Kneebar

Limb — Leg20 Finishes · 1.2% of All Submissions

Total Finishes

Share of All Subs

1.2%

Most by One Fighter

Peak Year

2010

Year by Year

13 Years with a Finish

Statistical overview

The tenth most used submission in the UFC

Every figure below covers complete years only, from 1996 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.

20finishes

1.2%of all 1,644 submissions

#10of 39 distinct submissions

2010peak year, 3 finishes

How’s it trending?

−100%running quiet

Across the last 1,000 men’s fights the kneebar finished 0 against 2.3 its earlier rate predicts — 0.00 per 100 fights against 0.23 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

1.3%of submissions1996–2020

1.1%of submissionslast five years, 2021–2025

The kneebar first appears in 1996. 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.

1.1% against 1.3% · 5 of 448 · 95% range −1.3 to 1.0 points

95% range −100% to 80% · 2024-06-28 to 2026-09-19, men’s divisions. Measured as the rate at which the kneebar ends a fight, not its share of submissions — share moves whenever the overall submission rate moves.

When does the finish come?

60.0%Round 1

30.0%Round 2

10.0%Round 3

0.0%Round 4

0.0%Round 5

kneebar every other submission

60.0% of these finishes come in the first round, against 51.0% for every other submission. That looks like a gap, but on 20 it is well inside what chance alone would produce. Treat the two as the same. Within the round itself the median comes at 2:16 against 2:53 — 37 seconds earlier.

Does weightclass matter?

Welterweight and middleweight0.8%4 of 488

Featherweight and lightweight0.9%4 of 446

Light heavyweight and heavyweight2.1%5 of 240

Flyweight and bantamweight0.9%2 of 235

Women's divisions2.4%4 of 168

No weight band separates itself from the others: every interval on the difference contains zero, so the kneebar is used in roughly the same proportion up and down the scale.

The men’s and women’s divisions

Across the women’s divisions the kneebar accounts for 2.4% of submissions — 4 of 168 — against 1.1% 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

Nothing stands out. No year, card or fighter sits outside what the kneebar’s own volume predicts — it arrives at a steady rate, spread across the roster, rather than in bursts belonging to one night or one person.