Some white belts can be more
advanced than others who are just starting, but the line between blue and
purple, purple and brown and brown and black is so incredibly blurred at
times. If a person has been training for
a year, how do we quantify the amount of time that he’s been training? Do we leave it at “a year”? Do we say he’s been training for 2 or 3 times
a week? Do we count the mat hours and
say he’s had 150-200 mat hours? Do we
count the little bit of time he may have taken to get a drink, or stopped and
talked to his training partners as a part of his “mat hours”? A gym can have such a varied group of people
– the way jiu-jitsu schools are set up so that practice is optional really
exemplifies the fact that hard work pays off in the gym. A blue belt that has been training for two
years at a pace of six days a week, twice a day and doing strength and conditioning
may be more advanced technically than the “recreational” purple belt who stuck
out their training for six years at 2-3 times per week. It is this aspect of jiu-jitsu that I find
interesting because we often see belt rank meaning next to nothing in the grand
scheme of things.
Gyms can hold people to different
standards for competition reasons.
Seeing some of the purple belts of today that are winning major IBJJF
tournaments, it’s interesting to think hypothetically what people would think
if they were to strap on purple belts and march into a school where they are
not known. Many of them could probably
out-perform some “recreational” black belts that run clubs and small schools,
and could give very tough matches to even competitive black belts. Some people call this “sandbagging” –
withholding a rank so that one is at a higher technical level than others in
one’s division – yet some of the best people competitors have not been training
for a particularly long time when measured in years – again, it comes down to
that dedication that they show in the gym every single day. It comes down to the summation of those
precious minutes in the gym when others are taking a break to push to the next
level, and to push through the pain of training multiple sessions per day when
others may have other commitments. It
comes down to the pure, raw mat time spent drilling and rolling, and those
empty hours after class studying tape and shadow drilling on the floor,
thinking of the next technique to work on – these are the things that set
competitors apart from people that train for recreation, and for some reason it
is often ignored even though it is infinitely more difficult than just letting
your membership at the academy run up for the year.
