In a Zoom discussion with Roger Gracie, John Danaher offered a detailed breakdown of wristlocks and why they so often fail in live competition. His argument centered on control rather than mechanics.
“Let’s put out a general statement here on submissions,” Danaher said. “People are very quick to make distinctions between different kinds of locks, leg locks, arm locks, wrist locks. The lock you select is really based around how much control you have prior to the lock. The lock is just the full stop at the end of a sentence. It’s the sentence that counts, and that sentence is control.”
He used early leg lock culture as an example of what happens when control is missing.
“When I first started with leg locks in the 1990s, the great problem was that there was no control. They were just moves where you jumped into it and hoped for the best. You tried to apply it as quickly as possible before the other guy could react. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It was more or less a desperation move, and as a result, the lack of control made many injuries and a lot of failures.”
Danaher explained that his response was to rebuild leg locking around positional dominance.
“My whole thing was to change leg locking into a control based game, to make a deep study of ashi garami, or entangled leg positions, so you could control people for long periods of time, the same way you do from the mount position when you’re working for an arm, or the same way you do from guard position when you’re working for a triangle. I never say a kind of joint lock is ineffective. My question is always, how effective is the control prior to the lock.”
He noted that modern leg lock systems succeed precisely because that control problem was solved.
“Historically, the control was minimal. That’s changed now. If you look at leg locks today, there’s a lot of control you can put on your opponent. Most upper body joint locks already come from very controlling positions, mount, side control, deep knee positions.”
That context explains his skepticism toward wristlocks.
“The problem I have with most wrist locks is that there’s very little prior control to the application of the move. In the majority of cases, they’re used to make people move or as a distraction. There’s no systematic set of controls that lead to their application.”
Danaher did identify one scenario where wristlocks consistently work.
“There is one interesting counterexample. Wrist locks can be highly effective when they’re used in the context of a triangle choke. When you have someone’s trapped arm tied up in a triangle and the strangle is hard to finish, and you can’t switch to an elbow lock, the wrist lock can be very effective. The triangle gives you a lot of control of your opponent’s movement. Wrist locks just performed in the open, without prior control, are much more dubious.”
He returned to the same principle in closing.
“There is a context in which wrist locks can be an important part of your game, but again, it’s not about the lock. It’s about the control you have prior to the lock. If you can show me strong prior control to a wrist lock, I’m going to be impressed. The best form of prior control we currently have for wrist locks is through triangles.”
Roger Gracie echoed the practical difficulty of applying wristlocks without immobilization.
“In wrist locks, I think they work more when it’s less slippery. It’s hard to move the hand into position to bend the wrist if you don’t have control. At least with a triangle, you can get it.”
Taken together, the discussion makes a consistent point. Wristlocks do not fail because they are weak techniques. They fail because they are usually attempted without the level of control that high percentage submissions require.
