Joint Locks: "That Stuff Doesn't Work"

Self-Defense Thursday For the Week of 11 June 2026

Every Thursday at this Substack, we talk self-defense. This week, I want to talk about joint locks.

“That stuff doesn’t work.”

How often have you heard it said, of joint locks, that they “don’t work?” A friend of mine told me that he first fell in love with joint locks while watching Steven Seagal movies in college. This was during the heyday of Steven Seagal’s career, when he was young and handsome and his star was on the rise. My friend saw Under Siege for the first time in a theater in college and never forgot how effortless Seagal made Aikido look.

Now, granted, what Steven Seagal does in the movies is not really Aikido except for a few isolated techniques. It’s a combination of Movie-Fu and things that no Aikido exponent would do because the system is intended to be defensive, not offensive. Still, Seagal finds time to demonstrate a lot of different joint locks in his films. There’s even a textbook example of one of the first wristlocks students learn, in the early portion of Under Siege 2.

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