Demetrious Johnson has spent October collecting critics. He told Ariel Helwani that Sean Strickland should either fight out the five bouts left on his UFC deal or hand back the middleweight belt and go box. Then Kayla Harrison went on Helwani’s show and called his laughter over the UFC 332 headliner “super unnecessary.” Now the former flyweight champion has turned on a submission. I love heel hooks, and I think he’s wrong.
MMA Sucka’s headline sums up his position: Johnson wants heel hooks gone in grappling. The clip that set this off was posted by Helwani on X, and in it Johnson was talking mostly about mixed martial arts, lumping heel hooks together with oblique kicks. His words: “It can ruin somebody’s career... I don’t do heel hooks and I don’t do oblique kicks because there’s another way I can take you out.” He went further, describing heel hooks and stepping on the knee as dirty. Then he made a football comparison, saying “You cannot rough the quarterback because they want to make sure the quarterback has a long career. I see it the same way for mixed martial arts.”
He has a real argument tucked in there. It’s attached to the wrong technique.
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The oblique kick deserves the heat
Josh Barnett, the former UFC heavyweight champion and a man who has caught more legs than most of us have shaken hands with, answered on X. He described what happens when an oblique kick lands correctly. The knee gets driven backward with high force against cartilage, tendons, ligaments and bone, and the damage is immediate. I agree with every word of that. The guy eating an oblique kick gets no warning and no exit. There is no tap to a kick. If Johnson wants to campaign against the stomp to the lead knee using the quarterback logic, I’ll hold the sign for him.
The heel hook is a different animal, and Barnett said so bluntly: “Heel hooks are nothing alike.” He called Johnson’s comparison a false equivalency, and I’d go a step further. DJ’s own words undercut his case.
DJ already wrote the rebuttal
Look at the line he used to explain why he’s comfortable with arm attacks: “I’ll break somebody’s arm because you have an opportunity to tap, right?”
Right. And the heel hook gives you that same opportunity. It’s a sequence. The attacker has to win the leg entanglement, clear the knee line, trap the foot and isolate the heel before any rotation happens. Every one of those steps is a place where the defender can fight, turn, pull the knee free or tap. An armbar works the same way. Johnson has finished people with arm attacks in front of the world and nobody called him dirty for it.
The fair knock on the heel hook is that the knee doesn’t always send a loud pain signal early, so a stubborn athlete or an untrained one can wait too long. That’s a real concern, and it’s an education problem. Barnett made a related point that I think gets overlooked. The hold works on the ankle and the knee together, which spreads the pressure out, and in a lot of cases the ankle gives first. Barnett called that kind of injury “very recoverable.” Compare that to a kick that hits the knee in one instant with all the force going one way.
Barnett also argued that people imagine every heel hook as a frenzied rip before the referee can step in. Some are. Most are controlled. The ugly cases happen when somebody cranks with intent or when a competitor refuses to tap. Those are cases about people, and rule sets already have ways to deal with bad actors.
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Draw the line where Barnett drew it
This is where I land, and it’s the same place Barnett did: “In amateur events, I agree, Heel Hooks and modified Heel Hooks should/could be generally banned for safety, but not in professional events.”
That’s the sensible split. A teenager at a local tournament may not know yet that the knee goes quiet before it goes bad. A professional grappler or prize fighter has spent years drilling the entries and the escapes, and has made an informed choice to compete where the hold is legal. Banning it at that level wipes out a whole branch of the sport’s best technical work. And that branch has given us some of the most fun grappling matches of the last decade, all inside-heel threats, rolls and counter-rolls.
Then there’s the part Barnett could not resist, and neither can I. Johnson’s longtime coach is Matt Hume, who coached Barnett years before DJ showed up. Barnett wrote that Hume is a master of the heel hook, that it “is one of Matt’s best attacks,” and that the two of them trained it constantly at AMC.
Johnson, for his part, was clear about his own gym: “I don’t teach that technique.” That’s his call. Barnett described it as personal preference, which is fine, but he said it should not count as an argument for how the sport gets regulated.
That’s the right read. DJ doesn’t like the heel hook. He’s allowed to never throw one, never teach one and finish people with everything else, which he has done better than almost anyone at 125 pounds. Turning that taste into a rule for everyone else is a mistake. Leave the heel hook in pro grappling, and save the quarterback speech for the oblique kick.
