John Danaher did not invent the heel hook. He did something the sport had never managed before him: he turned it into a position rather than a lunge. The ashi-garami control hierarchy — from 50/50 out to the saddle and inside sankaku — made the most feared submission in grappling into a high-percentage, controllable finish, and rewrote how the entire no-gi world attacks the legs.
For a stretch of 2015, the fastest way to lose a submission-only match in the lighter divisions of the Eddie Bravo Invitational was to let a training partner of John Danaher get to your legs. Garry Tonon and Eddie Cummings — two grapplers out of the same basement room at the Renzo Gracie Academy in Manhattan — arrived at EBI brackets that were built to force finishes, and they finished by twisting knees. Tonon won EBI 3 in March 2015 and then, stepping in for an injured Cummings, ran through EBI 5 later that year, closing the tournament with heel hooks in the quarterfinal and the final. Cummings had already been doing the same thing to his own brackets.
To the audience, it looked like two men had discovered a cheat code. Heel hooks had a reputation in Brazilian jiu-jitsu at the time as a dirty, low-percentage, ligament-shredding gamble — a technique you threw when you were losing and did not much care about the friendship. What Tonon and Cummings were doing did not look like a gamble. It looked calm. They were not diving at ankles and hoping. They were passing through a sequence of leg positions, each one tighter and more controlling than the last, and only applying the submission once the opponent had no way to spin, hide the foot, or stand up out of it.
That calm was the tell. Behind it was a coach who had spent years refusing to treat the leg lock as a trick, and had instead built it into a positional system with the same rigor the sport reserved for the back and the mount. The men in the bracket were the demonstration. The system was the story.
Danaher's contribution was not the heel hook itself — the submission is old — but the claim that the lower body is a legitimate positional game, with a control hierarchy as strict as the one that governs the back, in which the finish is the last and least interesting step rather than a desperate lunge.
The heel hook long predates Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The leg entanglement Japanese grappling calls ashi-garami ("leg entanglement") appears in judo's older newaza and, in more aggressive forms, throughout catch wrestling and Soviet sambo, where twisting foot and knee locks were never stigmatized the way they came to be in the gi-based BJJ tradition. For most of jiu-jitsu's competitive history, the heel hook sat outside the sport's main line of development — banned in IBJJF competition, discouraged in most academies, and associated with a handful of no-gi specialists rather than treated as a central weapon.
John Danaher is the figure who moved it to the center. A black belt under Renzo Gracie, New Zealand-born and a former graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University, Danaher coached for two decades out of the Renzo Gracie Academy in Manhattan — the room the grappling world came to call the Blue Basement. His method rejects the traditional model of jiu-jitsu instruction, a loose bag of individual techniques, in favor of treating a position as a problem to be defined precisely and then solved with a repeatable sequence. He applied that method to the one area of the sport that had been left almost entirely unsystematized: the legs.
The proving ground was a specific competitive team. The Danaher Death Squad — the name a former training partner, Ryan Quinn, coined on Reddit in 2016 to describe what training with them was like — grew out of Danaher's classes in the early 2010s and centered on Eddie Cummings, Garry Tonon, and, a few years later, Gordon Ryan. At the Eddie Bravo Invitational, a submission-only format with overtime rules designed to punish stalling, the group's leg attacks had a stage that rewarded exactly what they were good at. Between roughly 2015 and 2016 they used it to win, and to make the wider grappling public notice that leg locks were no longer a novelty.
The codification came in 2016, when Danaher released Leg Locks: Enter The System through BJJ Fanatics, filmed in the company's basement studio with Bernardo Faria and Michael Zenga. It was the first release in what became his "Enter The System" series, and it did for the legs what his later back-attack material would do for the back: it laid out not a highlight reel of finishes but a stepwise argument — the mechanical pillars, the families of ashi-garami, the control hierarchy, the entries and counters, and only at the very end the breaking mechanics of the submission itself. The instructional is the codified proof that this is a discrete system rather than "Danaher's favorite submission." It names the positions, ranks them, and prescribes the order in which a practitioner is meant to pass through them. Much of the community's shared vocabulary for the leg game today — the way coaches talk about inside versus outside position, about killing the knee line before turning the heel — traces back through that material.
A generic account of the heel hook describes a submission: trap the leg, isolate the heel, rotate. Danaher's system barely concerns itself with that final act, because its entire premise is that a heel hook attempted from poor control is both dangerous and low-percentage, and a heel hook attempted from dominant control is neither. The spine of the system is a control hierarchy of leg entanglements, a control-before-submission philosophy, and a precise set of heel-exposure mechanics that determine whether the finish is available at all.
