Jude Samuel's BJJ Lapel Guard: Twelve Years On
When this run of lapel guard clips first went up on the magazine in November 2014, the line we ran under it was barely a sentence: longtime friend of the mag Jude Samuel has been showing a number…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When this run of lapel guard clips first went up on the magazine in November 2014, the line we ran under it was barely a sentence: longtime friend of the mag Jude Samuel has been showing a number of lapel techniques on our YouTube channel — get studying. The reading was short on purpose, because the videos did the work. Jude, a Roger Gracie black belt with the kind of methodical British-school BJJ pedigree that runs from Carlson Gracie London through the modern Roger Gracie Academy network, was already one of a small handful of UK black belts treating the lapel as something other than a piece of clothing. Twelve years on, the clips look less like a niche curiosity and a lot more like an early sketch of where the gi game was about to go.
The shape of what Jude was teaching matters because it predates the wave. Keenan Cornelius had already started running his squid and worm games out at Atos in San Diego by 2014, but in the UK and Europe the position was still being filed under "gimmick" by most coaches. Jude's clips landed somewhere in the middle: not the maximalist worm-on-everyone version coming out of San Diego, but a calmer, more controlled use of the lapel as a leg-management tool — feeding the skirt across, threading the far lapel to break the passer's posture, using the slack to set up sweeps and back takes off a deep half or a reverse De La Riva. The British black-belt schoolmaster version of lapel guard, if you like. It travelled because it was easy to drill without breaking anyone, and because it slotted into a gi game most students already had.
Why a Jiu Jitsu clip from 2014 still teaches in 2026
Re-watching the clips a decade on, the curious thing is how little of the underlying message has aged. The leg wrap is still the leg wrap. The reverse grip on the same-side lapel is still the cleanest way to deny the passer his cross-grip. The principle Jude was pointing at — the gi is gripping equipment, not packaging — is now the bedrock of an entire continent of BJJ guard play. Tainan Dalpra runs tight low-friction lapel grips off half guard against the best gi black belts in the world. Mikey Musumeci pulls lapel across his own body in lightweight finals and finds slack the rest of us walk past. The Ruotolo brothers, though no-gi to their bones, still raid the lapel game's principles when they're working their crossover gi rounds. Even Tommy Langaker and Pedro Marinho, the kind of dyed-in-the-wool gi competitors who came up after the lapel revolution had already happened, treat the position as canon rather than novelty.
What's changed isn't the technique. It's the audience. In 2014 you could be a coloured belt in a serious gi room and never see a lapel feed run cleanly to its conclusion. In 2026 an upper-blue-belt who hasn't drilled at least the basic worm sweep and the basic cross-feed back take is the unusual one in their gym. BJJ Fanatics has multi-hour instructionals from Keenan, Lachlan Giles, the Mendes brothers and a dozen others walking through every variation in detail. The major instructional apps run their own series on how to play lapel and how to kill it. The IBJJF has spent the years since quietly tightening its rules around skirts and leg wraps — each rule edit a small admission that the position has outgrown the boundaries the federation set when the gi was assumed to be inert kit. None of that infrastructure existed when Jude was filming these clips for a magazine YouTube channel.
What Jude's details still teach the rest of us
Strip the names out and the Roger Gracie black belt's quieter version of the position still travels well. Jude's clips are not the place to learn the most aggressive squid lockdowns or the kind of crab-ride lapel back takes that won the lapel game its early ban-debates. They're where you go to learn how the position is supposed to feel: how the grip on your own lapel should be lazy until the moment you load it, how the feed across the body should travel under the opponent's hip rather than over it, how the threaded skirt is a tether and not a club. The first time a training partner taps to a lapel-assisted choke they didn't see coming because you fed the slack a step earlier than they expected, you realise the position rewards patience the same way collar chokes do, not athletes the way berimbolo did.
That, more than the specific entries, is the part worth carrying forward. Innovation in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu almost never arrives as a brand new submission. It arrives as someone noticing that a familiar piece of equipment has a use nobody had bothered to try. A lapel was already there. A leg was already there. A Roger Gracie black belt with the patience to thread one through the other and the teaching habit to film the result for a UK magazine in 2014 was quietly part of how the position became canon. Whether you ever live in lapel guard yourself or not, the lesson Jude was already living out in those clips is the same one every honest gi player keeps coming back to — study the kit as kit, treat every grip as a possible handle, and watch the people who keep finding angles in the gear the rest of us only think of as clothes.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 15 November 2014. Refreshed for 2026.