It’s often thought that leg locks are the “great equalizer” of the Jiu Jitsu game, and in many ways that’s true. However, using leg locks to level the playing field with bigger and stronger opponents requires not only an aggressive initiative to go for the legs, but a knowledge of how to maximize leverage and force even if your opponent is by far more powerful.

In this article, I’m going to dive into the details of what is now the most powerful leg lock in the International Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Federation, the toe hold.

We’ll break down the three elements which – to me – comprise the most important points for finishing the toe hold on bigger and stronger opponents:

1) “The Cucumber Bend”

When you’re setting up your toe hold, its important to not just be satisfied by locking your hands together, but to make sure that by the time your hands connect, you’ve “loaded” a lot or pressure on the bent foot of your opponent. This ensures that you don’t need much muscle to finish because the tension on the outer ligaments of the opponent’s foot are already tight simply from your wrist pressure.

2) Keep the Foot Tight to Your Chest

Many people try to do what I call the shot-put method of finishing the toe hold, where you push the leg away from you and towards your opponent in order to get the tap. I’ve been lucky enough to take private lessons and seminars with toe hold experts world champions like Caio Terra and the Mendes brothers – and if you watch these guys going for toe holds, you’ll notice that during the setup and the finish, they keep the attacked leg tight to their chest, rotating to the side with their bodies to get the tap (and NOT pushing the leg away from them.

3) Bend Their Big Toe to Their Elbow

It’s been traditionally taught that in order to force the toe hold tap, you’ve got to bend the opponent’s big toe towards his tailbone. In fact, you should be bending his big toe towards his same side elbow (IE: if you have his right foot, aim to get his right big toe to his right elbow). What this does is it gives you more range of motion and it also works against the knee joint because you’re bending the foot out and over the opponent’s own knee joint. When it comes to finishing this attack on someone bigger and stronger, you’ll definitely want to ensure that you’re loading as much pressure on as many joints as possible.

5x bjj world champ and ADCC champ Braulio Estima shows a couple interesting variations of the toe hold that actually makes it much more powerful.

Braulio grabs the heel and pushes the foot with his own forearm. Bernardo Faria was impressed.

Learn And Master The Most Unique Footlocks From The Multiple ADCC And World Champion Who Invented Them.

Braulio Estima Is Here To Walk You Through Developing A Lethal, Simple, And Devastating Lower Body Submission Game
Braulio Estima is a multiple time ADCC Champion and multiple time Black Belt World Champion who has wins over some of the best in the world including Marcelo Garcia.
Braulio has spent years refining this technique and has been able to utilize it successfully at the highest levels of competition.