John Danaher rebuilt the oldest position in jiu-jitsu as a no-gi machine — a linked map of five positions that solve posture, elbow, and height before a single submission is thrown. It is the closed guard reorganized as a decision tree, not a bag of tricks, and it is how the New Wave era teaches the bottom game.
For most of jiu-jitsu's history, the closed guard was taught as a room of doors. Here is the cross-collar choke. Here, on another wall, is the armbar. Over there, the triangle; behind you, the omoplata; somewhere else, the hip-bump sweep. A student learned each door as a separate object, walked through whichever one happened to open in a given roll, and hoped the geometry lined up. The position was a century old and beloved and, at the elite no-gi level of the late 2010s, quietly dying — passed over for leg entanglements and dynamic open guards that produced faster, more legible offense.
Then the coach who had done more than anyone to make leg locks legitimate turned his attention to the oldest position on the mat and asked the question he asks about everything: not what are the techniques, but what is the system that connects them.
John Danaher's closed-guard work does not add a new submission to the position. It adds an operating system. In his framing, the choke and the armbar and the triangle are not doors on separate walls; they are outputs of the same upstream problem — posture and elbow control — solved in a fixed order. Win the posture battle, control the elbow line, account for the height mismatch between a bottom player and a standing passer, and the submissions become downstream consequences rather than gambles. The closed guard stops being a room of doors and becomes a flowchart.
That reframing is the reason a position most no-gi analysts had written off in 2019 was, by 2022, being taught again as a complete offensive system to the best grappling team on earth.
Danaher's contribution to closed guard is not a technique but a sequencing rule: solve posture, then the elbow, then height — and the sport's oldest submissions fall out of the position in a fixed order instead of being hunted at random.
John Danaher did not invent the closed guard, and he is careful never to claim he did. Its mechanics — a bottom player with ankles crossed behind a top player's back — predate him by the better part of a century and belong to the lineage that runs from the Kōdōkan through the Gracie family and into every academy on earth. What Danaher built is a method of organizing that inheritance, and the method is the product.
The method has a name and a house style: "Enter the System." Danaher's arrival as an instructional author came in 2019 with Leglocks: Enter The System, the release widely credited with formalizing the leg-lock game that his squad had been quietly dominating with. Its success established both a brand and a pedagogy. Over the following years the "Enter The System" line grew into a set of submission-specific studies — among them and — each built on the same architecture: two volumes of principle and concept, then four of technique that exist only to serve the principles. The individual attack chains a closed-guard player relies on — the triangle, the juji-gatame armbar — were codified in those submission volumes first.
The closed guard itself got its dedicated treatment later, and under a different banner. By the time Danaher turned to it, the ground under his career had shifted. In July 2021 the original Danaher Death Squad split: Danaher, Gordon Ryan, and Garry Tonon moved to Puerto Rico under the New Wave Jiu-Jitsu name, while Craig Jones, Nicky Ryan, Nick Rodriguez, and Ethan Crelinsten formed B-Team. The instructionals rebranded accordingly. In July 2022, BJJ Fanatics released New Wave Jiu Jitsu: Closed Guard — Building a Complete Closed Guard System — eight volumes, roughly nine and a half hours, no-gi throughout. That instructional is the codification this article is about. It is where the closed guard stops being, in Danaher's world, an assumed fundamental and becomes an explicitly mapped system with named positions and decision rules.
A note the editor should keep in view, and which this desk flags rather than papers over: there is no Danaher instructional literally titled Enter The System: Closed Guard. The "Enter the System" phrase names his broader method and his submission series; the closed-guard codification lives under the New Wave Jiu Jitsu label. The two are the same author and the same philosophy applied to the same position, but they are not the same product, and any reader who goes shopping for an "Enter The System: Closed Guard" set will not find one. (See Known open items.)
What makes this a system and not a chapter of the generic closed guard article is the insistence that attacks are the last thing you think about, not the first. Danaher's closed guard is organized around a single sequencing principle, and everything else hangs off it.
The recurring phrase across the instructional is "the battle for posture." A top player who can posture up — spine stacked, hips back, head high — can eventually open and pass any closed guard. A top player whose posture is broken down, chest pulled toward the mat, is a top player who is losing, whatever else is happening. So in Danaher's ordering the first job from closed guard is not to threaten a submission; it is to win the posture battle, and only a broken-posture opponent is a legal target for the next phase. This inverts how most beginners are taught, where the submission is the goal and posture-breaking is a means. Here the posture is the goal, and the submission is what becomes available once you own it.
