The Melbourne physiotherapist who heel-hooked three of the heaviest men at ADCC 2019 did not build his leg game the way New York did. Lachlan Giles's system is the analytical, anatomy-first branch of the modern entanglement game — codified in "The Leg Lock Anthology" and taught to a generation, including Craig Jones.
On the second day of the 2019 ADCC World Championship in Anaheim, a 33-year-old physiotherapist from Melbourne walked into the absolute division — the open-weight bracket, no upper limit, the place where the sport's heaviest and most decorated grapplers settle who is best regardless of size — and began removing people from it by the leg.
Lachlan Giles competes at roughly the size of a middleweight. The men in front of him did not. His first opponent was Kaynan Duarte, the reigning champion of the heaviest weight class. Giles sat to guard, worked into a leg entanglement, isolated the foot, and finished him with an inside heel hook. His second was Patrick Gaudio, a 99-kilogram finalist from four years earlier. Same story: to the ground, into the legs, heel hook, tap. By the reckoning of the event's own broadcaster, each of those finishes came in under four minutes.
He lost his semifinal to Gordon Ryan — passed, back-taken, and choked by the best heavyweight of the era. But he came back for the bronze medal against Mahamed Aly, another man from the sport's largest division, sat straight to guard, hunted the same heel hook, and got it.
Three men from the two heaviest brackets in the sport, all submitted by the legs, all by a competitor who gave up thirty or forty pounds in each match. The grappling internet named him the people's champion by the end of the weekend. What it was actually watching was a system — a specific, teachable, anatomically reasoned approach to the lower-body game — passing the hardest test its author could have set for it.
Giles's leg-lock system is the proof that the modern heel-hook game is not one school but several: his is the analytical, physiotherapy-informed Melbourne branch, built to let the smaller, more precise grappler finish the larger one.
The modern leg-lock era has a dominant origin story, and it is not this one. The version most people know runs through John Danaher's basement in New York and the squad of no-gi competitors — the group once known as the Danaher Death Squad — who made the inside heel hook the defining submission of no-gi grappling in the late 2010s. That system has its own bjj.media profile. Giles's story is a parallel one, developed on the other side of the world, from a different starting point, by a man with a different toolkit.
Lachlan Giles was born in Melbourne in 1986. His black belt comes from the Australian instructor John Simon, in the lineage of John Will — one of the so-called "dirty dozen," the first non-Brazilians to earn BJJ black belts — which traces back through the Machado brothers to Carlos Gracie. He was promoted to black belt in 2012 and has been the head coach at Absolute MMA in St Kilda, Melbourne, for over a decade.
The detail that shapes everything about how he teaches is the other credential. Giles holds a PhD in physiotherapy, completed in 2016 at La Trobe University, on top of a bachelor's degree in the same field from 2008; his published research concerns patellofemoral (kneecap) pain. He came to the leg-lock game already fluent in the anatomy of the joints he was about to attack — the exact structures of the knee and ankle, the direction of rotation each ligament resists, the mechanical difference between a lock that torques the knee and one that torques the ankle. Where much of the leg-lock world learned its anatomy backwards, from what worked on the mat, Giles arrived with it as a professional prerequisite.
That background is why his system reads the way it does. The codifying document is The Leg Lock Anthology: 50/50, released through BJJ Fanatics, an eight-volume study built explicitly around the position and the concepts behind his ADCC run. It is not organized as a highlight reel of finishes. It is organized as an argument — entries, controls, the breaking mechanics of the finish, and the counters to the counters — the way a clinician would build a differential. Giles has since moved most of his teaching onto Submeta, his own subscription platform, where the same material is broken into structured courses on single-leg-X, butterfly ashi, the K-guard, and 50/50, taught by him and his team.
The timing matters for the lineage claim. Giles was already a decorated ADCC and no-gi competitor and a full-time coach and researcher before the heel-hook era peaked. His system was not downloaded from New York; it was worked out in Melbourne, which is exactly why it looks different when you slow it down.
