When And Why Leg Locks Work

Kody Steele showed the MMA world what modern jiujitsu looks like. Today we’re going to talk about why jiujitsu works and will always be valuable.

Now let’s get into it.

This weekend’s UFC card was something of a “who’s up next?” event.

The marquee attraction was Carlos Prates taking a year off Jack Della Maddalena’s life. The rest of the event was mostly promising Australian prospects like Quillan Salkilld and Colby Thicknesse getting appropriately matched fights to move up the rankings while appeasing the Australian MMA market. You also got some big heavyweights with bloated records swinging for the fences.

I was most interested in the first fight of the night with Kody Steele.

We’re team Steele here and you should be too. He was a superb grappling competitor that cut his teeth right down the road from me in the center of the Lone Star State. He moved out west to Vegas to further his MMA career but he’s been always been on the grappling community’s radar. Partially because of his skills and partially because he looks like a Saiyan science experiment engineered to create air time and violence.

Anyone that can suplex their opponent three times in a row has the physicality to win a fist fight. More importantly, the meanness.

Steele left professional grappling to get 7 professional MMA wins with 6 finishes. Then he dropped a decision to the young veteran Rongzhu. Saturday was Steele’s first fight back and they gave him another young promising lightweight, Dom Mar Fan.

The fight was scheduled in Fan’s backyard. It was the first fight of the night but the earliness didn’t stop the Aussies from getting drunk and loud as is expected.

Usually when a young prospect gets to fight a guy coming off a loss in their hometown some unscrupulous matchmaking is afoot. The foreign intruder is really just supposed to take 2 flights and 1 concussion. They really should have picked a different person other than Steele if that was the plan.

Steele made the most of the experience he gained from his grappling career by taking Fan down in about a minute. Then we got to see a skill that’s becoming rarer and rarer in MMA. Guard passing.

Steele slid through Fan’s defense like he was back teaching fundamental jiujitsu classes. But then Fan reminded us why new guys can be so dangerous and exploded.

Steele was “on defense” through this whole exchange but he was never in danger. Fan hardly had top position let alone control of the tempo. Within the next 30 seconds Steele put the finishing touches on this addition to his highlight reel.

Look at the key frames from this exchange.

At no point could Fan hit Steele with anything meaningful because Steele used his leg entanglements create barriers and off balance Fan. That’s world class jiujitsu right there and exactly why it’ll always be a useful skill.

Steele’s finish comes at an interesting time for the chronically online combat sports community. 2 legendary Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitors lost the weekend before Steele set the Australian Dom Mar Fan on fire. This forced the armchair experts to over analyze jiujitsu’s place in the world.

Roger Mayweather once famously said, “Most people don’t know shit about boxing”. That has to apply triply for this newer art we call as jiujitsu.

Jiujitsu is an important piece of grappling. It innovated many of the submissions we see in MMA today but seemingly no one who talks about it understands why its useful.

I’m going to stop bitching and put us on the same page.

Jiujitsu is literally translated as the gentle art. Or yielding art depending on which search engine you used.

What we saw Royce Gracie use at UFC 1 and is commonly associated with the word “jiujitsu” today is the Gracie family’s take on judo. They learned it from a traveling instructor, adapted some techniques to create a modified low impact slef defense system, and then sold the world on its utility.

What they packaged hardly exists today outside of The Gracie Academy and their affiliates, and it’s certainly not showing up in competition. It’s not close to Marcus “Buchecha'“ Almeida and Rodolfo Viera used, and it’s effectively alien to what Kody Steele and the majority of his contemporaries compete in to make their living.

Steele and many of the athletes at the forefront of the competitive jiujitsu built their name competing in the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) events. ADCC‘s unique scoring criteria puts heavy emphasis on wrestling, turtle, back control, and leg locks. That is exactly what you need to be a good MMA fighter.

If you wrestle well you decide where the fight takes place.
If you can turtle well you can get up off the floor when you get taken down.
If you control the back well you access the most high percentage submission in MMA.
If you are good with leg locks you can off balance someone when you’re underneath them and maybe even submit them.

That’s exactly what Steele did above and Ryan Hall does below.

No one would advise starting with flopping over when you’re learning how to fight. No one with two eyes and a brain should think that that’s what Hall and Steele are doing.

Steele and Hall are turning bad positions that should require defense into immediate scoring opportunities.

MMA is an offense first sport. Impact and damage are the letter of the law and some of the best fighters of all time were notorious for defense that was porous. They just hid it behind their overwhelming offense.

That doesn’t men defense is useless. To the contrary, it means good offense has defense built into it. And that’s exactly what the guard is in jiujitsu.

Even if your guard work and leg entanglements don’t yield submissions they allow you to move safely and get back on offense. In the words of John Danaher and his students, good jiujitsu teaches you to convert defensive cycles into offensive cycles.

Do I abandon jabbing if someone knocks me out with a cross counter over a jab? Is boxing fake? I’m not sure you could read this far if you were so I think you get my point.

The West Coast Trials produced my favorite performance of this ADCC cycle by a mile. Nathan Haddad won -88KG and earned certified dog status with a capital D-O-G.

Haddad got 4 submissions across 7 matches. One of those was easily the most thrilling submission win at any trials event this year.

The coolest thing about Haddad’s run is he was hardly even a dark horse to win the division.

Haddad is a good competitor. He’s fought amateur MMA and grappled at EBI, PGF, and UFC BJJ. But he never made it past the top 16 at any previous ADCC trials and this West Coast bracket had previous qualifiers Ryan Aitken, Andy Varela, and Jacob Couch as well as dangerous up and comers like Dory Aoun and the world’s most famous uke, Placido Santos.

Haddad was not supposed to win. But he did, so we have to figure out why this guy from the middle of Kentucky was able to blow through the division.