John Danaher treats the guard as a problem with two halves — first get past the legs, then never let them come back. Codified in his "Go Further Faster: Passing" instructional and run at the highest level by Gordon Ryan's body-lock, leg-staple pressure game, it turned passing from a scramble into a controlled, head-first sequence.
By the time Gordon Ryan reached the quarterfinal of the +99 kg division at the 2022 ADCC World Championship in Las Vegas, the story of the weekend was not who he would submit but whether anyone could keep him standing in their guard long enough to matter. Against Victor Hugo — one of the largest and most technical guard players in the field — Ryan did not hunt a fast finish. He clamped a body lock around the hips, walked the legs to one side, stapled a knee to the mat, and spent the match slowly removing the space Hugo needed to reguard. It went to points. Ryan won. Two matches later he took gold, then the same weekend beat André Galvão in the superfight to complete a division-and-superfight double no one had managed in the event's history.
To a spectator it looked like a bigger, stronger man leaning on people. To anyone who had studied under his coach, it looked like a specific sequence running exactly as designed: close the distance, kill the legs' ability to frame, get the hips to the floor, control the head, and pin — in that order, every time. Ryan was not improvising a way through the guard. He was executing a codified method for defeating it.
That method has a coach and an instructional. John Danaher — the New Zealand-born black belt who built the Renzo Gracie Academy's "Blue Basement" into the most productive competition room in modern grappling — spent years reducing guard passing from a collection of individual passes into a single argument about how the legs are beaten. It is the same intellectual move he made with leg locks and with the back: define the problem precisely, then solve it in a fixed order. This is a story about that order.
Danaher's contribution to guard passing was not a new pass. It was the claim that passing is two problems, not one — first neutralize the legs as a barrier, then consolidate an upper-body pin the opponent cannot escape — and that most passing failures are really a passer trying to solve the second problem before finishing the first.
John Danaher is a black belt under Renzo Gracie, promoted at the Renzo Gracie Academy in Manhattan, where for two decades he coached out of the low-ceilinged training room the grappling world came to call the Blue Basement. He arrived in New York from New Zealand as a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University and took up jiu-jitsu partly to support himself by working the academy's front desk. That training in defining terms and building arguments is not incidental to how he coaches: his entire method rejects the traditional model of instruction — a loose bag of individual techniques taught in isolation — in favor of treating a whole area of the game as one problem to be defined and then solved with a repeatable sequence.
Guard passing was codified in his Go Further Faster series for BJJ Fanatics, the fundamentals project he announced in 2019 to sit alongside the more advanced "Enter The System" instructionals. The passing entry — Passing the Guard: BJJ Fundamentals — Go Further Faster — runs to eight volumes and roughly ten hours. It is not a highlight reel of passes. It opens with the requirements of the passer and a framework Danaher labels the five steps of guard passing, then works through opening the closed guard "in the minimum amount of time and the minimum amount of fuss," before arriving at the specific passes: the knee cut, the toreando (torreando), the leg drag, the long step, the smash pass, the over-under, the double-under, and the headquarters position that stages most of them. The instructional is the codified proof that this is a discrete system and not merely "Danaher's favorite passes": it names the sub-problems and prescribes the order in which they are solved.
Danaher later revisited the same material for the modern no-gi meta in New Wave Jiu-Jitsu: No Gi Guard Passing, sharpening the parts of the method that change when there is no collar or sleeve to grip. Across both, his public account of the problem is consistent. Passing, he argues, has to be understood as a small number of distinct situations — a closed guard to be opened, a seated (upright) guard to be flattened, a supine (lying) guard to be outflanked, and a half guard to be finished — each with its own tool. The through-line beneath all four is the two-part logic: the legs are the barrier; deal with them first, and only then fight for the pin.
A generic guard-passing lesson teaches a pass — how to knee-cut, how to toreando — as a self-contained movement. Danaher's system starts one level up, with a claim about what a guard is: a set of connections between the guard player's legs and hips and the passer's body, backed by frames from the arms. Passing is the ordered removal of those connections. Everything in the system follows from insisting that this happens in two stages, in sequence, and never out of order.
The first principle is that the legs, not the arms, are the thing standing between the passer and the pin. A guard's offense — sweeps, submissions, reguards — is powered by the legs' ability to frame, hook, and load. So the opening job of any pass is to take that ability away: to get the passer's body past the plane of the knees and get the guard player's hips flat or pinned, so the legs can no longer generate force or recover their frames.