The second layer is elbow and arm control. Once posture is broken, the deciding variable is where the opponent's near elbow lives. An elbow pinned to your centerline is an elbow you can attack; an elbow escaping to the outside is a pass in progress. The instructional's arm-control mechanics — a same-side two-on-one to the wrist, an over-hook above the triceps, a collar tie coupled to the arm rather than the arm attacked in isolation — all exist to keep that elbow on the wrong side of the fight. The individual technique matters less than the rule: do not attack an arm you have not first trapped at the elbow line.
The third layer is the one most systems ignore entirely: height. A short-legged player and a long-legged player face genuinely different closed guards, because the whole position is a function of whether your ankles can lock low on a tall opponent's back. Danaher addresses this directly with what the instructional calls the Two-Stage Philosophy of Attack — a method of first shrinking the effective distance (climbing the back, elevating the hips, closing the height gap) before committing to the attack that the newly-won distance makes possible. It is one of the few closed-guard treatments that treats a practitioner's build as a design input rather than an inconvenience.
The spine of the system is a set of named positions the player cycles between, each a stable platform from which specific attacks become high-percentage. Across the instructional these are the recurring five:
The point of naming them is that they are not techniques; they are rooms in the flowchart, each with known exits. From side scissor the player has one set of sweeps and submissions; from the clamp, another; the opponent's defensive reaction to one position is the entry to the next. A hip sweep, an elbow sweep, a trap triangle, a rear triangle — these are labeled outputs, and each is attached to the position that produces it.
Only now, three layers deep, do the submissions appear — and they are the same submissions jiu-jitsu has always had. The triangle arrives when a controlled arm and a broken posture leave one arm in and one arm out. The armbar arrives when the top-lock control isolates the elbow and the posture cannot be recovered. The omoplata, the back-take, the sweeps — each is the downstream consequence of a posture-and-elbow situation the player deliberately engineered upstream. Danaher's claim is not that these submissions are new. It is that hunting them directly is the error, and that a player who solves posture and elbow in order will be handed them in a predictable sequence. That claim — attacks as outputs of an upstream control problem, solved in a fixed order — is the thing a section of the generic closed-guard article cannot say, and it is what makes this a system rather than a survey.
The Danaher closed guard is best understood next to the two other codified closed-guard systems it shares a shelf with, because the differences are not stylistic — they are about what problem each system was built to solve.
Roger Gracie's closed guard is the gi archetype: cross-collar grip, posture break, and the cross-collar choke as the spine, with the armbar and triangle as the branches an opponent's defense forces him onto. It is a system of pressure and inevitability built around a lapel that a no-gi player does not have. Bernardo Faria's Battle-Tested Closed Guard is likewise a gi system, organized around deep grip-fighting, the over-under and lapel controls, and forcing a pressure passer into predictable frames.
Danaher's is the no-gi answer, and the absence of the lapel is the whole design constraint. With no collar to choke and no sleeve to pin, control has to be won with the body — underhooks, over-hooks, wrist and elbow control, the clamp — and the offense reorganizes around what the body alone can do. That is why the system leans on the triangle and armbar rather than the cross-collar choke, why arm and posture control replace grip-fighting, and why the whole thing reads as a machine for a jacketless sport. The three systems attack the same position; they are built for two different rulesets, and Danaher's is the one built for the mat New Wave competes on. See the sibling breakdown in the Roger Gracie closed-guard system piece for the gi contrast in full.
The system's reach in 2026 is best measured not by how often you see closed guard on a highlight reel — you do not see it often — but by how it is taught inside the sport's most successful no-gi camp. Danaher's team, anchored by Gordon Ryan and Garry Tonon and rebuilt as New Wave after the 2021 split, treats the closed guard as a codified module of the curriculum rather than a fundamental everyone already knows. Ryan's own instructional catalog includes a dedicated closed-guard title, Systematically Attacking From Closed Guard, which carries the same principles-first architecture into an athlete's voice — evidence that inside the camp this is a taught, examined system, not received wisdom.
The broader significance is what Danaher's treatment did to the "closed guard is dead in no-gi" consensus. In the years before 2022, elite no-gi offense had migrated so far toward leg entanglements and open-guard flows that the closed guard looked like a gi-only relic — high-percentage under IBJJF points, low-percentage in a submission-only, jacketless meta. By reorganizing the position around posture, elbow, and height rather than around grips it did not have, Danaher produced a version of the closed guard that a no-gi competitor could actually run. He did not resurrect the old gi closed guard for no-gi; he rebuilt a different closed guard for a different sport. The position remains a minority choice at the very top, where the best players still prefer to attack from open guard and leg entries — but it is once again a legible choice, with a map, rather than a fundamental everyone had quietly stopped using.
