Most grapplers meet the kimura as a submission — a figure-four on the arm, a shoulder to be cranked. John Danaher rebuilt it as something larger: a universal control grip that sweeps, passes, retains guard, takes the back, and finishes, all from the same double-wrist-lock frame. This is the system that turned a submission into a hub.
Watch a Danaher-trained grappler take the back and you will almost always see the same thing happen a beat before the seatbelt closes: one of the opponent's wrists disappears. It is trapped, folded behind him at ninety degrees, held by a figure-four grip that looks — to anyone who learned the kimura as a submission — like a finish that failed. It is not a failed finish. It is the point.
The grip is the double wrist lock, known in jiu-jitsu as the kimura. In most gyms it is taught as a submission you hunt from side control: pin the arm, step over the head, rotate the shoulder until the opponent taps. It works often enough at the lower belts and disappears against good defense at the higher ones, because a submission you can only enter from one position, against an opponent who knows it is coming, is a low-percentage bet.
John Danaher's answer was not to teach a better finish. It was to stop treating the kimura as a finish at all. In his framing, the figure-four grip on the wrist and elbow is a form of control — one of the most powerful two-limb controls in grappling — and the shoulder lock is only one of the things it can do. From the same grip a practitioner can sweep from the bottom, pass from the top, retain a collapsing guard, and, most consequentially, march an opponent to his own back. The submission becomes the least interesting exit.
This is a story about that reframing: how one of the sport's oldest submissions was reorganized, around 2019, into a control-and-transition system that runs underneath the modern no-gi game — and why the grip your training partner keeps calling "just a kimura" is doing far more than trying to break your arm.
In Danaher's system the kimura is not a submission that sometimes controls — it is a control that sometimes submits, a single grip that can sweep, pass, retain, and take the back before it ever threatens the shoulder.
The submission is old, and its name is a receipt. On 23 October 1951, in Rio de Janeiro, the Japanese judoka Masahiko Kimura defeated Hélio Gracie with a reverse ude-garami — a shoulder lock — and the Gracie family, in a gesture the sport has never stopped citing, kept the technique and named it after the man who beat their founder. In catch wrestling the same grip carries an older, more descriptive name: the double wrist lock. Both traditions understood it as a way to end a fight.
What neither tradition fully systematized was the grip's second life as a control. That the figure-four could be used to steer rather than to finish was known in fragments long before Danaher — turtle players used it to threaten the back, top players used it to flatten a scrambling opponent, and instructionals treating the kimura grip as a positional trap circulated in the no-gi scene through the 2010s. The idea was in the water. What did not exist was a single, ranked, mechanically consistent account of it.
That account is "Kimura: Enter The System," released on BJJ Fanatics in 2019 as part of Danaher's larger Enter The System series — the same run of instructionals that codified his triangle, back-attack, front-headlock, and leg-lock games. The kimura set runs roughly ten hours across eight volumes of no-gi instruction. Its organizing claim, stated in the instructional's own framing, is that the kimura is one of the most misused techniques in grappling: hunted as a submission from a single position, abandoned the moment the arm slips free, and never understood as the control it actually is.
Danaher's authority to make that claim is a matter of record. A black belt under Renzo Gracie and a longtime instructor at Renzo Gracie Academy in New York, he coached the group that came to be known as the Danaher Death Squad — Gordon Ryan, Garry Tonon, Nicky Ryan, and others — whose competitive results through the late 2010s reorganized how the sport thinks about no-gi submission grappling. The kimura instructional sits inside that body of work as the volume that treats a classical submission as a modern control system.
The codification matters because it is what separates a technique from a system. A technique is a thing you do. A system is a ranked set of responses to what the opponent does back — a decision tree in which every defense the opponent offers routes you to a named next option. That is what the eight volumes provide, and it is why the grip a white belt calls "a kimura" and the grip a Danaher student calls "the kimura system" are, functionally, two different objects.
The spine of the system is a reframing, and everything else follows from it: the figure-four grip is a control, and the shoulder lock is one of several exits from that control. Hold that idea and the eight volumes organize themselves.
The grip is a two-on-one on a single limb. The kimura grip is a figure-four — one hand grips the opponent's wrist, the other hand threads through and grips your own wrist — applied to the opponent's arm. Two of your limbs are committed to one of his. In isolation that is a losing trade, which is why the system insists the grip is never worked in isolation: the legs, the head, and bodyweight are recruited so that the opponent cannot simply out-muscle two arms with the rest of his body. Danaher's framing stresses that the grip's power comes not from arm strength but from alignment — the wrist bent, the elbow lifted, the shoulder loaded along a specific line — so that a correctly held kimura controls a stronger opponent's entire upper body through one trapped arm.
