Joe Rogan Teaches the Imanari Finish: A BJJ Leg Lock Lesson
Long before BJJ's leg lock game was the leg lock game, a clip surfaced of Joe Rogan walking a small group of MMA fighters — Whitney Miller, Danny Castillo and TJ Dillashaw among them — through the…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
Long before BJJ's leg lock game was the leg lock game, a clip surfaced of Joe Rogan walking a small group of MMA fighters — Whitney Miller, Danny Castillo and TJ Dillashaw among them — through the entry, the angle and the finishing mechanics of the Imanari roll. Watched today, what's striking isn't just the technique. It's the timing. Back then, this stuff was still treated as a niche party trick most Jiu Jitsu coaches quietly warned you off. Rogan, ever the curious student, was already showing it on camera and giving the move its proper name.
Masakazu Imanari is the godfather here. The Japanese featherweight built an entire career out of dropping under bigger fighters and hunting the heel — a roll that looked, to most people in 2010, like a controlled fall down a flight of stairs. The mechanics are simple to describe and brutal to drill: a deep step, a roll under the lead leg, an exit into a leg entanglement, and a finish on whichever lock the position offers. Get it wrong and you give up your back. Get it right and the fight is over.
What Rogan was really doing in that clip wasn't passing along a single submission. He was nudging the door open for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He's done that for the sport more times than most people give him credit for — booth-side at the UFC, twenty years of podcast hours with grapplers from Eddie Bravo to John Danaher, the casual repetition of the words "heel hook" and "inside sankaku" in front of an audience that, frankly, didn't have the vocabulary yet.
What the Imanari roll teaches BJJ a decade on
The ten years since have proven the point. Imanari rolls now show up on the UFC roster as a matter of course. ADCC and Jiu Jitsu podiums are routinely decided by ankles. Craig Jones turned the entry into a brand, Gordon Ryan made the position the cleanest finish in the sport, and Lachlan Giles' 2019 absolute-division run gave the leg game its mainstream coming-out moment. By the time the Ruotolo brothers were tearing through Who's Number One cards, no one was calling it a gimmick anymore.
For the rest of us in BJJ, the lesson is less about the technique and more about the posture toward it. The submissions that look strange to your jiu-jitsu eye today are very often the ones your grandkids will treat as fundamentals. The work is the same it always was: drill the entry slowly, train it with a partner who values their knee, and stay curious about the moves that don't yet have a clean name. Rogan and Imanari were ahead of their time. The rest of Jiu Jitsu just had to catch up.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style. Refreshed for 2026.