Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD Review [2025]

Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD Review
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Key Takeaways

  • A three-part No-Gi instructional shedding light on the use of hammerlocks in BJJ. 
  • Features hammerlock finishes and setups, transitional attacks, and control.   
  • Contains innovative ways of setting up the crucifix as well as escaping bad spots.
  • BJJ World Expert Rating: 9 out of 10.

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There are shoulder locks in grappling that you are not considering doing at all, and it is holding you back. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Gi BJJ specialist and just want to use lapels to finish people – you need to understand the mechanics of shoulder lock and how to ride the shoulders.

For those interested in a different way to approach shoulder locks, the Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD is a great place to start. It blends moves that are useful and make sense in a BJJ, but are derived from wrestling and catch. The perfect combination to catch anyone off guard as you mix together the threat of submission and tight transitional control that allows you to dictate the pace and place of the exchange.

The Strangest Joint Lock

Shoulder locks are the weirdest joint lock in grappling. They attack a joint that has a wide range of motion and does have the tendency to be hard to control. And yet, they’re staples of the upper body submission game in any grappling martial art.

When you come to think of it, no other joint in the body, including the elusive ankle, offers so many challenges to people trying to control it as the shoulder does. The fact that both shoulders are connected via the collarbone girdle only makes things more difficult.

One way that we tend to solve the issue of fixating the shoulder joint enough to manage to apply braking pressure to it is to trap it by leverage. That leaves arm configurations such as Kimuras and Americanas as effective, but also very recognizable.

Further options come in the form of what I consider to be the strongest shoulder locks, such as leg-based submissions such as the Omoplata, Monoplata, Tarikoplata, etc. While more powerful and harder to stop than arm-based shoulder locks, these are also much harder to reach and set up.

That brings us to sneakiness. And for that, we have catch wrestling. While hardly worth it on their own, when put into a BJJ context and helped by some common grappling principles, catch wrestling shoulder lock grips tend to provide a surprisingly reliable way of controlling the shoulder, eventually getting that much sought-after tap.

The Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD offers one such system that’s worth checking out.

Grappling Coach Zach Green

A lifetime of grappling is what defines Zach Green, a BJJ black belt, and Judo brown belt. He works as the head instructor and Jiu-Jitsu coach at Onyx Combat Sports, teaching grappling to all levels and ages.

A black belt in the Gracie Humaita system, Zach started BJJ in 2008 and has never looked back since. He perfected his craft under many renowned instructors, such as Zack Maxwell, Regis Lebre, and Brian Rago, to mention a few. With a strong base of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and an innovative, modern approach learned from some of the biggest names in No-Gi, Zach has a very unique style of grappling that he teaches.

Green has spent considerable time on the competition mats, with plenty of local medals to show for it, as well as super fight victories and several No-Gi Pans medals.  Zach is also a huge martial arts nerd, studying the history and geography of martial arts in his spare time. That’s just another reason to consider the Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD.

Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD Review

Over the course of almost two hours, and with material organized in three distinct volumes, the Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD provides all the information you need to figure out hammerlocks for BJJ and how to use shoulder locks for control and motion on top of finishing:

Part 1 – Wrist Rides and Hammer Locks

As the Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD kicks off, Zach presents the hammerlock, a submission I am still slightly unconvinced about. Wrestlers and catch wrestlers swear by it, and I’ve gotten some taps over the years, but I still find it to be unreliable for BJJ.

That said, at least Zach doesn’t just regurgitate the same old wrestling stuff in this instructional, but instead gives it a BJJ dimension. He actually emphasizes wrist rides as a means of control, preventing people from rolling out of his shoulder locks, which makes lots of sense.

Several hammerlock finishes appear in this part, some of which I am going to give the benefit of the doubt and try out next time I roll. The integration of hammerlocks for improved back control is viable, and I enjoyed the chapters covering it a lot. The turtle stuff is not usable.

Part 2 – Crucifix 

Part two of this Shoulder Lock Zach Green DVD is where the magic happens. Green offers very interesting twists on playing the crucifix, mainly by offering a ‘handcuffs’ concept enabled by hammerlock principles. As one of the early victims of the ‘French handcuffs’ I tend to value any grappling move that has the word ‘handcuff’ in it.

The crucifix chapters only take up half of the second volume of the instructional, paving the way for Zach to cover the mount and side control as part of his shoulder locking system too. The blood eagle from the mount is super cool, while the side control and closed/half-guard options revolve around Kimuras and Omoplatas.

Part 3 – Transitions and Escapes

As we reach the final part of the Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD, the attention is on movement and setting up the hammerlocks and wrist rides in the first place. Zach offers several ways to use headlocks from the Kesa Gatame position to set up the finishes demonstrated earlier.

I particularly appreciated the counter-attacking portion of the instructional which shows you how to deal with headlocks and BJJ pins like side control, mount, and back, while escaping towards hammerlocks. I’d say the escapes shown here are practical, reliable, and fairly easy to figure out by watching this DVD.

Riding Shoulder Locks

One of the best uses of shoulder locks in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is not to finish submissions. I tend to get incredible success with them when I need to pin someone in place, or, even better, when I want to make someone move against their will.

Take the Omoplata for example. I love setting up triangle chokes from the Omoplata, as people get obsessed about regaining control of their shoulder back, even though I am not trying to finish the shoulder lock. This gives me entries to triangles, or, if I end up on top (which happens all the time) Gogoplatas. Because why not look cool when you can?

The Kimura Trap is another example of how you can literally ride someone using a shoulder lock through all kinds of BJJ positions. Finishing is always an option, but so is transitioning which usually means more submission options than just the obvious shoulder lock. Some food for thought as you consider learning from the Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD.

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Getting Hammered

Time to be the hammer, and nail a bunch of unexpected arm locks using the tactics and instructions in the Shoulder Lock Mastery Zach Green DVD. I’d single out the crucifix portion and Zach’s directions on escaping pins and bad spots straight into hammerlocks and wrist rides. The entire DVD is a very useful one though, and I think that those that will benefit the most from it are the Gi people not considering it at all.

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