The control precedes the submission, always. In the lower-belt version of the kimura, the grip and the finish are the same motion: you grab and you crank. In the system they are separated in time. First you win the grip and establish control — the opponent's posture broken, his arm folded, his ability to turn into you removed. Only from established control do you choose an exit, and the shoulder lock is merely the exit you take when the opponent gives you nothing better. This separation is the single most important idea in the system, because it is what makes the grip survive against opponents who defend the finish. You are no longer trying to break the arm; you are holding a position, and the break is available if he lets it be.
The grip works from both top and bottom, and it inverts by position. This is the feature that makes it a system rather than a side-control trick. From the bottom — closed guard, half guard, butterfly — the kimura grip is a sweep and a guard-retention tool: trapping the arm kills the opponent's base and his ability to pass, and steering the trapped arm rolls him over or recovers your guard. From the top — side control, north-south, turtle — the same grip is a pass-consolidator and a back-take: it prevents the bottom player from turning in, and it walks him to his back. One grip, opposite jobs, depending on who is on top. Danaher's volumes are organized largely by position for exactly this reason, because the grip's meaning changes with the position even though the grip itself does not.
The back is the destination, not the shoulder. The most consequential exit in the system is not the submission it is named for. When an opponent defends the shoulder lock — as good opponents reliably do — the correct response in the system is frequently to abandon the finish and use the trapped arm as a steering wheel to the back. The opponent's own defensive rotation, the turn he makes to save his shoulder, is the motion that exposes his back; the kimura grip converts that defense into a back-take. This is why the kimura system and Danaher's back-attack system are not two separate games but two halves of one: the kimura grip is one of the cleanest on-ramps to the seatbelt and the strangle-first back attack that his students finish at rates the sport had not seen before.
The finishes fan out. Because the grip controls the arm and the opponent's reactions are predictable, the kimura also feeds a wider net of submissions than its own shoulder lock — armbars when the elbow extends, triangles when the opponent frames, wrist locks when he grips defensively, and the straight-armlock family when he straightens to escape. The system names these as ranked responses to specific defenses rather than as separate techniques you hunt independently.
The volumes elaborate this spine into a large vocabulary — pull-dominant versus push-dominant applications, dorsal and "T" kimura configurations, shoulder-line and power-line framing, north-south and turtle entries, standing and scramble variants. The named parts matter less than the through-line: every one of them is the same grip, doing one of the same handful of jobs — control, sweep, retain, pass, take the back, finish — sorted by position and by the defense in front of you.
By 2026 the kimura-as-control idea has moved from a Danaher specialty to a background assumption of high-level no-gi grappling. You see it less as a signature "kimura game" than as connective tissue: the grip that appears for a half-second on the way to the back, the frame that stops a guard pass, the control that consolidates a scramble. Its ubiquity is the sign that the reframing worked — the system succeeded so completely that it stopped looking like a system and started looking like fundamentals.
The clearest expression of it lives in the games of the athletes Danaher coached. Gordon Ryan's transitional game in particular leans on the kimura grip as an entry to his back attacks: trap the wrist inside half guard or off a scramble, use it to prevent the opponent from turning in, and convert it to the seatbelt. The grip does not appear on the highlight reel as a finish; it appears as the quiet control a beat before the finish. That is exactly the role the system designs it for.
The instructional market tracked the shift. Danaher's own kimura set was followed by kimura-focused content from his students and rivals — Gordon Ryan released material systematizing the kimura attack, and the broader no-gi instructional catalog through the early 2020s increasingly treated the grip as a control-and-transition hub rather than a standalone submission. The vocabulary the system introduced — the kimura as a "trap," a "control," a route to the back — is now the default way the technique is discussed online.
What changed most is what happens after the grip is defended. In the older model, a defended kimura was a dead end: the opponent frees the arm and the exchange resets. In the modern model, a defended kimura is the beginning of a chain — to the back, to an armbar, to a sweep, to a pass — because the system treats every defense as a routed next option rather than a stop. The kimura was not made stronger as a submission. It was networked into everything around it.
