Do you get heel hooked by people who are much worse than you? I know your pain. I trained mostly in the gi for a long time, so leg lock defense is a natural weakness for me. That’s why I watched Get off my legs gringo by Craig Jones. In this review I tell you what you can learn from this instructional.
Title | Get off my legs Gringo: a complete roadmap to defending the modern leglock game |
Instructor | Craig Jones |
Total duration | 5 hours and 19 minutes |
Publication year | 2021 |
Where to buy | Here on BJJ Fanatics |
Learn leg lock defense from Craig Jones
Defend like Craig
What’s get off my legs gringo about?
Get off my legs gringo is about leg lock defense. It focuses on defense and escapes from leg entanglements, and there’s one volume about how to prevent leg entanglement entries. It dives very deep into early, middle and late stage defense from the most common leg entanglements: straight ashi garami (single x), double outside ashi, reaps, 50/50 and saddle.
My experience with this instructional
I’ll split my experiences between straight and cross ashi garami’s, because they’re quite different for me (I was much better at one than the other before I watched this instructional).
Straight ashi garami (single leg x)
I got this dvd because I have a lot of problems with escaping the standard or straight ashi garami (single leg x) and reaping positions. I get outside heel hooked and straight footlocked from these positions quite often.
I really like the standard ashi garami escapes. Craig focuses on building height, going from seated to split squat to standing if he can.
What was very new for me, is that Craig says that your escapes are very different depending on whether you’re seated, split squatting or standing:
- Standing: you just need to keep great balance (Craig shows how), expose neither your heel not the sweep, and clear the legs.
- Split squat: you need to make use of hamstring exposure and pressure your opponent’s hamstring to put severe on stress your opponent’s grip, while also clearing the legs.
- Seated: you need to do the traditional escape where you push the foot off your hip – but Craig admits this can be very hard against high level opponents. That’s why he almost always tries a counter leg lock from this position instead to get his opponent to react to his threat.
I also learned in the section How to beat the reap that in the reap, the problem is actually not the reaping leg, but the other leg. This was a small eye opener for me.
Cross ashi garami (50/50 and saddle)
I have a bit more experience defending the cross ashi’s than I do with the straight ashi’s. My early stage saddle escapes and my own 50/50 game were already pretty good (imho), but I still picked up great details from Craig.
For example, Craig again focuses on building height above anything else. I never do this in 50/50 because I assumed people can just sweep you right back or invert under you, but Craig shows how to defend both these threats. And it’s interesting because building height is such a big theme in his other instructionals as well.
Further, Craig has many layers of defence against the backside 50/50. This was all new to me, and it’s very helpful because backside 50/50 is very popular nowadays.
Craig also has 1001 late stage heel hooks and saddle escapes, even with double trouble. To be honest this part went largely over my head because I’m still pretty new to leg locks. I’ll come back to this once I’m comfortable in getting in leg lock shootouts with other high level leg lockers. For now I’ll focus on the early and mid stage defenses.
My verdict
This is a very good instructional. Craig obviously knows exactly what he’s talking about. He covers all the leg lock positions you should know how to escape from, with many new details that I’d never seen before.
If you want to learn leg lock defence this is definitely the most complete and best explained instructional you can get.
Learn leg lock defense from Craig Jones