This is why Danaher's passing is so preoccupied with distance and with what he calls staging positions. The headquarters position — the passer kneeling with one of the opponent's legs draped over a thigh, hands managing the near knee — is not a pass; it is the stable platform from which the legs are managed while the passer decides which pass the opponent's reaction opens. Against a supine guard, the toreando clears both legs to one side by pinning them at the knees or shins; Danaher's crucial no-gi caveat is that "in no-gi toreando your grips are transitory — they're there for a second and gone," so the pass is a matter of timing and hip-to-hip pressure rather than a held grip. Against an upright, seated guard, the answer is different: a body lock or tight-waist clinch that wraps the hips and takes away the seated player's ability to load a leg or scoot to space. In every case the goal of part one is the same — flatten or immobilize the hips so the legs stop being a weapon.
The signature pressure tool of the modern version of the system is the body lock pass, developed to its competitive peak by Gordon Ryan and codified in his own Systematically Attacking the Guard body-lock study. The mechanics express part one exactly. The passer locks the hands around the opponent's waist — a front lock, a tight waist, or an over-under — and uses that clamp to walk the hips to the mat, removing the pelvic mobility every guard needs. Once the hips are pinned, the loose leg is dealt with by stapling it: trapping and pinning a thigh or shin to the floor with a knee or shin so it cannot re-hook or reframe. Ryan describes three ways of dealing with the legs from here — stuffing, shelving, or splitting them — and, crucially, a decision that turns the pass into a trap: if the opponent stays square and faces the passer, they get pinned; if they turn away to escape the pressure, they expose the back. Ryan has called it a dilemma "between pinning the guy if they face us, and taking the back if they turn away." The leg staple is what makes the dilemma binding — with the hips down and a leg pinned, the guard player has no third option.
Only once the legs are neutralized does the second problem begin: converting past-the-legs into a pin that holds. Here the system's defining rule is about the head. Danaher argues that the single most controlling position in all of passing is one where the passer controls the opponent's head while passing — and that this is why he treats half guard, of all places, as a preferred passing situation rather than an obstacle. Half guard, he points out, "is the only position in which the guard passer can control the guard player's head while passing." Where the standard order of operations frees the trapped leg first and worries about the upper body later, Danaher inverts it: control the head and shoulders first, flatten the opponent, and free the leg last — "head first, hips last." The reasoning is that a controlled head cannot turn in to reguard, cannot bridge with power, and offers far fewer frames, so the pressure the passer applies is not resisted by a live upper body.
This is the deep continuity with the rest of Danaher's work. His back system arrives at an undefended neck by removing the defending hands first; his passing system arrives at an uncontested pin by removing the legs first and then pinning the head. Both refuse to attempt the finish — the strangle, the pin — until the thing that defends it has already been taken away. The pin is the receipt, not the fight.
The last load-bearing idea is that this two-part logic is grip-independent. In the gi, the passer can use collar and sleeve grips to negate the legs' frames; in no-gi, the grips are transitory and the same job is done with the body lock, tight waist, and head pressure. What does not change between the two is the order: negate the legs, then pin the upper body, with the head controlled throughout. That is what makes it a system and not a set of passes — the passes are interchangeable expressions of a fixed sequence, and a practitioner who understands the sequence can pass a guard they have never drilled against because the problem is always the same two problems in the same order.
The room that built the system no longer exists under the name that made it famous. In 2020 the group around Danaher left the Blue Basement and eventually relocated; in July 2021 the original squad split amid what Danaher publicly described as personal and generational conflicts. He formed New Wave Jiu-Jitsu in Austin, Texas, with Gordon Ryan and Garry Tonon, a school rebranded Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu in April 2025; several younger members founded B-Team, also in Austin.
The split fractured the team but not the method. By 2026 the body-lock pass and its leg-staple pressure are the default way the elite no-gi field attacks a seated guard, taught in gyms whose members never trained a day under Danaher. The tells are everywhere: the refusal to pass into open space, the preference for pinning the hips before touching the legs, the head-control-first order of operations, and the pin-or-back dilemma that turns an opponent's escape attempt into a back exposure. What changed after the split is institutional, not technical — the ideas now travel through a competing set of gyms and instructionals rather than one squad, but the framework each starts from is the two-part logic Go Further Faster: Passing laid out.