The organizing idea is that leg entanglements are not interchangeable. They form a spectrum from weak, symmetrical control to strong, asymmetrical control, and the practitioner's job is to climb it. The system arranges the major positions roughly in this order:
Outside ashi-garami and 50/50. The entry-level entanglements. In outside ashi-garami — and in its symmetrical cousin 50/50, where the opponent's leg is passed across the body and both grapplers end up in mirror-image positions — you have a leg controlled and a straight ankle lock available, but the control is shallow and, in 50/50, shared. The opponent has the same attack you do. This symmetry is precisely the problem Danaher's system is built to escape, not to celebrate: 50/50 is a place you pass through, not a place you camp.
Inside ashi-garami. Rotating to the inside of the opponent's leg changes the geometry. Now the entanglement threatens the knee rather than just the ankle, and the symmetry begins to break in your favor.
The saddle (also called the honey hole, the 411, or inside sankaku's home). Here the system reaches its most controlling family. The opponent's leg is trapped with your legs threaded inside and around it — a configuration that pins the hip, isolates the knee line, and gives you the inside heel with the opponent unable to mirror the attack. When the entanglement is finished off with a triangle of the legs formed inside the trapped leg, it becomes inside sankaku ("inside triangle"), the position that lets you threaten both the ankle via a straight lock and the knee via an inside heel hook, while denying the opponent any equivalent counter.
The reason this ordering matters is competitive rather than aesthetic. In a shared position like 50/50, a heel hook is a race — whoever finishes first wins, and the loser is often the one who committed a half-second later. In the saddle and inside sankaku, there is no race, because the opponent has no attack to run. Danaher's system is, at bottom, an argument for spending your effort getting to the positions where the finish is uncontested rather than gambling on the finish from positions where it is a coin flip.
Within any of these entanglements, the finish depends on two mechanical conditions the system insists on before any rotation begins.
The first is control of the knee line — trapping the opponent's knee so that the lower leg cannot rotate freely and the opponent cannot simply turn the knee to follow the pressure and relieve it. A heel hook applied to a leg whose knee is still mobile transmits force into a moving joint that can chase the rotation; a heel hook applied to a leg whose knee is pinned transmits that force directly into the ligaments of the knee. The system's language of "killing" or "controlling" the knee line captures this: the knee is immobilized first, and only then is the heel attacked.
The second is heel exposure. The heel hook is not a foot lock in the ordinary sense; it works by rotating the foot to torque the knee, and it only works if the heel is actually exposed to your control, with no gap for the opponent to hide it or spin it away. Coaches out of this lineage describe the ideal as leaving no daylight between the exposed heel and the attacker's own body — the heel is captured tight against the chest or shoulder so there is nowhere for it to travel. A defender's entire game, once caught, is to keep the heel hidden and the knee mobile; the attacker's entire game is to remove both of those escapes before turning. The submission, when it comes, is a small, controlled rotation, not a violent wrench — which is exactly why, done correctly within the system, it is safer to train than its reputation suggests, and more reliable to land.
Underneath the hierarchy sits the philosophy that separates this system from the old view of leg locks. Conventional jiu-jitsu teaches "position before submission" — establish a dominant pin, then attack. The leg game long violated that maxim, which is part of why it was distrusted: people threw heel hooks from scrambles with no control at all. Danaher's inversion is subtle. He does not abandon control; he relocates it. The ashi-garami hierarchy is his version of a positional pin — a set of controls that hold the opponent as firmly as a mounted seatbelt holds the back — and the rule becomes control that leads to submission: you do not attack the heel to win, you attack the heel because the control you have already established has left the opponent no other way for the exchange to end.
This is what a section of the generic heel-hook technique article cannot say. The technique is a submission. The system is a claim about the whole lower body as a positional domain — that the legs deserve the same hierarchy of dominant and inferior positions that the sport had already granted the back, the mount, and side control, and that once you build that hierarchy, the most feared submission in grappling becomes one of the most controllable.
The leg game in 2026 is unrecognizable from the one Danaher inherited. What was, a decade ago, a specialist's oddity is now a required part of every serious no-gi competitor's curriculum, taught from white belt in many academies and expected knowledge in any elite training room. The vocabulary the system introduced — inside versus outside position, the saddle, inside sankaku, killing the knee line — is now simply how the sport talks about the legs, regardless of whether a given coach ever trained under Danaher.
The most consequential institutional change came from the sport's largest governing body. On 1 January 2021, the IBJJF — which had banned heel hooks and knee reaping for its entire history — legalized both for adult brown and black belts in no-gi competition, sanctioning inside and outside heel hooks and the reaping positions (including variations of inside ashi-garami) that the technique depends on. The change did not extend to gi competition, to masters divisions, or to belts below brown, and a few entries — the flying scissor takedown (kani basami) and the Imanari roll among them — remained prohibited for everyone. But the shift was still a watershed: the organization that had done the most to keep leg locks at the margins now acknowledged, for its highest-level no-gi athletes, that the position had become central. (FloGrappling)
The team that built the system, meanwhile, dispersed. Cummings parted ways with the group in the late 2010s; the broader Danaher Death Squad left the Blue Basement in 2020 and split in July 2021, with Danaher forming New Wave Jiu-Jitsu in Austin alongside Gordon Ryan and Garry Tonon while several younger members founded B-Team in the same city. As with the back-attack system, the split fractured the team but not the method. By the time the room broke up, the leg game had already been codified in the 2016 instructional and disseminated far beyond any single gym. It now belongs to the sport.
