Xande Ribeiro's Power Knee Slice: A BJJ Breakdown

Words: Jiu Jitsu Style

When we first shared Xande Ribeiro's power knee slice on Jiu Jitsu Style just before Christmas 2015, we barely wrote a word to go with it — and honestly, we didn't need to. Xande was BJJ royalty then and he's BJJ royalty now: multiple-time world champion, two-time absolute king, owner of the most famous guard in the sport — the one nobody could pass for the best part of a decade. When a man like that shows you his favourite way of passing other people's guards, you press play and pay attention. A decade on, with Xande retired from competition and a whole generation raised on his teaching, the clip has aged into exactly what we suspected it was at the time: a fundamentals lesson dressed up as a technique of the week.

Watch it: Xande Ribeiro's power knee slice.

The knee slice — knee cut, knee slide, whatever your gym calls it — is one of the oldest passes in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and Xande's version earns the word "power" in the title. You cut your lead knee across the opponent's bottom thigh, staple their leg to the mat, and drive your shoulder and hips through the space their guard used to occupy. Nothing about it is secret. What separates Xande's knee slice from the one that gets swept at your local open mat is where the weight lives while all of that happens.

How Xande Powers Through the Knee Slice

Watch the old footage and the first thing you notice is how little hurry there is in it. Xande doesn't sprint past the legs — he moves in stages, and every stage is heavy. The grips come first: control of the trouser or the underhook so the bottom player can't make the angle to recover. Then the knee cuts across the thigh and pins it, stapling the bottom leg so the guard can't follow him. And through all of it his head and shoulder press into the space above, cross-facing so his opponent is stuck looking the wrong way while the pass happens. By the time Xande slides through to side control, the fight has been over for several beats — the bottom player just hadn't been told yet.

That's the "power" in the power knee slice, and it's the part beginners get backwards. They treat the knee cut as a race — slice fast, hope for the best — and wonder why they keep getting knee-shielded, underhooked, and rolled. Xande treats it as a sequence of pins. Kill the leg, kill the head, and the pass is just the last thing that happens. It's the same philosophy that made his own guard unpassable for so long, applied in reverse: position and pressure first, movement second.

Why the Knee Slice Still Rules Modern BJJ

Guards have evolved wildly since 2015 — berimbolos, matrix entries, whole lapel civilisations — and the knee slice has outlasted every one of them. Watch Tainan Dalpra dismantle a Worlds bracket, or Lucas Lepri, who built one of the great careers in Jiu Jitsu on this exact pass, or the no-gi crowd from Gordon Ryan down cutting through half guard with the same staple-and-slide mechanics. The details Xande shows in that clip — the pinned bottom leg, the cross-face, the unhurried weight — are precisely the details still winning at the top of BJJ in 2026. Modern guard players have a thousand recoveries stored on the app in their gym bag; the knee slice done Xande's way takes the recoveries off the table before they start.

And the man himself is easier to learn from than ever. In 2015 you needed a seminar ticket to get this kind of detail; now Xande's full passing and defensive systems are a tap away on BJJ Fanatics and YouTube, taught with the patience of someone who has spent his whole life explaining fundamentals to people who wanted flash. Take the hint the clip was always offering. Drill the staple until the bottom leg stays dead. Win the cross-face before you dream about side control. Let your weight do the arguing. The guards will keep mutating; Xande's knee slice will keep cutting through them.

See you on the mats.

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 24 December 2015. Refreshed for 2026.