Common BJJ Submissions Explained

A submission is any technique that puts an opponent in enough danger — of being choked unconscious or having a joint injured — that their only reasonable option is to surrender. They surrender by tapping, and the person applying the hold releases immediately.

Crucially, a submission is not a strike or an injury; it is a controlled threat. The whole art is designed so that finishes can be practiced at near-full intensity every session precisely because the tap ends things before harm is done. This is what lets BJJ players spar live so often, as described in What Is BJJ?.

Submissions are usually hunted from dominant positions. From the guard you might attack a triangle or armbar; from the back, a rear naked choke. Position and submission are two halves of the same system.

Chokes are widely considered the highest-percentage finishes because a properly applied one leaves no room to power out. The rear naked choke is the classic example: applied from back control, it wraps the arm around the neck to cut off blood flow to the brain, and it is one of the most reliable submissions in the art.

The triangle choke uses the legs instead of the arms — you trap the opponent’s head and one arm between your thighs, a signature attack from the guard. The guillotine attacks the front of the neck, often caught as an opponent shoots in or drops their head.

What these share is a reliance on position and angle rather than strength, which is why chokes sit at the heart of the "technique over force" idea BJJ was built on.

Joint locks threaten a joint by taking it past its normal range. The armbar is the archetype: you isolate the opponent’s arm and use your hips to extend the elbow, a finish available from the guard, mount, and elsewhere.

Shoulder locks form another cluster. The kimura and the americana both twist the shoulder using a figure-four grip in opposite directions, while the omoplata attacks the shoulder using the legs from the guard. Each rewards control of the isolated limb far more than raw power.

The kimura carries a piece of BJJ history in its name: it is commonly said to be named after the Japanese judoka Masahiko Kimura, following his celebrated match against Hélio Gracie in the early 1950s. As with many origin stories in the art, the details are best checked against the sources.

Leg locks attack the joints of the lower body — the knee, ankle, and hip. Straight ankle locks and kneebars have long existed in BJJ, but the most feared is the heel hook, which torques the heel to place rotational stress on the knee. Because the knee can be damaged before pain gives a clear warning, heel hooks demand extra care and are restricted or banned under some rulesets.

For years leg locks were treated as a low-percentage or even disreputable area of the game. That changed dramatically with the rise of the modern leg-lock system — a structured, systematized approach to entries, control, and finishes that reframed the legs as a primary attacking target rather than a last resort.

This shift is strongly associated with coach John Danaher and the broader no-gi revolution, in which submission-only, no-gi competition rewarded exactly this kind of innovation. The wider story sits in the no-gi era of the art’s history.

The tap is the safety valve that makes all of this trainable. When caught, a player taps the mat, their partner, or taps verbally, and the hold is released at once. Tapping early and often is treated as good sense, not weakness — it is how practitioners survive years of daily hard sparring.

Some submissions carry more risk than others. Chokes usually give clear feedback before anything serious happens, while fast-acting joint attacks — heel hooks especially — leave little margin, which is why rulesets stage their introduction by belt level and experience.

Understood this way, submissions are less about hurting an opponent than about demonstrating that you could — safely, repeatably, and by control rather than force. That is the logic that ties every submission back to the positional hierarchy and to BJJ itself.