Reilly Bodycomb's Sambo Ankle Pick to BJJ Kneebar
When we first posted this clip back in October 2015, the whole write-up was four words: interesting tech from Reilly Bodycomb. That was honestly all the context most of the BJJ world could handle…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When we first posted this clip back in October 2015, the whole write-up was four words: interesting tech from Reilly Bodycomb. That was honestly all the context most of the BJJ world could handle at the time — a sambo guy chaining an ankle pick straight into a rolling kneebar, in an era when half the gyms in the country still treated leg attacks as a dirty trick best left out of Jiu Jitsu altogether. Eleven years on, the sequence Reilly was quietly drilling that day reads less like an oddity and more like a preview of where the whole sport was headed.
Watch it: Reilly Bodycomb's sambo ankle pick to rolling kneebar.
Why a sambo ankle pick belongs in your Jiu Jitsu
The beauty of Bodycomb's entry is that it starts from a place every grappler already lives: hand-fighting in the open, looking for a way in. The ankle pick is one of the oldest takedowns in wrestling and sambo — you change levels, snatch the lead ankle, drive the head into the hip, and the man goes down. What Reilly added was intent. He never wanted the ankle pick to end as a takedown. The grab on the foot is already a grip on the leg, and a grip on the leg is the doorway to the entanglement. So instead of finishing on top and resetting, he keeps falling, rolls under, and arrives in a kneebar with the leg he never let go of.
That continuity is the lesson. The takedown and the submission aren't two techniques bolted together — they're one motion that happens to pass through standing on its way to the finish.
The rolling kneebar that makes it click
The roll is the part that looked exotic in 2015 and looks routine now. As the ankle pick drops your partner, you commit your own body to the floor, somersault under his trapped leg, and use the momentum of the fall to wind into the kneebar position — hips tight to his thigh, his knee pinned across your centreline, his foot trapped to your chest. Sambo built this kind of dynamic, rolling leg entry decades before BJJ borrowed it, and Reilly Bodycomb was one of the clearest translators between the two worlds.
What sells it is the same thing that sells every leg lock: control before the crank. The roll only works if the leg stays glued to you the whole way through. Lose the grip mid-somersault and you've handed your back away for nothing. Keep it, and you surface already finishing.
How a 2015 clip predicted the modern BJJ leg game
Re-watch it now and the timing is almost funny. A year or two after this clip, John Danaher's squad turned leg locks into the most studied subject in no-gi, and the Ruotolo brothers, Mikey Musumeci, Craig Jones and Lachlan Giles spent the next decade building entire competitive careers on entanglements that flow exactly like this one — takedown into ashi, ashi into the finish, all in a single thread. ADCC is now half leg locks, heel hooks open the IBJJF no-gi rule set, and a blue belt at a serious academy is expected to know a kneebar the way our generation was expected to know an armbar.
Reilly Bodycomb wasn't predicting any of that. He was just showing his work — a sambo player who understood that the leg is a handle, the ankle pick is a grip, and the roll is how you cash it in. The names around the leg game have changed, the rule sets have caught up, but the sequence in this clip still teaches the through-line better than most modern breakdowns: pick the ankle, keep the leg, roll into the finish, and walk your partner off the mat in one piece.
See you on the mats.
Originally published on Jiu Jitsu Style, 4 October 2015. Refreshed for 2026.