Eddie Cummings' BJJ Heel Hook Details
When we ran this Eddie "Wolverine" Cummings clip in the summer of 2015, the BJJ heel hook conversation was still being held in whispers. EBI 1 had just happened, EBI 2 was being put together, and…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When we ran this Eddie "Wolverine" Cummings clip in the summer of 2015, the BJJ heel hook conversation was still being held in whispers. EBI 1 had just happened, EBI 2 was being put together, and a quiet kid out of the Renzo Gracie basement in New York had spent the year heel-hooking his way through brackets in a way nobody — short of the people he trained with — had really seen before. He was 27, soft-spoken, looked more like a physics graduate than a finisher, and was in the middle of demonstrating that the whole sport had been politely ignoring half the human body. The four sentences we wrote at the time felt generous. Twelve years on, they read like an understatement.
The detail Cummings was teaching in this video isn't really one detail. It's the same lesson John Danaher's quieter students keep coming back to: the heel hook is a control problem before it's a finish. The hold ends the moment the opponent's knee crosses your centre line — but everything that gets you there is leg-entanglement geometry. Hip to hip, knee line over knee line, the inside of his foot threaded across your hip crease, your top knee pinning his thigh so the only thing left that can rotate is the joint you're attacking. Cummings was already explaining the position in those terms when most Jiu Jitsu coaches were still teaching it as a scramble.
What he was really doing in front of the camera that summer was making the same argument Dean Lister had been making ten years earlier — that the leg is a target like any other in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu — but with the polish of someone who'd already proved it under a stopwatch. By the time we filmed him, Cummings had won EBI 1 finishing every opponent with a heel hook, run through Polaris with the same shape, and would shortly win EBI 2 the same way. The "Death Squad" tag stuck to him, Garry Tonon and the rest of the Renzo basement around then, and the rest of the no-gi world spent the next decade trying to catch up to a curriculum a handful of people in a 200-mile radius of midtown Manhattan had already finished writing.
Roll the tape forward to 2026 and the argument is over. Gordon Ryan turned the position into the cleanest endgame in the sport, won ADCC superfights off it, and made the inside heel hook a routine punctuation mark on a no-gi match. Craig Jones built a career and most of B-Team's marketing budget on the entries Cummings was sketching on a Renzo mat. The Ruotolo brothers — Tye and Kade — fold inside and outside finishes into superfight cards that play on ESPN. Lachlan Giles dropped three medals at ADCC out of heel hook entanglements that owe a great deal to this video. Ffion Davies and Mikey Musumeci swim between gi armbars and ashi-garami without a raised eyebrow. The IBJJF, the last serious holdout, finally allowed heel hooks at brown and black belt no-gi. The "exotic" finish is now first chapter on every serious BJJ Fanatics no-gi instructional, every leg-attack module on John Danaher's app, every leg-lock seminar a travelling black belt rolls into a UK academy with.
Cummings himself stepped away from the bright lights well before the position he'd helped popularise reached the mainstream. He kept teaching, kept refining, never seemed especially interested in being a brand. The body of work, though, is everywhere. If you've watched a Polaris card, a Who's Number One bracket, a CJI undercard or any ADCC trials match in the last five years, you've watched somebody using a shape Eddie Cummings was patiently chalking on a whiteboard in 2015.
For the rest of us in a gi or a rash guard, the takeaway hasn't changed. Find a partner who values their knee, drill the entries slowly, learn how to tap a beat before the breaking point, and treat the leg game as work that belongs to you and not to somebody else's school. The position has had its mainstream moment. The details Wolverine was teaching here are the details the modern game still runs on — patient hip-to-hip control, no rotation until you've earned it, the finish as the last thing in the sequence, not the first.
See you on the mats.
Originally published on Jiu Jitsu Style, 2 June 2015. Refreshed for 2026.