The system's clearest living proof is Gordon Ryan's competitive record. As of the 2024 ADCC World Championship he holds the most gold medals in the event's history, and he has gone years without a loss in high-level no-gi competition. Much of that record is built on submissions — but the position those submissions are finished from is almost always one he arrived at by passing, and the passing is the part that is hardest to stop and least dramatic to watch.
Selecting bouts where the passing game, rather than a single highlight submission, was the deciding thread. Because passing decides matches through accumulated control rather than a discrete finishing moment, the per-exchange detail below is characterization of well-documented results; the frame-by-frame passing sequences are flagged for source-check.
The through-line is not that Ryan is talented, though he is. It is that a spectator can predict how each of these matches will be shaped — hips flattened, legs stapled, head controlled, pin banked — before it starts, and the prediction keeps being right. That is the signature of a system rather than a highlight.
White belt learns to open the closed guard efficiently and to pass into a pin rather than around into open space. At this stage the goal is simply to get past the legs and hold side control for the length of a round without being reguarded. Arriving before finishing.
Blue belt learns the two-part order — that the legs must be neutralized before the pin is contested, and that most of their failed passes are attempts to pin an opponent whose hips are still live. The blue belt who internalizes only this already passes far more, because they stop diving past legs that are still able to frame.
Purple belt learns the staging positions — headquarters, the body lock, the tight waist — as platforms from which passes are chosen by the opponent's reaction rather than committed to blindly. The purple belt stops forcing one pass and starts reading which pass the guard's defense has opened.
Brown belt learns head-first control and the leg staple: flatten the hips, pin the head, staple the loose leg, and turn the opponent's escape into the pin-or-back dilemma. The brown belt closes matches from the top because the reguard has been pre-empted, not merely chased.
Black belt rebuilds passing from the pin backward. He enters every exchange already knowing the two problems and their order, negates the legs before the opponent knows the pass has started, and treats the pin as the inevitable last step. For a black belt inside this system, passing is not a gamble taken in a scramble; it is a sequence steered from the first grip.
1. Passing into open space instead of into a pin. The most common intermediate error: clearing the legs but landing in a position with no head control and no hip pressure, so the opponent simply reguards. The pass is not finished when you are past the legs; it is finished when the head is controlled and the hips are pinned.
2. Attacking the pin before the hips are dead. Trying to consolidate side control while the opponent's hips are still mobile and their legs can still frame. This is solving part two before part one. Flatten or staple the hips first; the upper-body pin only holds against a guard player who cannot reload the legs.
3. Relying on grips in no-gi as if they were gi grips. In no-gi the toreando and passing grips are, in Danaher's words, transitory. A passer who tries to hold them the way they would hold a sleeve gets left behind. The body lock and head-and-hip pressure replace the grip; timing replaces the hold.
4. Neglecting the head. Freeing the trapped leg first and worrying about the upper body later is the standard order — and the one the system rejects. A live, uncontrolled head turns in, bridges, and reguards. Control the head, flatten the shoulders, and the leg comes free against no resistance.
5. Treating half guard as a failure. Many passers see half guard as a pass that went wrong. In this system it is a preferred passing situation precisely because it is the one place the head can be controlled while passing. Fighting to abandon it for a "cleaner" position gives up the system's best control.
At open mat this week, isolate part one and nothing else. Start in the opponent's seated guard. One rule: you are only trying to close the distance, lock the hips (body lock or tight waist), and get them flat or stapled — no pass attempt allowed past that point. Your partner is only trying to keep their hips mobile and reload a frame. A five-minute round, both sides.
You are training the half of passing almost everyone skips. Most people drill the pass — the knee-cut, the toreando — and neglect the part that makes any pass work, which is killing the legs before the pass begins. The pass is the easy half. The match is decided in whether you can flatten the hips, and that is a skill that only improves when you rehearse it without the temptation to lunge for the finish the instant a gap appears.
Add a second round that begins already past the legs, and drill the pin-or-back dilemma: you control the head and staple the leg, and your partner must choose to face you (and be pinned) or turn away (and give the back). Learn to punish both. Then, and only then, run a round where the full pass is live — and notice how little the pin is contested once the legs are already gone.
Repeat weekly for six weeks. Passing will stop being a scramble and start being a sequence.
Danaher's passing system is a specific, codified method built on top of a universal problem. To place it:
The relationship to guard passing generally is the same as the closed guard's relationship to the guard: a universal problem everyone faces, made into a discrete, teachable weapon by one coach's insistence on defining it precisely — as two problems in a fixed order — before solving it.
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