BJJ legend Roger Gracie recently shared his thoughts on heel hooks, leg locks, and the evolution of modern Jiu-Jitsu, explaining why he believes many lower-body attacks are less effective in MMA than they are in grappling competition.

Here is what he had to say on the topic:

In MMA, you don’t see heel hooks and foot locks.

You see, but like almost very few, because you get punched in the face the moment they grab my foot. If your arms are busy attacking my foot, you’re not protecting from your punches.

So it doesn’t really translate to real fighting.

Drawing on his own MMA experience, Gracie said he eventually realized that chokes offered a far more reliable path to victory:

After that I’m like, no, I have to start choking people out because then they had no choice.

If I go for locks, you know, people sometimes they don’t tap for foot locks. They can resist. They can injure themselves for the sake of the match…

(But with) chokes, if you get choked and you don’t tap, it’s like good night.

Despite that, Gracie acknowledged the major impact heel hooks have had on competitive Jiu-Jitsu over the past decade:

Everyone now needs to learn heel hooks because that’s how you’re going to catch everybody.

It’s a technique that almost no one has been using and then it started working like crazy.

For Gracie, the rise of leg attacks represented one of the biggest shifts away from the original focus of the art:

With the leg lock and the foot lock attacks, heel hooks, foot locks, knee bars, whatever, that already was the biggest shift from the main goal.

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