A candid note belongs here. The kimura system's competitive footprint is unusual, because the system is designed so that its most important applications are not finishes. Its signature is the trapped wrist that becomes a back-take, or the grip that stalls a pass — moments that show up in the record as back finishes and dominant positions rather than as "kimura wins." Cleanly verifiable, dated bouts decided by a kimura submission at the elite level are genuinely harder to point to than the system's influence would suggest, precisely because the system so often routes away from the shoulder lock and into the back before the tap. Rather than attach specific scores or dates that cannot be confirmed against a scoresheet, this section characterizes the pattern and flags the specifics for source-check.
Editors: verified, dated kimura sequences from ADCC, FloGrappling, or IBJJF archives can be slotted in during the source-check pass. Until then, no specific match score or date is asserted in this section.
White belt learns the kimura as a submission from side control: pin the arm to the mat, secure the figure-four, step over the head, rotate. This is the correct place to start, and the system does not disown it — it simply calls it the first page, not the book.
Blue belt learns that the grip is a control before it is a finish. The realization that you can hold the kimura grip — keep the opponent's arm folded and his posture broken without immediately cranking — is the doorway into the system. The blue belt stops losing the grip the instant the finish is defended, because he stops treating the finish as the only reason to hold it.
Purple belt learns the back-take exit. When the opponent defends the shoulder lock by turning, the purple belt uses the trapped arm to follow him to his back instead of fighting to complete a finish that is no longer there. This is the moment the kimura stops being a submission in the practitioner's mind and becomes a hub.
Brown belt learns the grip from the bottom — as a sweep and a guard-retention tool from half guard, butterfly, and closed guard — and begins to understand that the same figure-four does opposite jobs depending on who is on top. The brown belt can enter the grip from a scramble and knows in advance which exit each of the opponent's likely defenses will open.
Black belt runs the grip as connective tissue. He does not "go for a kimura"; he arrives in the grip on the way to somewhere else, and steers. The kimura for a black belt is not a technique he performs but a control he passes through — a junction where sweep, pass, back-take, and finish all branch from one frame, chosen by what the opponent gives.
1. Cranking before controlling. The defining lower-belt error, and the one the entire system is built to correct. Trying to finish the shoulder lock the instant you grip it gives the opponent a single, well-known thing to defend, and against good defense it fails every time. Win control first — arm folded, posture broken, opponent unable to turn in — and let the finish be the last thing, not the first.
2. Abandoning the grip when the finish is defended. The second-most common error is treating a defended shoulder lock as the end of the exchange. In the system, the defended finish is the start of the best chain — most often the back-take. Letting go of the grip because "the kimura didn't work" throws away the position at the exact moment it becomes most valuable.
3. Committing two arms with nothing else. The figure-four is a two-on-one on a single limb; used with the arms alone, it loses to a stronger opponent's whole body. The fix is the system's core mechanical rule: recruit the legs, the head, and bodyweight so the grip is supported by more than arm strength. A kimura held only with the arms is a kimura waiting to be ripped free.
4. One-position thinking. Hunting the kimura only from side control, as it is first taught, ignores the feature that makes it a system — that the same grip works from the back, the turtle, half guard, butterfly, and standing, doing a different job in each. Practitioners who only see the side-control finish are using a fraction of the tool.
5. Ignoring the inversion between top and bottom. From the top the grip walks the opponent to his back; from the bottom it sweeps or retains. Confusing the two — trying to run a top exit from underneath, or vice versa — is a common intermediate error that the position-by-position structure of the system is designed to prevent.
Pick one junction and drill the branch, not the finish. This week, from side control, establish the kimura grip against a resisting partner whose only job is to defend the shoulder lock — no submitting allowed on your side. When your partner defends by turning in to save the shoulder, follow the trapped arm to the back and secure the seatbelt. Reset. Repeat.
The point of the round is to stop training the kimura as a finish and start training it as a fork: grip, control, and then read which exit the defense opens. You are rehearsing the decision — finish if he gives it, back if he turns — until the choice is automatic rather than deliberate.
Add a second round from the bottom. From half guard, win the kimura grip on the near arm and use it to off-balance and sweep, or to recover guard when the pass comes. Same grip, opposite job. Feeling the figure-four do two different things from two different positions in the same session is the fastest way to internalize why Danaher calls it a system and not a technique.
Six weeks of drilling the grip as a control — rather than the crank as a finish — will change how the position feels more than six months of hunting the submission.
The kimura system is best understood as a bridge that connects several other positions on the map.
The through-line is transition: the kimura grip is one of the cleanest on-ramps from the top positions to the back, and one of the more reliable retention tools from the bottom. It is less a destination than a junction the rest of the map routes through.
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