Modern Era (2010–present)
THE LEGLOCK REVOLUTION: DANAHER, SAMBO, AND THE MODERN NO-GI GAME
For most of BJJ's competitive history, leg attacks were considered low-percentage, dishonorable, or both. The IBJJF banned heel hooks at every belt level in gi competition and most belts in no-gi until very recently. Then John Danaher and a small group of students rebuilt the leg-lock game from first principles, and within five years the world's most consequential ADCC matches were being decided by attacks that had been considered fringe a decade earlier.
The leg-lock revolution did not begin with John Danaher. Its roots lie in Russian and Eastern European sambo, where leg attacks have always been a central pillar of the art, and in the parallel work of Dean Lister, Erik Paulson, and Rolles Gracie in the early 2000s. Lister in particular, an ADCC champion and Submission of the Year recipient for his heel-hook finishes, was the figure who famously challenged Danaher (then Renzo Gracie's chief instructor) with the question that became the title of one of the most influential BJJ instructional series ever produced: "Why would you ignore fifty percent of the human body?"
Danaher took the question seriously. Beginning around 2012, he and his students — Eddie Cummings first, then Garry Tonon, Gordon Ryan, Nicky Ryan, and others — rebuilt the leg-lock game inside the Renzo Gracie Academy with the methodological seriousness that the Gracie family had originally brought to the upper-body game. They identified the inside sankaku (a figure-four position with the attacker's legs trapping the opponent's leg from inside) as the position from which heel hooks could be reliably finished against world-class opposition, and they developed entries to that position from nearly every other position on the mat.
The results began appearing at ADCC and EBI tournaments in 2015 and 2016. By 2017, when Gordon Ryan made his ADCC debut and won double gold while Tonon and Cummings were finishing higher-belt opponents with heel hooks at near-record rates, the rest of the grappling world was forced to respond. The Atos team, the New Wave team's primary rival, integrated leg attacks into their game. The Australian B-Team, led by Craig Jones, refined the heel hook for the high-level no-gi exchange and won an entire generation of ADCC matches with it. By 2024 the inside heel hook had become the most-used submission across major no-gi tournaments, with the rear naked choke and the guillotine close behind.
The revolution also forced the IBJJF and other governing bodies to reconsider their leg-lock rules. As of the most recent rule revisions, the IBJJF permits inside heel hooks in no-gi competition at brown belt and above, and a discussion about gi-competition heel hooks remains active. The technique remains banned in gi competition for safety reasons — the heel hook produces damage before pain, which is fundamentally different from every other submission — but the rest of the leg-lock arsenal, including the straight ankle lock, the kneebar, the toe hold, and the outside heel hook, has gradually become legal in nearly every modern ruleset. The leg-lock revolution did not destroy traditional jiu jitsu, as some practitioners had feared; it integrated into it, and the modern game is now defined by the ability to attack the entire body rather than only the upper half.