Ryan Hall's Rolling Back Attacks in BJJ
When this Ryan Hall clip first ran on Jiu Jitsu Style in May 2016, rolling back attacks still sat in the "advanced class only" drawer for most BJJ hobbyists. The turtle was somewhere you waited…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When this Ryan Hall clip first ran on Jiu Jitsu Style in May 2016, rolling and spinning your way to the back still sat in the "advanced class only" drawer for most BJJ hobbyists. The back take was something you earned slowly from the top, and the idea of rotating into the best position in the sport, rather than grinding your way there, felt like showing off. Hall's clip argued otherwise, in his usual quiet way, and a decade later the sport has come around so completely that these entries now get taught to blue belts as bread and butter.
Watch it: Ryan Hall's rolling back attack.
The mechanics are classic Ryan Hall: no athletic miracle, just geometry arranged in advance. Most of the clip works from side control, where Hall shows several entries into the same back take, each built on one piece of control, a hook with your leg on your opponent's leg. As he puts it, "The winner of this position, guys, has their ankle in the bend of the other guy's knee." Set that ankle into the crook of the knee and the path to the back opens up. He also shows an entry from the turtle, with one clear warning: push your leg too far through and you give the position back. The thread running through all of it is the same. Control the leg first, arrive on the back second.
What made the clip worth running then, and worth revisiting now, is the framework underneath it. As Hall says at the outset, "We're going to be going over strategies, concepts, principles, control, everything that you need to be successful with this position, and integrate it with the things that you've already learned." That is how he has always taught Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, as a connected system rather than a pile of moves, the same patient, first-principles approach that made his triangle and deep half material required viewing. The back take here is the logical answer to a position that defends every direction except the one you take control of first.
How rolling back attacks aged in BJJ
Better than almost anything else we posted that year. The berimbolo generation grew up inverting, so arriving on the back upside-down stopped looking exotic and started looking normal. The Danaher school made the seatbelt-and-straitjacket back system the gold standard of finishing, which made every route to the back more valuable. And the current crop, Kade and Tye Ruotolo, Mica Galvão, Mikey Musumeci, treat rolling and spinning back entries as core Jiu Jitsu, chaining them off passes, off leg entanglements, off anything that turns an opponent even slightly away. Watch an ADCC or CJI card in 2026 and you'll see the exact idea from this clip several times a night: control the leg, take the back, seatbelt, finish.
Hall himself gave the theme a second life in the UFC, where his rolling entries, usually hunting legs rather than backs, made him the fighter nobody wanted to grapple. Different limb, same lesson: the attacks that travel through rotation are the ones opponents defending in straight lines never see coming. Fifty/50 BJJ in Falls Church still runs on that thinking, and his instructional material has aged into the apps-and-YouTube era better than most of what was filmed alongside it.
What the rest of us can take to the gym
Win the leg before you chase the finish. Across every entry in the clip, the position is won or lost on that hook, your ankle set in the bend of your opponent's knee. Get greedy and push the leg too far through, the one mistake Hall calls out on his turtle entry, and you hand the position right back. Drill it slowly from side control: win the leg, feel the ankle settle into the crook of the knee, and only then travel to the back. Arrive, seatbelt, breathe, and take the finish the position offers rather than the one you pre-ordered.
And if the entry still feels like a leap of faith, that's rather the point. Jiu Jitsu keeps rewarding the people willing to travel through the position everyone else avoids. Ryan Hall was making that case on this page ten years ago. The sport has spent the decade since agreeing with him.
See you on the mats.
Originally published on Jiu Jitsu Style, 1 May 2016. Refreshed for 2026.