Firas Zahabi's BJJ Leglock Tutorial

Words: Jiu Jitsu Style

When we first shared Firas Zahabi breaking down leglocks back in 2016, half the BJJ world still treated the subject like contraband. Lower-belt classes skipped it, gi tournaments punished it, and plenty of black belts wore their ignorance of the leg game as a badge of honor. Zahabi was an interesting messenger precisely because he wasn't a grimy no-gi specialist with taped knees, he was the head coach of Tristar Gym in Montreal, the man in Georges St-Pierre's corner, and a Jiu Jitsu black belt under John Danaher. When someone with that pedigree tells you the legs are half the human body and you're ignoring them, it's worth sitting up.

A decade later, the clip has aged the way good coaching always does: the sport caught up to it.

Watch it: Firas Zahabi's leglock tutorial.

The Danaher connection runs through everything

You can't talk about Zahabi and leglocks without talking about lineage. His black belt comes from Danaher at the Renzo Gracie Academy, and 2016, the exact moment this tutorial first ran, was the year Danaher's squad was dragging the leg game out of Jiu Jitsu's shadows. Garry Tonon and Eddie Cummings were heel-hooking their way through every submission-only card that would have them, and a young Gordon Ryan was about to make the inside position the most feared real estate in grappling. Zahabi was teaching from inside that same system of thought: legs as targets, entanglements as positions, mechanics over muscle.

That connection hasn't faded. Zahabi spent this summer telling anyone who'd listen that Danaher is the greatest coach in the sport's history, and the affection clearly goes both ways. When a coach who has run one of MMA's great gyms for two decades still points back at his own Jiu Jitsu teacher, that tells you something about how deep the well is.

What the tutorial actually preached

Strip the technique names away and Zahabi's message was the same one he applies to everything at Tristar: be systematic, be safe, and don't confuse aggression with skill. A leglock, in his teaching, is not a scramble you win by cranking harder, it's a position you arrive at with control. Own the entanglement first, kill the free leg, and let the finish come from precise rotation rather than brute force. It's the same logic every good BJJ coach applies to the armbar; Zahabi simply refused to accept that the logic stopped at the waist.

The other half of his message was about the room, not the match. Zahabi has always been one of the sport's loudest voices for training longevity, he's the coach who tells you the goal is to still be on the mats at sixty. Applied to leglocks, that means slow rotations, early taps, and treating your partner's knee like your own. Heel hooks give you almost no pain before the damage arrives, so the discipline has to live in the room's culture rather than the victim's reflexes. Gyms that learned that lesson got a whole new dimension of Jiu Jitsu for free. Gyms that didn't got surgeries.

A decade on, the BJJ leg game won

Watch where the sport went and the 2016 hand-wringing looks almost quaint. The IBJJF finally legalised heel hooks and reaping in no-gi at brown and black belt, and the ceiling didn't fall in. Gordon Ryan built the most dominant ADCC résumé in history with the inside heel hook as his cornerstone. Craig Jones turned leglock instructionals into a cottage industry and then into the CJI, a whole event series built on the submission-first grappling those old clips promised. Even the UFC now sees heavyweights like Valter Walker winning fight after fight by twisting heels, the exact scenario Zahabi, an MMA coach before anything else, was preparing his athletes for years earlier.

And the learning problem that clip existed to solve has been solved a hundred times over. In 2016, a leglock tutorial from a coach of Zahabi's calibre was a rare find; in 2026, between YouTube, BJJ Fanatics and every instructional app on your phone, the entire leg-lock canon is a search bar away. Zahabi himself talks grappling to millions through his podcast and channel. The scarcity is gone. What hasn't changed is the filter you need to apply, and that's the real reason this tutorial still matters. Anyone can show you a heel hook. Very few people can teach you the order of operations: position before submission, control before rotation, your training partner's knee before your ego.

The takeaway

If your Brazilian Jiu Jitsu education still has a leg-shaped hole in it, close it. Not because leglocks are trendy, that battle ended years ago, but because ignoring half the body was always a bad deal, in the gi or out of it. Start the way Zahabi would have you start: learn the positions before the finishes, drill the escapes as seriously as the attacks, and go slowly enough that everyone trains again tomorrow. The leg game rewards the systematic and punishes the reckless, which makes it less a bag of tricks and more a test of whether you actually learned how to learn Jiu Jitsu.

See you on the mats.

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 28 September 2016. Refreshed for 2026.