Ryan Hall's Stomp and Curl: A BJJ Triangle Detail
When this Ryan Hall clip first ran on Jiu Jitsu Style in December 2014, we tagged it the way you'd tag a short video from any other connoisseur of the triangle — "here's a detail you might not…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When this Ryan Hall clip first ran on Jiu Jitsu Style in December 2014, we tagged it the way you'd tag a short video from any other connoisseur of the triangle — "here's a detail you might not have seen". Twelve years on, you could run the same clip again with no edits and it would still hold up, because Hall's whole pitch in BJJ has always been about taking the most-taught submission in the sport and refusing to teach it lazily. The stomp and curl is one of those refusals. It is the difference between locking on a triangle and hoping, and locking on a triangle that's already finished by the time your training partner figures out what's happening.
The detail itself is small in the way Ryan Hall details usually are. Once the legs are crossed and the angle is acquired, most beginners squeeze with their hamstrings and their calf — and most beginners then spend the next two minutes losing the squeeze a millimetre at a time as the top player postures, sweats and stalls. Hall's adjustment is to "stomp" the locking foot down across the partner's back, anchoring it past the lat instead of perched on top of the shoulder, and then to "curl" the free leg into a hard hamstring contraction that pulls the trapped head deeper into the choke. The squeeze stops being a static clamp and starts being a slow, mechanical wind. Your hamstring fatigues much later than your calf does. The tap arrives.
What makes the cue land is the framework around it. Ryan Hall didn't make his name in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu by inventing exotic positions; he made it by being the most patient explainer of the obvious-once-you-see-it. The "Triangles" instructional he put out in his twenties was the first time a lot of competitors had heard the move broken down by angles, lines and chains rather than by trick setups. The stomp-and-curl clip is the same Hall on a smaller canvas — one piece of geometry that survives the squirming, the resetting and the third-round gas tank.
How Ryan Hall's triangle game aged in BJJ
A decade ago, "Ryan Hall is a triangle guy" was a category people liked to argue about. He was the deep-half-from-everywhere outlier, the 50/50 evangelist back when half the sport thought 50/50 was a stall, and the academic in a room that wasn't entirely comfortable with academics. None of that has aged badly. The 50/50 is now a baseline grappling position the way closed guard once was. Inverted entries that looked weird in 2014 are the bread and butter of every kid who watched Mikey Musumeci win a world title and decided the bottom is an attacking layer. Ffion Davies, Tainan Dalpra and the Ruotolo brothers all live in some version of a triangle-first attacking game. Hall's triangle library — the angle change, the head-and-arm trap, the squeeze that lives in the hamstring rather than the calf — sits underneath an enormous amount of the modern Jiu Jitsu submission game without much credit on the label.
Ryan himself hasn't gone anywhere either. Fifty/50 BJJ in Falls Church is still producing competitors, his instructional work has migrated to the platforms the sport actually uses now — apps, YouTube, the long-form breakdowns the BJJ Fanatics era trained everyone to expect — and the wider grappling world tends to listen when he talks about whatever submission he's currently picking apart. The fight career has had its bumps; the teaching has not.
What the rest of us can take to the gym
For the rest of us, the lesson is the small one. The most-taught submission in BJJ still has rooms full of upside if you're willing to be picky about the details — where the foot anchors, which muscle you're really squeezing with, how the angle is acquired before the lock instead of after. Try the stomp and curl in your next open-mat triangle attempt. Notice how much longer the squeeze lasts before your leg starts to bargain with you. Notice that the finish is closer than you remembered.
Drill it on a partner who knows how to defend. Borrow the cue for your back-take chains, for your armbar transitions, for your guard pulls — the squeeze travels. And the next time someone tells you the triangle is a beginner move and not worth a serious jiu-jitsu player's time, point them at Ryan Hall, 2014, quietly explaining why the calf was the wrong muscle to be tired about.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 15 December 2014. Refreshed for 2026.