Slick BJJ Submission Finishes Worth Studying
There are countless slick submission finishes floating around on the internet, and one of the small joys of being deep into BJJ in 2026 is that the supply has never been higher. YouTube still has…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
There are countless slick submission finishes floating around on the internet, and one of the small joys of being deep into BJJ in 2026 is that the supply has never been higher. YouTube still has the gold; Instagram, TikTok and FloGrappling fill the feed with new finishes most weeks; BJJ Fanatics' instructional library now reads like a slow-motion replay of every submission worth knowing. Sit a Jiu Jitsu student down for half an hour and you can put together a personal highlight reel of finishes that, a decade ago, you'd have had to hunt across grainy uploads to find.
The original five submissions we flagged back in 2014 still hold up. That's the thing about a clean finish — it ages well. The mechanics don't go out of fashion the way the gi colours and the cage shorts do. What has changed is the cast, and the volume.
What "slick" looks like in 2026
If we were rebuilding the list today, a few names would be impossible to leave off. Mikey Musumeci has turned the kneebar and the inverted heel hook into something you can almost teach from a single still frame — patient hand-fighting, precise hip rotation, no rush. The Ruotolo brothers' guillotines and darce variations have become must-watch reference material for every gym chasing front-headlock finishes. Gordon Ryan's strangles on the back at the top of ADCC are clinics in head position and seatbelt control. Ffion Davies' bow-and-arrow setups remain some of the cleanest mat-returns into a finish anywhere in Jiu Jitsu. Tainan Dalpra's collar drag-to-armbar sequences barely look like an attack until your elbow is suddenly in the wrong place.
Drop down a level and the supply is just as rich. Submission-only cards like Who's Number One, Tezos WNO Championship and the Craig Jones Invitational have given the BJJ audience a steady diet of finishes from athletes most fans hadn't heard of two years ago. Heel hooks, inside trips into back takes, twisters, mounted triangles — there's a clip a week somewhere worth pausing on.
How to actually study a clip
The trap with any of this is that watching is not the same as drilling. Slick finishes on camera always look like one motion; in practice, they are four or five small adjustments stacked tightly together. The students in our gyms who get the most out of the modern feed do roughly the same thing: pick one finish a week, scrub it frame by frame, write down the three things that have to happen for it to work, then drill those three things until they're boring. Anything more than that and you end up collecting techniques you'll never hit. Anything less and you're just watching highlights.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu's library of "amazing finishes caught on tape" is now effectively bottomless. The discipline is in choosing what to study, and respecting that the slickest-looking submission in any video has a fundamental sitting underneath it that your coach has been showing white belts for years.
What are your favourite submission finishes caught on camera lately? Send them in — we still love a good roundup.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 24 October 2014. Refreshed for 2026.