Every Submission, Explained

Newcomers find the ground game unwatchable because it looks like nothing is happening. It usually is. Every submission in the sport belongs to one of two families, and knowing which one you are looking at turns a stalemate into a countdown.

Family one: chokes

A choke ends a fight by interrupting supply to the brain. There are two mechanisms and they behave completely differently.

Blood chokes, more accurately called strangles, compress the carotid arteries on either side of the neck. They do not restrict breathing, which is why a fighter caught in one can often still talk. They are fast — unconsciousness in seconds — and comparatively safe, because releasing the pressure restores flow immediately.

The rear naked choke is the definitive example, applied from behind with an arm across the neck. The triangle choke uses the legs and the opponent's own shoulder to close both sides. The guillotine, the arm triangle and the D'Arce are variations on the same principle from different positions.

Air chokes compress the windpipe instead. They are slower, considerably more painful, and generally regarded as cruder — a fighter can resist one for a long time. Deliberately targeting the trachea is illegal, so most air chokes in competition are imperfectly applied blood chokes.

Family two: joint locks

A joint lock threatens to move a joint past the range it is built for. It ends the fight because the alternative to tapping is structural damage.

Arm locks are the most recognisable. The armbar hyperextends the elbow using the hips. The kimura and the americana rotate the shoulder in opposite directions. The omoplata attacks the shoulder with the legs and doubles as a sweep.

Leg locks attack the knee and ankle. The straight ankle lock and the kneebar are the traditional entries; the heel hook is the one that changed the sport.

Wrist locks exist and work, though they are rarer in MMA than in pure grappling because gloves and sweat make the grip harder to keep.

Why heel hooks are treated differently

A heel hook does not hyperextend a joint. It rotates the lower leg, and the damage is torsional — the ligaments inside the knee shear rather than stretch.

The danger is that the pain arrives late. With an armbar, discomfort scales with the threat, so a fighter feels the fight ending before it does. With a heel hook the ligament can go before the signal does. That is why they are banned in many amateur and lower-level grappling rule sets while being entirely legal in MMA, and why a fighter caught in a tight one tends to tap immediately rather than test it.

What tapping actually is

There are three ways a submission is acknowledged. The fighter taps — repeatedly, on the opponent or the mat, so it cannot be mistaken for a grip. They tap verbally, which counts equally and exists for when both hands are trapped. Or the referee stops it, either because the fighter has gone unconscious or because a limb has visibly gone past its limit.

A choke that renders a fighter unconscious before they tap is recorded as a technical submission. It is the same result with a worse recovery.

Tapping carries an odd stigma among people who have never trained. Inside the sport it reads as basic literacy: a fighter who taps to a heel hook fights again in eight weeks, and one who does not may not fight again for a year. The tap is not surrender to an opponent. It is a correct read of a position that has already been lost.

How to actually watch it

Three things tell you almost everything.

• Where the hips are. Grappling is decided by hip position far more than by arms. The fighter whose hips are controlling the other's is winning, whatever the top-and-bottom arrangement suggests.
• Whether hands are fighting or resting. Active hand-fighting means a submission is being set up or denied. Still hands usually mean a stall.
• Which way a limb is being isolated. Every submission starts by separating one limb from the body that defends it. The moment an arm or a leg is alone, the countdown has started.