Garry Tonon's BJJ Berimbolo Counter to Heel Hook
When this Garry Tonon clip first landed on Jiu Jitsu Style in September 2014, both of the moves wrapped inside it were still considered exotic. The berimbolo was a position the IBJJF lightweight…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When this Garry Tonon clip first landed on Jiu Jitsu Style in September 2014, both of the moves wrapped inside it were still considered exotic. The berimbolo was a position the IBJJF lightweight world had only just stopped arguing about, and the heel hook was a finish most coaches were quietly telling their students not to chase. Sat between them, almost gleefully, was a kid from New Jersey who'd later turn that exact intersection into a career. The note we ran at the time was four sentences long: you can never have too many counters for the berimbolo, this one leads into a heel hook, nice tech from Garry Tonon. Twelve years on, the four sentences look like a small piece of prophecy.
The shape of the counter is simple to describe. Your training partner shoots the De La Riva hook and starts the rotation underneath you. Instead of fighting the spin or sprinting for the cross-face — the responses everyone was teaching at black belt back then — Tonon lets the bottom player commit. He reads the moment the inverting leg passes the midline, sits down on the entry side, and uses the offered shin and ankle as the doorway into a leg entanglement of his own. The berimbolo's own structure delivers the foot. The heel hook is the punctuation mark.
What's quietly brilliant about it is that the counter doesn't ask you to be faster than the berimbolo player. It asks you to be ahead of where he thinks the position ends. Every fast inversion has a half-beat where one leg is committed and the other is in the air looking for a hook — and for those few frames, the bottom player's outside foot is a finished leg lock entry sitting on a tray. Tonon was one of the first people on a Jiu Jitsu magazine page to show this out loud. The Danaher Death Squad would build a whole national-team-level system around the same principle, the Ruotolo brothers grew up on it, and by the time Ffion Davies and Cole Abate were carving up modern IBJJF brackets, the threat of a leg entanglement was a routine part of the conversation any berimbolo player had to have with themselves before they shot the entry.
The decade since has done nothing but vindicate the clip. Heel hooks are legal everywhere that matters now, ADCC podiums are settled by inside sankakus, and Craig Jones, Gordon Ryan, Lachlan Giles and Mikey Musumeci have spent a long stretch of the no-gi calendar reminding the rest of the sport what the leg game looks like at the top end. The specific Tonon entry we filmed in 2014 hasn't even needed updating — the same shape shows up in Ethan Crelinsten's matches, in B-Team highlights, in any Polaris card that runs long enough to find the ground. Where the original was a slightly-off-the-map idea, the principle now sits comfortably in mainstream Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Berimbolo, meet your downside.
For the rest of us, the lesson goes further than the move. Every flashy attack in Jiu Jitsu is also an exposure for whoever has bothered to learn the answer to it. The berimbolo gives you the foot. The De La Riva gives you the knee line. The deep half gives you the back. Whatever you fear most on the bottom is a counter someone, somewhere, has already filmed — usually a long time ago, usually on a quiet afternoon, usually with a quiet smile. Tonon was that someone in 2014. The submissions haven't changed. The willingness to look at them from the other side is still what separates the people who get tapped by trends from the people who tap them.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 25 September 2014. Refreshed for 2026.