami — the foundational "outside" leg entanglement, in which the opponent's leg is trapped across the hips, the knee line pins the thigh, and the feet control the hip — flowing into the outside heel hook. The distinction between inside and outside heel hooks is explained in full in the heel hook article; what is worth noting here is that Jones's public game leans heavily on the outside entanglements and the sweeps and back-exposures that share them, rather than living exclusively in the inside-sankaku "saddle" that anchors much of the East-Coast game. His most-replayed finish — the outside heel hook that ended Chael Sonnen in under two minutes at ADCC 2017 — is the textbook example of the outside game against a wrestler's base.
The deeper entanglements are shared territory, not private: the 50/50 and its cousins, where each grappler's legs mirror the other's and the fight becomes a contest over the inside line and heel exposure. Jones's matches are frequently decided in exactly this symmetrical space, which is why his defensive game (below) matters as much as his offense.
The single organizing principle of the system is the one the parent article states in general and Jones states in the specific: the finish is trivial; the position is everything. The heel-hook rotation takes a fraction of a second and almost no strength. Everything that makes it high-percentage happens before it — in how completely the leg is trapped, the hip immobilized, and the heel isolated and exposed.
This is the source of the "calm" that became Jones's on-camera signature. He does not scramble for the tap; he secures the entanglement, strips the defensive grips, exposes the heel, and only then rotates. To a viewer it reads as composure. Mechanically it is a sequence with the finish placed last on purpose, because a heel hook applied before the position is complete is a heel hook the opponent spins out of — often directly into the attacker's own exposed leg.
The part of the system most neglected by people who copy it is the half that keeps Jones from losing the exchange he starts. Because the deep entanglements are symmetrical, entering a leg lock means offering the opponent a leg in return. Jones's game is built to win that two-way conversation: hiding his own heel, controlling where his foot points, clearing the knee line when he is the one being attacked, and turning a defensive position — the wrong side of 50/50, a leg he failed to finish — back into an entry.
This is what separates the system from a highlight reel of finishes. A complete leg-locker does not merely know how to catch a heel; he knows how to be caught and get out, because at the level where everyone knows the entries, most matches are decided by who survives the exchange rather than who initiates it. The Diniz final is the negative proof: against an opponent who declined the exchange entirely and won on a takedown, the offense never got its chance, and the defensive game had nothing to defend.
By 2026 the leg game is no longer anyone's specialty — it is a required region of a complete no-gi game, and the fingerprints of Jones's particular version are on an enormous number of amateur games specifically because he sold the manual so cheaply and so early. Down Under Leg Attacks priced a full entry-to-finish leg system at a fraction of the cost of a seminar, and a generation of hobbyists learned the Z-guard-to-ashi pathway from it.
Institutionally, the room that carries the game is B-Team in Austin, co-founded by Jones in 2021 after the Danaher Death Squad dissolved. B-Team's flatter, more irreverent culture became, in Jones's hands, a business strategy as much as a training one — an audience independent of any promotion, which he spent in 2024 by launching the Craig Jones Invitational, the million-dollar-per-winner event that reset the sport's pay expectations. That story is told on his athlete page; it belongs here only as the reason the system's author now has more reach than his medal count would predict.
The technical state of the game in 2026 reflects a convergence. The Australian branch that Giles and Jones grew and the East-Coast branch that Danaher grew are no longer meaningfully separate schools; elite competitors move fluidly between the outside ashi game and the inside saddle, and a brown belt preparing for IBJJF No-Gi Worlds — where inside and outside heel hooks and reaping have been legal for adult brown and black belts since 2021 — has to defend both. What survives as distinctly "Jones" is less a set of secret techniques than an emphasis: the entries taught as the hard part, and the control-first, finish-last discipline taught as the whole game.
Three dated, verifiable bouts that map the system's reach and its ceiling. Scores and finishes below are flagged for source-check against event records; see Known open items.
White belt does not learn the heel hook — in most gyms and rulesets a white belt will not apply one at all. The white-belt lesson from Jones's system is the entry position: frame a clean Z-guard knee shield and do not get flattened. Learn to keep the shin across the torso and to recognize the leg entanglements from the losing side so you know when to tap.
Blue belt learns that the leg lock is a system with entries, controls, and finishes — and that the entries matter more than the finish. Blue belt is where a student first drills the transition from the knee shield into a controlled entanglement and learns to secure the inside position before thinking about the heel.
Purple belt starts to see the network: how the Z-guard, the K-guard, and the single-leg-X all feed the same finishing positions from different ranges, and how a failed sweep becomes a leg entry. This is the rank at which the system becomes legible as one connected game rather than a set of separate tricks.
Brown belt — the first belt permitted to compete with the heel hook under IBJJF no-gi rules — studies the control and the counter, not the submission. The brown belt learns why Jones looks calm (the position is already won before the rotation) and learns to survive the symmetrical exchange: hide the heel, clear the knee line, win the wrong side of 50/50.
Black belt treats the leg game as a two-way conversation and wins the inside line before the opponent does. At black belt the question is no longer "can I catch a heel" but "who controls the exchange," and the defensive game carries as much weight as the offense — which is the exact lesson the Diniz final taught the system's own author.
1. Chasing the heel before controlling the position. The error the whole system is built to punish. A heel hook applied before the hips are immobilized and the inside line secured is one the opponent spins out of, frequently into your own exposed leg. Control first; the rotation is the last thing that happens, not the first.
2. Using the Z-guard as a rest. The knee shield looks defensive, so beginners stall in it and surrender its entire value. It is a launch point — to sweep, to wrestle up, or to enter the legs. If you are not threatening one of the three from it, you are just waiting to be passed.
3. Diving at the leg and abandoning the upper body. Reaching for a leg entry without accounting for underhooks, frames, and angle lets a good passer flatten you or take the back. Jones wins the upper-body battle during the entry, not instead of it.
4. Training only the offense. The most-copied half of the system is the finishing half; the neglected half is the defensive and counter game. Because the deep entanglements are symmetrical, every entry offers a leg in return. A leg-locker who never drills hiding his own heel and escaping the wrong side of 50/50 is building half a game — and it is the half that loses the exchanges everyone else can also start.
5. Ignoring the ruleset. Much of the game lives in positions illegal under IBJJF rules below brown belt and in the gi and Masters divisions. Drilling entanglements you cannot legally finish in your next competition, or learning reaps without learning which are legal in your ruleset, gets athletes disqualified. Know the rules of the event you are entering.
At open mat this week, take the Z-guard as your only starting position for three rounds. Begin every round in bottom half guard with the knee shield framed across your partner's torso, and give yourself exactly three permitted outcomes: elevate-and-sweep, wrestle up to the back, or enter a leg entanglement. No other escapes. When the frame gets flattened — and it will — reset and start again. You are training the hard part of the system, the entry, in isolation.
Then isolate the control step and stop there. From the Z-guard or a single-leg-X, enter one entanglement and win the inside position — then release without finishing. Twenty entries, no submissions. You are drilling the part of the game that actually decides matches: getting inside and controlling, calmly, before the heel is ever exposed.
Finally, and only with a trusted partner of similar rank under a coach's eye, train the defensive half. Start in the losing position — the wrong side of a leg entanglement — and drill hiding your heel, clearing the knee line, and recovering. The finish, added later and slowly, is a formality. Getting inside and surviving the exchange is the system.
Craig Jones's system is one branch of the modern no-gi leg game — the branch organized around bottom entries and a control-first, two-way philosophy.
The map shows the system's shape: distinct at the entry, shared at the deep entanglements, and defined less by a private technique than by an emphasis — entries as the hard part, control as the whole part.
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Known open items: