Arm Triangle

Neck135 Finishes · 7.9% of All Submissions

Total Finishes

135

Share of All Subs

7.9%

Most by One Fighter

Peak Year

2024

Year by Year

26 Years with a Finish

Statistical overview

The fourth most used submission in the UFC

Every figure below covers complete years only, from 1994 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.

126finishes

7.7%of all 1,644 submissions

#4of 39 distinct submissions

2024peak year, 16 finishes

How’s it trending?

+49%on a good run

Across the last 1,000 men’s fights the arm triangle finished 22 against 14.8 its earlier rate predicts — 2.20 per 100 fights against 1.48 before. It sits below our threshold for calling a trend shift, though. On 22 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

6.3%of submissions1994–2020

11.4%of submissionslast five years, 2021–2025

The arm triangle first appears in 1994. That is a real difference — 5.1 points more of the modern game than it used to be, and big enough that chance does not explain it.

That is a real difference — 5.1 points more of the modern game than it used to be, and big enough that chance does not explain it.

11.4% against 6.3% · 51 of 448 · 95% range 1.9 to 8.4 points

95% range −11% to 137% · 2024-06-28 to 2026-09-19, men’s divisions. Measured as the rate at which the arm triangle ends a fight, not its share of submissions — share moves whenever the overall submission rate moves.

When does the finish come?

34.1%Round 1

41.3%Round 2

23.0%Round 3

1.6%Round 4

0.0%Round 5

arm triangle every other submission

34.1% of these finishes come in the first round, against 52.5% for every other submission. That is a real difference — 18.4 points later than the rest, and big enough that chance does not explain it. Within the round itself the median comes at 3:14 against 2:50 — 24 seconds later.

Does weightclass matter?

Welterweight and middleweight9.8%48 of 488

Featherweight and lightweight5.6%25 of 446

Light heavyweight and heavyweight9.6%23 of 240

Flyweight and bantamweight8.1%19 of 235

Women's divisions5.4%9 of 168

The arm triangle is at its strongest in welterweight and middleweight, taking 9.8% of the submissions there against 6.7% elsewhere — 3.1 points clear, interval 0.1 to 6.1. It is weakest in featherweight and lightweight at 5.6%, 2.8 points below the rest of the sport, interval −5.5 to −0.2.

The men’s and women’s divisions

Across the women’s divisions the arm triangle accounts for 5.4% of submissions — 9 of 168 — against 7.9% everywhere else. That looks like a gap, but on 168 it is well inside what chance alone would produce. Treat the two as the same. 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 missing year

2005: not once, all year

The seventh blank year in the 32 since it first appeared, and the first since 2004. That year’s submission volume predicted 1.6. The longest it has ever gone quiet is 3 years running.

See 2005 →

A spike

2024 produced 16 of them

That year’s submission volume predicted 6.4. 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 2024 →