Ankle Lock

Limb — Leg9 Finishes · 0.5% of All Submissions

Total Finishes

Share of All Subs

0.5%

Most by One Fighter

Peak Year

2007

Year by Year

6 Years with a Finish

Statistical overview

The 13th most used submission in the UFC

Every figure below covers complete years only, from 1995 through 2025. The current year is left out until it is finished, because a part-season is both a smaller sample and a lopsided one — this section rewrites itself each January.

9finishes

0.5%of all 1,644 submissions

#13of 39 distinct submissions

2007peak year, 4 finishes

How’s it trending?

−100%running quiet

Across the last 1,000 men’s fights the ankle lock finished 0 against 1.3 its earlier rate predicts — 0.00 per 100 fights against 0.13 before. It sits below our threshold for calling a trend shift, though. On 0 finishes in a window this size, a run like this turns up often enough by chance that we will not call the underlying rate changed — a genuine move and a good spell look the same until more fights land. Worth watching rather than worth re-planning a camp around.

And over the long run

0.7%of submissions1995–2020

0.2%of submissionslast five years, 2021–2025

The ankle lock first appears in 1995. That looks like a gap, but on 448 it is well inside what chance alone would produce. Treat the two as the same. Over five years it is holding roughly the share it always had.

That looks like a gap, but on 448 it is well inside what chance alone would produce. Treat the two as the same.

0.2% against 0.7% · 1 of 448 · 95% range −1.1 to 0.2 points

95% range −100% to 252% · 2024-06-28 to 2026-09-19, men’s divisions. Measured as the rate at which the ankle lock ends a fight, not its share of submissions — share moves whenever the overall submission rate moves.

When does the finish come?

77.8%Round 1

22.2%Round 2

0.0%Round 3

0.0%Round 4

0.0%Round 5

ankle lock every other submission

77.8% of these finishes come in the first round, against 50.9% for every other submission. That looks like a gap, but on 9 it is well inside what chance alone would produce. Treat the two as the same. Within the round itself the median comes at 1:15 against 2:52 — 97 seconds earlier.

Does weightclass matter?

Welterweight and middleweight0.6%3 of 488

Featherweight and lightweight0.7%3 of 446

Light heavyweight and heavyweight0.4%1 of 240

Flyweight and bantamweight0.0%0 of 235

Women's divisions0.0%0 of 168

The ankle lock is at its weakest in flyweight and bantamweight at 0.0%, 0.6 points below the rest of the sport, interval −1.1 to −0.2.

The men’s and women’s divisions

Across the women’s divisions the ankle lock accounts for 0.0% of submissions — 0 of 168 — against 0.6% everywhere else. That is a real difference — 0.6 points less of the women's game, and big enough that chance does not explain it. That said, the women’s sample is 168 submissions in total, so it moves on a handful of fights in a way the men’s does not.

Anything out of the ordinary

A spike

2007 produced 4 of them

That year’s submission volume predicted 0.3. Judged against the year’s own volume rather than the raw count, and against a bar raised for the number of years looked at, so a busy year is not mistaken for an unusual one.

See 2007 →