Woj Lock
The Woj lock — an outside heel hook and ankle lock combined, attacked from the inside line, everting the ankle rapidly. The mirror of the Aoki lock.
Adapted from the original page. Grappling.Games did not write this. Sources.
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The Woj lock is an outside heel hook and an ankle lock applied at once, attacked from the inside line. The attacker sits inside the leg — which is why cross ashi and 50/50 are its positions — and produces the rotation an outside heel hook produces: external rotation of the tibia, loading the lateral knee. The grip threads differently from a standard heel hook, with the elbow of the hooking arm driving closer to the body and the finish relying on hip extension and a shoulder drop rather than pure arm rotation.
★ The line is not the rotation. Sitting on the inside line does not make this an inside heel hook, and describing it that way — an easy mistake, because the entry positions all expose the inside of the heel — gets the knee anatomy exactly backwards. The rotation is external, so the structures at risk are the LCL and the posterolateral corner, not the MCL and ACL.
Its danger is not only the knee. The Woj lock everts the ankle, and it does so fast. Eversion is the direction the ankle is least built to resist — the deltoid ligament on the medial side is what stops it — and the speed leaves no interval in which a defender can recognise the load and respond. This is the part of the technique that most descriptions omit, and it is the part that ends training sessions.
Its mirror is the Aoki lock: the same pairing of a heel hook with an ankle lock, run the other way round — outside line, inside rotation. Learning either one is most efficient as learning the pair.
This page assumes the reader has studied the inside heel hook mechanics. The Woj lock is an advanced variant, not a starting point for heel hook study.
Elevated RiskWoj Lock is an elevated risk technique. Two joints load together, and the ankle is the faster of the two. The rotation is an outside heel hook’s — external rotation of the tibia — so the knee structures at risk are the LCL and the posterolateral corner. At the same time the foot is everted rapidly, which loads the deltoid ligament on the medial ankle; eversion is the direction the ankle resists least, and the speed of it removes the interval a defender would normally use to recognise the load. Because the attack comes from the inside line, a defender reading position rather than rotation will prepare for an inside heel hook and brace the wrong way. Serious injury can occur with minimal rotational movement.
If you are new to this technique: read this section before anything else. Understanding the danger is part of understanding the technique.