What makes this a system, and not simply "Lachlan Giles does heel hooks well," is that it answers the three questions every entanglement game has to answer — how do you get to the legs, how do you keep the leg once you have it, and how do you finish without losing it — with a consistent, stated set of principles rather than a bag of techniques. And it answers them in a recognizably different accent from the other schools.
Control before submission — always in that order. The single load-bearing idea in Giles's teaching is that the heel hook is the last thing that happens, not the first. Before any rotation is applied to the foot, the system demands a controlled entanglement: the hips pinned, the knee line trapped, the opponent's ability to rotate out or stand up already removed. Giles teaches the entanglement as the position you win from, and the submission as a formality you collect once control is total. This is the opposite of the beginner instinct, which is to grab the foot and crank. In his framing, if you are fighting for the finish, you skipped a step earlier.
The entry positions. Giles's game is built on a small family of leg entanglements that he has done as much as anyone to popularize and organize:
The finish, explained as anatomy. This is where the physiotherapy shows. Giles teaches the inside heel hook as a rotational attack on the knee, not a pain compliance hold on the ankle — the tap comes from torque transmitted up the tibia into the knee ligaments, and the danger (the reason the submission is treated with such care and banned under so many rulesets) is precisely that it can damage the knee before the athlete feels enough to react. His instruction names the structures, describes the exact line of rotation, and stresses controlled application — a rare case where the way a technique is taught is also a safety brief. It is a very different register from "put the blade of your forearm here and rotate."
Concept over choreography. The connective tissue across the whole system is that positions are taught as decision trees keyed to what the opponent gives you, not as fixed sequences. If the opponent rotates this way, the heel is exposed; if he clears the knee line, you switch entanglements; if he stands, you have the sweep. This is what a section of the generic heel-hook or the 50/50 position, taught on their own, cannot supply: the through-line of one coach's answers to every branch, tested at the highest level and written down in one place.
By 2026 the leg-lock genie is long out of the bottle, and Giles's influence on the mainstream is easy to underrate precisely because it has been so thoroughly absorbed. The single-leg-X, K-guard, and weaponized-50/50 vocabulary he helped standardize is now simply how the bottom game is played in no-gi, from regional opens to the invitational circuit.
His platform did as much as his competition record to spread the system. Submeta, launched as a structured subscription service rather than a series of one-off instructionals, turned Giles's method into an ongoing curriculum — one of the more successful examples of a top coach going direct-to-student, and a distribution model many others have since copied. The result is that a purple belt in Manchester or São Paulo can train the exact conceptual framework Giles used at ADCC, updated as his own game evolves.
The most visible proof of the system's transmissibility is a person: Craig Jones. Jones came up under Giles at Absolute MMA and was awarded his black belt by Giles in 2016; he went on to become one of the most recognizable no-gi grapplers in the world and the founder of his own invitational event, and his leg-lock game — profiled separately on bjj.media — carries the unmistakable fingerprints of the Melbourne room even as he has built his own identity on top of it. A coach whose student becomes a headline act, and whose method is legible in that student's game years later, has by definition produced a system and not just a personal style.
What has changed since 2019 is the counter-game. The heaviest, most elite grapplers now defend the legs far better than Duarte, Gaudio, and Aly could that weekend, and pure leg entanglement is harder to land cold at the very top. Giles's own game has adapted accordingly — he has spoken publicly about moving away from certain positions, such as backside-50/50, as the meta shifted. That evolution is itself a feature of the system: it was built by a researcher, and researchers update.
The system's competitive case rests overwhelmingly on one weekend, which is unusually well-documented, and which is strong enough to carry it.
The result is durable because it is verifiable: a single-day, three-submission run through the open-weight bracket, all by the same family of attack, all against significantly larger and highly credentialed opponents, at the sport's premier no-gi event. It is one of the most-cited underdog performances in the sport's history, and it is the reason the instructional built around it carries weight.
