What do Belts Mean?

When I first began my journey in jiu-jitsu, I never thought of the difference between each higher belt.  Everybody, to me, was simply either a white, blue, purple, brown or black belt.   The belts told you different things about the person’s technical ability, but nothing more.  Four and a half years later, my perception is once again (like it always is, it seems) changing on how I view grapplers.

            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.