One nuance is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to overclaim. The system's most spectacular early results came under submission-only rulesets — EBI above all — where heel hooks were legal and overtime rewarded finishing. Under ADCC's points-and-time rules, and especially before 2021 under the IBJJF, the same athletes often had to win differently. Gordon Ryan's run to ADCC gold at −88 kg in 2017, for instance, was closed out with a rear-naked choke and a guillotine, not a heel hook — a reminder that the leg system is a devastating part of an elite game rather than the whole of it, and that its dominance is clearest where the rules let it operate.
Selecting the bouts that best show the system deciding matches at the highest level. The clearest examples come from submission-only competition, where the leg game had room to operate.
The through-line is the same signature the back system shows: a spectator who knows the system can name the position a match is likely to be decided in before it starts, and keep being right. That predictability, against opponents who also know what is coming, is the mark of a system rather than a highlight.
White belt learns the entanglements as defense and safety first — how to recognize when a leg is being isolated, how to escape ashi-garami before it tightens, and, where the academy trains them, how to tap early and often. At this stage the heel hook is something you learn to survive, not to apply, and the most important lesson is that the submission gives almost no warning before the ligament goes.
Blue belt learns the entries and the outside positions — how to get to ashi-garami and 50/50, and the straight ankle lock that lives there. The blue belt discovers that the leg is a place you can attack from, not just a place you defend.
Purple belt learns the hierarchy: that 50/50 is symmetrical and to be escaped upward, that the inside positions are where control lives, and how to move from outside entanglements toward the saddle. The purple belt stops racing for the heel and starts improving position first.
Brown belt — the rank at which the IBJJF first permits the technique in no-gi — learns the finish properly: killing the knee line, exposing the heel with no daylight, and the small controlled rotation that finishes without wrenching. The brown belt closes matches from the legs because the control is established before the heel is ever turned.
Black belt rebuilds the leg game from the entries backward and integrates it with everything else — passing, guard, the back. For a black belt inside this system, the legs are not a separate specialty bolted onto a jiu-jitsu game; they are one more domain governed by the same logic of dominant and inferior position, entered from failed passes, from guard, from scrambles, and finished as calmly as a choke.
1. Camping in 50/50. The most common intermediate error is treating 50/50 as a destination because it feels stable. It is symmetrical: the opponent has your exact attack. The system's whole point is to leave it for an inside position where the control is one-way. Pass through, do not settle.
2. Reaching for the heel before killing the knee line. Attacking the heel while the opponent's knee can still rotate lets the opponent chase the pressure and spin free — and makes the submission far more likely to injure than to finish. Immobilize the knee first; the heel is the last step.
3. Leaving daylight on the heel. A heel that is not captured tight to the body can be hidden, and a hidden heel cannot be attacked. If the opponent can create a gap between the heel and your chest, the finish is already gone. Trap the heel before you turn.
4. Turning the heel with speed instead of control. The heel hook done right is a slow, small rotation from dominant control. Wrenching it fast from loose position is how the technique earned its dangerous reputation and how training partners get hurt. Control makes it both safer and more reliable.
5. Treating the leg game as a separate specialty. Practitioners who bolt leg locks onto an otherwise disconnected game find the entanglements exposed in scrambles. The system works because the entries connect to passing, guard, and the back — the legs are integrated, not siloed.
At open mat this week, ignore the finish entirely. Start in outside ashi-garami or 50/50 with a same-rank partner and set one rule: you are only trying to improve your position — from outside, to inside, to the saddle — while your partner is only trying to escape or recover a neutral position. No heel hook attempts allowed. A five-minute round, both sides.
You are training the part of the system almost everyone skips. Most people drill the heel hook; the heel hook is the easy part and, drilled carelessly, the dangerous part. The match is decided in the climb up the control hierarchy, and that climb is a skill that only improves when you rehearse it without the temptation to lunge for the finish the moment the foot appears.
Add a second round in which you reach a saddle or inside sankaku and work only the two finishing conditions — killing the knee line and exposing the heel with no daylight — still without applying rotation. Learn to recognize the exact moment the finish becomes available. Then, and only then, with an experienced partner and slow, controlled pressure, add a live finish, and notice how little rotation it actually takes once the control is real.
Repeat weekly for six weeks. The leg game will stop being a scramble and start being a sequence — and, drilled this way, a safe one.
Danaher's heel-hook system is a codified method built on top of a submission and a family of positions the whole sport shares. To place it:
The relationship to the heel hook is the same as the closed guard's relationship to the guard, or the Straight Jacket's relationship to back control: a technique everyone has access to, made into a discrete, teachable positional weapon by one coach's insistence on defining the problem precisely before solving it.
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