White belt learns the entanglement as a position, not a submission. The first job is safety and orientation: recognizing single-leg-X and 50/50, understanding why the inside heel hook is dangerous, and — in most gyms — drilling the control without ever applying rotation. Giles's own teaching supports this order; the finish is the last thing introduced.
Blue belt learns to enter. This is where the K-guard and single-leg-X entries become live tools — getting from open guard into a controlled leg entanglement against a resisting partner, and getting the sweep when the entanglement is denied. Most blue belts can find a heel hook; almost none can hold the position that makes it safe and certain.
Purple belt learns control before submission as a rule, not a slogan. The purple belt stops racing to the foot and starts winning the entanglement first — pinning the hips, killing the knee line, removing the opponent's rotation and stand-up before the heel is ever exposed. This is the shift that separates a leg-lock hobbyist from a leg-lock player.
Brown belt learns the branches. Now the 50/50 becomes 80/20: reading which way the opponent can rotate, switching entanglements when the knee line is cleared, and chaining the back-take when the legs are defended. The brown belt runs the decision tree rather than a single sequence.
Black belt rebuilds the system around his own body and the current meta. He knows the counters to his entries, pre-empts them, and — as Giles himself models — abandons positions that the top game has solved and finds new ones. The black belt treats the whole thing as a living argument to be updated, which is exactly how its author treats it.
1. Reaching for the heel before the entanglement is controlled. The defining beginner error, and the one Giles's entire teaching order is built to correct. If you are cranking on a foot that can still rotate out, you have a scramble, not a submission — and you are giving up your own leg in the exchange. Win the position first.
2. Treating 50/50 as neutral. Athletes who learned 50/50 as a stalemate sit in it and wait. The whole point of Giles's system is that 50/50 is not symmetrical once upper-body control and hip angle are added. Playing it passively hands the initiative — and possibly your own heel — to an opponent who knows better.
3. Confusing the K-guard for a home. The K-guard is an entry, a launch posture that should convert into an inside-leg position or a back-take within a beat or two. Practitioners who camp in it get their frames flattened and their guard passed. Use it to go somewhere.
4. Misunderstanding the finish as an ankle lock. Because the hand is on the heel, beginners crank the ankle and wonder why the tap does not come. The inside heel hook damages the knee via rotation up the tibia; the mechanic is torque and angle, not squeezing the foot. Misreading this makes the attack both weaker and more dangerous to a training partner, because feedback arrives late.
5. Ignoring the exits when the leg is defended. A leg game with no sweep and no back-take is a leg game the top players simply defend and wait out. Giles's system always pairs the entanglement with what to do when the finish is denied. Train the entries and exits, not just the submission.
Pick single-leg-X, one entanglement, for the whole week. At open mat, start every round from a neutral seated position and give yourself one job: get to a controlled single-leg-X against a resisting same-rank partner. No heel hook. No submission of any kind. Just the entry and the control — hips elevated, the leg trapped with all four of your limbs, your partner off-balanced and unable to stand.
Round two: from that control, take only the sweep. Your partner defends fully; you are allowed to elevate and reverse but not to attack the leg. This teaches the position as an off-balancing engine, which is what keeps it safe and what keeps opponents honest.
Only once those two rounds feel automatic should the heel hook enter — and it should enter under supervision, slowly, with a coach who can name the mechanics, tapping early and often, both partners treating it with the caution the joint demands. If your gym allows it. Many do not below a certain rank, for good reason, and the position is worth drilling for the control and sweeps alone.
Repeat weekly. The entanglement game rewards the same thing Giles's ADCC run displayed: control that is so complete the submission is a formality.
Giles's system is one branch of the modern lower-body game, and it is best understood next to its neighbors.
Read together, those five pages are the map of how the sport learned to attack the legs — and Giles's node on it is the analytical, anatomy-first, Melbourne one.
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.
Publication draft prepared 2026-08-07. Two-pass edit and source-check pass required before scheduling.
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