Knee Cut Like a Boss: Lucas Lepri's BJJ Passing Blueprint

Words: Jiu Jitsu Style

Back in July 2017 we posted a short clip of Lucas Lepri drilling BJJ's most important guard pass: the knee cut. There was no accompanying essay — just a few reps from one of the most decorated guard passers ever to compete, showing the position that's since become the backbone of modern Jiu Jitsu passing. Lepri was already a five-time IBJJF World Champion by then, an Alliance black belt built under Fabio Gurgel's system, and the knee cut was the signature that made his passing so hard to survive: low, heavy, and relentlessly patient. Nine years on, the clip hasn't aged a day. If anything, the rest of the sport has spent the years since catching up to what Lepri was already doing.

Watch it: Lucas Lepri's knee cut pass.

The mechanics behind Lucas Lepri's BJJ knee cut pass

What made Lepri's version of the knee cut so difficult to deal with wasn't speed — it was patience married to detail. He controls the ankle or pant cuff on the near side first, kills the framing leg before it can reload, and only then drives his own knee diagonally across his opponent's hip line, staying chest-down and heavy the whole way instead of popping his hips up to shortcut the angle. The cross-face arrives before the legs are even clear, so there's no gap for the bottom player to shrimp back into. It's a pass built on sequence, not athleticism: kill the frame, take the angle, cross-face, sit through. Skip a step and a black belt guard will find the seam. Do them in order and there usually isn't one.

Why the knee cut still runs modern BJJ guard passing

The clip is nearly a decade old, but the pass has only grown since. Watch any recent Worlds or ADCC bracket and the knee cut — or some direct descendant of it — is still the pass the best black belts open with, from Tainan Dalpra picking guards apart with it in the gi to Mica Galvao and Kade Ruotolo running the same low, heavy pressure into no-gi finishes. Gordon Ryan built entire rounds of his ADCC runs around a knee slice he'd happily credit to the Alliance lineage Lepri comes from. The instructional landscape has changed completely — a decade ago you learned this from a magazine clip or a seminar; now it's a tap away on BJJ Fanatics or YouTube, Lepri's own passing instructionals included — but the pass itself hasn't needed updating. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu keeps producing new passing systems, and nearly all of them still borrow the knee cut's spine.

That's the real value in going back to a clip like this one. Lepri wasn't showing off a secret; he was showing the sequence — kill the frame, cut the angle, cross-face, sit through — until it stopped being five separate steps and became one motion. Drill it in that order often enough and your own knee cut stops depending on how athletic you feel that day. It just works, the way BJJ black belts want their guard passing to work, on a Tuesday as much as at Worlds.

See you on the mats.

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 10 July 2017. Refreshed for 2026.