There is a certain type of opponent who is best described as a compulsive leglocker. You know the type: no sooner have you put him in your guard than he flings himself backwards and starts attacking your lower body with ankle locks, toe holds, kneebars and other submissions. You generally don’t want to trade leglocks with this kind of opponent – he uses them all the time and will probably get to the submission first – so what can you do?

There are certain strategies that are very helpful in shutting down the game of a leglock-oriented opponent:

• Maintaining a closed guard if you are on the bottom. There are very few effective leglocks that can be used against a closed guard.
• Breaking your opponent’s posture if they are in your guard: it is very difficult to go for a leglock if you can’t posture up first.
• Maintaining your grips: if you are wrestling with the gi then sleeve and/or collar grips make it difficult for your opponent to entwine your legs with his arms and throw himself backwards.
• Passing the guard on your knees. There are quite a few leglock attacks that can be applied by an opponent who is on his back when you are standing in his guard. If you stay on your knees when passing his guard you will make yourself less vulnerable to most leglocks (at the expense of being more vulnerable to chokes and armlocks).

Finally I should point out that you should still practise your leglock counters. For every submission there are multiple counters and escapes, and you might want to review and practice them just in case your opponent figures out a way to counter your other strategies. A working knowledge of leglocks themselves is very useful to understand how to counter them, and it IS possible to be good at leglock counters without being good at leglocks themselves.

Today’s topic is a slightly unusual control position for footlocks. Control positions are methods of positioning your legs while you are attempting a leglock. The purpose of a control position is to control your opponent’s legs and body while you set up and execute your leglock. First check out the below (taken at Grapplemania Seattle. January 29th 2005, by Jermiah Armstrong).

In this photo I am trying to leglock my opponent. I have chosen to use a control position where I hold BOTH his ankles. This is a great control position: it is very difficult for him to stand up because he can’t get one leg back behind himself to push up with.

From here I will discuss 3 options:

1 – Submit him: obviously this is your best option. Typically you will eventually have to let go of one of his ankles to actually finalize the lock. When you sense that the time is right release one of his legs and switch a more conventional leglock position with your arms and legs.

2 – Stand back up: if you don’t think the leglock is going to work you can get back to your own feet fairly easily. Use the instep between his legs to lift his butt off the floor a little bit: he thinks that he will get back to his feet and will usually lift up a little bit more. Then drop his butt to the floor and use his momentum to pull yourself back up to a standing position.

3 – X guard: you also have the option to let him stand up and put him in the X guard and sweep him immediately. This is exactly what I did after the photo was taken. This is one of my favorite entries into the X guard and I have used it twice in competition (readers who own Dynamic Guard Sweeps Vol. 1 have seen this technique in action already). For more information on the X guard please visit www.grapplearts.com/X-Guard.htm

Here is what I suggest you do if the double ankle grab control position is something you want to develop. When you are in your sparring partner’s open guard grab BOTH his ankles and sit back. Try to clamp your legs tightly around his leg, with one foot behind his butt and the other pushing his hip. Now just hold this position; don’t let him A) stand up, or B) pull his foot out. Don’t even worry about the submission at first – just try to hold him here as long as you can, following his movement.

This drill will develop the sensitivity and pressure required to control his legs and hips. Once you can hold him in the double ankle grip position indefinitely then start playing around with trying to finish the leglock and/or getting back to the top position in his guard.

Last week I talked about the most common mistake novice leglockers make when trying to use the ankle lock. Here are a few more common errors:

