Bas Rutten on Leg Locks and Heel Hooks
The first time we ran this clip — fifty-odd minutes of Bas "El Guapo" Rutten walking you through leg locks and heel hooks — most academies in the UK still treated the words "heel hook" like a…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
The first time we ran this clip — fifty-odd minutes of Bas "El Guapo" Rutten walking you through leg locks and heel hooks — most academies in the UK still treated the words "heel hook" like a swear word. You could roll for six months in a respectable gi school in 2014 and never see one demonstrated. Plenty of black belts had quietly opted out of the position altogether and let their students do the same. Bas, in his usual cheerful way, had been teaching it in front of a camera for years already.
Watch the tape back in 2026 and the thing that jumps out isn't the technique. It's the matter-of-factness. There's no mystique, no preamble about "advanced" submissions, no warning about how this stuff is forbidden. He just steps you through entries, finishing mechanics and the order in which you ought to be hunting the holds. Inside ankle, outside ankle, straight knee bar, heel hook — each one explained with the same engineer's calm he brought to liver shots and high kicks in another life. The man came out of a Dutch kickboxing gym, fought in Pancrase and the UFC when the rulebook was still being written, and treated grappling like a problem worth solving rather than a tradition worth tiptoeing around. That posture is half the lesson.
What he was really doing in this video — and in the half-dozen others he filmed in the same era — was the same thing the early no-gi pioneers had been doing for a decade: insisting that the leg was a target like any other. The Sakuraba camp had been saying it in Japan. The first wave of catch wrestlers had been saying it forever. Bas just happened to be famous enough, and friendly enough on camera, that the message got past the gatekeepers. A kid in 2014 with a laptop and a slow internet connection could absorb in an afternoon what an older generation had needed a fight career to learn.
Twelve years on, the argument is over. The Danaher Death Squad turned heel hooks into a finishing system. Craig Jones built a career out of the entries Bas was sketching in this clip; Gordon Ryan made the position the cleanest endgame in the sport; the Ruotolo brothers folded inside and outside heel hooks into superfight cards that play on ESPN. ADCC podiums are routinely decided by ankles. IBJJF rules finally caught up and started allowing heel hooks at brown and black belt no-gi. The "forbidden technique" is now the first chapter of every serious no-gi instructional on BJJ Fanatics, every leg-attack module on John Danaher's app, every kids' camp that wants to look modern. The tape Bas shot in a quiet gym a decade ago reads like a curriculum the rest of the sport spent ten years catching up to.
For the rest of us, the takeaway hasn't really changed. Find a partner who values their knee, drill the entries slowly, learn how to tap before you learn how to finish, and stop pretending the leg game is somebody else's department. Whether you live in a gi or a rash guard, half the high-level matches you'll watch this year will turn on the same control points Bas is teaching in this video. The position has had its mainstream moment. The work is the same it always was — patient, careful, two beats slower than your training partner would like.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 25 September 2014. Refreshed for 2026.