Honesty requires a specific caveat here, and this desk will not paper over it. Danaher's closed-guard system is a 2022 pedagogical codification, not a signature competitive scoreline, and its proof lives in the instructional and the camp rather than in a single famous bout the way Roger Gracie's cross-collar era does. New Wave's marquee athletes win most often from passing, back attacks, and leg entanglements; closed guard is a taught module, not their competition centerpiece.
Because the house rule is to never attach an invented date or score to a claim, this section names no specific dated bout as "decided by the Danaher closed guard system." Any such match — a New Wave athlete winning a titled, dated, scoreline-verifiable bout specifically from this closed-guard sequence — must be confirmed against a scoresheet or a FloGrappling archive before it is asserted here. It is flagged in Known open items for the source-check pass. The verifiable, citable event in this system's history is the codification itself: the July 2022 release of New Wave Jiu Jitsu: Closed Guard.
White belt learns the closed guard the old way first — close it, keep it closed, control the wrists — and that is correct. The system is an organizing layer that only makes sense once the raw position exists. The one idea a white belt can borrow early: your first job is the opponent's posture, not a submission.
Blue belt learns to break posture with structure instead of strength, and meets the first real Danaher idea — that a broken-posture opponent is a precondition, not a bonus. The blue belt who stops hunting armbars on a postured-up opponent and instead pulls the chest down first has absorbed the system's opening rule.
Purple belt starts living in the named positions. Side scissor to clamp to top lock stops being three techniques and becomes one connected map, and the purple belt begins choosing the next position based on how the opponent defended the last one.
Brown belt internalizes the ordering — posture, then elbow, then height — as a reflex, and closes the height gap with the two-stage method before committing. At this level the submissions genuinely start arriving as consequences rather than attempts.
Black belt runs the whole flowchart against a resisting elite passer, pre-empting each posture recovery and steering the exchange toward the position whose exit the opponent has already shown he cannot defend. The closed guard becomes, as it is for every high-level player, a destination rather than a starting point.
Coral belt can teach the entire map at once and explain precisely why a no-gi system had to be rebuilt around the body when the lapel disappeared — the design constraint that separates this closed guard from Roger's and Faria's.
1. Hunting the submission before winning posture. The single most common error, and the one the entire system is built to correct. A submission thrown at a postured-up opponent gives up position for nothing. Break the posture first; the attack is a downstream reward, not the opening move.
2. Attacking an untrapped arm. Reaching for an armbar or triangle before the near elbow is controlled hands the opponent the escape for free. The rule is fixed: control the elbow line, then attack the arm it belongs to.
3. Ignoring the height mismatch. A shorter player who runs a taller player's closed guard without first closing the distance — climbing, elevating, clamping — will find the ankles pop open and the attacks out of range. The two-stage method exists precisely because build is a variable, not a footnote.
4. Treating the five positions as separate techniques. Learning side scissor, clamp, top lock, high cross, and double-unders as five isolated tricks misses the entire point. They are rooms with connecting doors; the opponent's defense to one is the entry to the next. Drilled in isolation, they revert to the room-of-doors problem the system was built to escape.
5. Importing the gi answers into no-gi. Cross-collar grips and lapel controls do not exist without a jacket. A player who tries to run Roger's or Faria's gi closed guard in no-gi is solving the wrong problem; Danaher's system is the one designed for the jacketless ruleset.
This week, drill the ordering, not the finishes. Pick a same-rank partner and run three-minute rounds from closed guard with one rule: you may not attempt a submission until your partner's posture is visibly broken — chest pulled toward you, spine bent. The instant they re-posture, you reset. No armbars, no triangles, no sweeps until the posture condition is met. You are training the system's first gate, and nothing else.
Add a second block for the elbow line. From a broken-posture position, your only objective is to trap the near elbow across your centerline with a two-on-one to the wrist or an over-hook above the triceps — and hold it while your partner tries to recover the arm to the outside. Still no submission. You are training the second gate.
Only in a third block do you allow one attack — a single triangle or armbar — and only once both prior gates are passed. Run posture, then elbow, then the finish, in that order, every time. Six weeks of gating the attacks behind their preconditions rewires the closed guard from a scramble into a sequence, which is the whole of what the system teaches.
The through-line is that every one of these pages describes the same position or its parts from a different ruleset or era. Danaher's contribution is the connective tissue: the argument that in no-gi, the century-old submissions are best reached not by hunting them but by solving posture, elbow, and height in order.
Publication date will be set at ingest. This log will be appended to over the life of the article. Any factual corrections will be dated and specific.
Known open items:
38-article-01-closed-guard.md) contains the same miscitation — "Enter the System: Closed Guard, BJJ Fanatics, 2020" — and should be corrected there too.