1. Telegraphing the attack. I often see someone decide to use an ankle lock to counter the open guard: this person then wraps his arm around the ankle, pauses, considers whether to proceed, and only then falls back into an ankle lock. This is way too telegraphic to work on a skilled opponent: there should be no pause when you decide to proceed with this attack.
2. Lack of leg control. To successfully attack the ankle joint you need to control the rest of his leg (i.e. the knee, thigh and hip). If you want to become disillusioned about leglocks try this: wrap your arm around your opponent’s ankle, flop back without a plan of how to control his legs, and hope for a miracle. Leg control is very important in maintaining and applying ankle locks.
3. Attacking significantly longer legs. Generally speaking, if two people are trying to ankle lock each other the person with the longer legs has the advantage. It IS possible to leglock people with longer legs, but you need to have a higher level of technique than your opponent.
4. Not having a plan for opponents who stand up. It is very common for someone defending an ankle lock to stand up in an attempt to counter your ankle lock. To become an ankle lock expert you need to have several reliable solutions to this particular counter.
5. Not having a “Plan B” if the ankle lock fails. Not every submission will work on every opponent. There are some hyper-flexible and super-tough people out there who just will not tap to an ankle lock. Does your leglocking strategy include a “Plan B” for this type of situation?
6. Using the ankle lock too often. Some people fall in love with ankle locks and never learn to pass the guard. Leglocks are not a substitute for guard passing skills: leglock and guard passing complement each other and set each other up. Learn and use both.

Photo: Laura vs Jennifer Gibbons (closest to camera). Taken at the Defence Unlimited Submission League, August 17th, 2003 in Manchester, England. Courtesy of “Doctor Octagon” Formerly a featured Grappling and MMA Photo of the Week

Let’s talk about the basic ankle lock (also known as the ‘Achilles lock’ or the ‘straight foot lock’) today. When I see people trying ankle locks in sparring and in competition the most common error I see is targetting, by which I mean where they are placing their forearms on their opponent’s ankle.

Quite often I see people trying to apply the ankle lock by putting pressure far too high up the leg, sometimes as high as mid-calf. While this might work for some people it isn’t the most efficient method to use.

The place where you want to put your forearm is right at the bottom of the leg, just above the heel bone. Try this: extend your toes and foot away from you like you are going to round kick someone with your instep. Now look at the back of your ankle – you should see a bunch of horizontal wrinkles in the skin. This is where you want to place your forearm.

Another way to figure out where your forearm should go is to take a very loose ankle lock on your practise partner. Slide your forearms down his leg until they get stopped by his foot. Take a good look at the position of your arms relative to his leg, and make a mental note of how far down his leg your arms have come.

By placing your fulcrum (your bottom forearm) at this position on the foot you will have a very powerful submission. You will be applying maximum pressure to his achilles tendon and achieving maximum leverage against the top of his foot.

Happy footlocking!

Many Jiu-jitsu schools discourage, and even disallow, the use of leglocks while sparring. They argue that leglocks are a ‘cheap’ technique, and/or are unsafe, and/or prevent you from developing a good guard passing game.

I respectfully disagree.

The ‘cheap’ label gets used for new and unfamiliar techniques. There was a time when kicking someone was considered cheap and dirty – now with a more educated public it’s considered a cool way to knock someone out (thanks Bruce Lee).

Are leglocks dangerous? Well, it depends. All submission holds are dangerous if applied in a ballistic manner and without control, regardless of whether they target the knee, ankle, shoulder, elbow, wrist, etc. Ankle locks, compression locks and kneebars are fairly safe, if applied with control.

Leglocks that TWIST the knee and ankle, such as the heel hook or toe hold, are definitely dangerous. These twisting leglocks have a very narrow safety margin: the onset of pain is often indistinguishable from onset of damage to the joint. Be very careful if you use these techniques – always being ready to release them if your opponent starts flailing or refuses to tap.

Now I agree that novices who concentrate on leglocks a lot tend not to be great guard passers. However most leglock specialists eventually figure out that they need to make their game well rounded, and then work on developing their guard passes. They get to the same place just via a different route. After a certain point leglocks and guard passing actually complement each other: for example you might fake an ankle lock and then go for the guard pass.

Leglocks are becoming much more popular in competition. To learn the offensive and defensive aspects of a technique you NEED to include it in your sparring. If the knowledge stays theoretical (i.e. you are shown the counters but never get to use them on the mat) you will never hone the sensitivity and awareness to defend leglocks at a high level. Without the threat of leglocks many beginners develop unrealistic guardwork, leaving their legs WAY too exposed. Without the threat of leglocks how will you ever learn to defend them properly?