Belts in BJJ: What they are and what they aren’t
Belts, ranks, stripes, degrees, and titles play a role in martial arts with a traditional Eastern roots, and this includes Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. What do belts represent? Are they important? Yes and no. Let’s explore.
beginner AND Intermediate Belts
In a narrow sense, belts are a tool used by martial arts instructors to signal to students that they are on the right path. Stripes serve the same role but are much less significant. It’s very important for beginner/intermediate students to avoid placing too much importance on these promotions. For the academy I adopted an excellent phrase I saw posted at Gracie University in Torrance, “Chase knowledge, not belts”.
It’s very challenging to completely resist the desire for rank and external validation. But those who place their main focus on earning rank don’t tend to last long in BJJ. Working hard to earn a blue belt fills you with a sense of accomplishment… for a few days. But this type of superficial motivation evaporates quickly once you realize that the grind will persist indefinitly. You need to discover joy in overcoming challenge and incremental growth to last in this game. Perhaps learning to focus on building skill and developing your physical attributes instead of rank is part of the training.
Black Belts and Lineage
The black belt in BJJ is a symbol. A jiu jitsu practitioner with a black belt is said to be a white belt who never quit, with the black color representing the grime accumulated after countless hours of training. The black belt must be given to you by your mentor, to signal that you have paid your dues, mastered the basics, and that you have demonstrated the resilience and mindset necessary to embark on a lifelong pursuit of martial arts study.
What’s to stop you from ordering a black belt and putting it on yourself? We consider that a form of fraud. How do we know that you paid your dues unless another bona fide black belt is willing to vouch for you? That, of course, leads us to the idea of lineage — what is a bona fide black belt in the first place?
If we keep track of every black belt awarded through the generations of teachers and students, we can build a lineage. In a sense it gives us confidence that our black belts are genuine because our mentor’s black belt was genuine, and so on. Lineage is also a way to honor our teachers by remembering the contributions they made to the art. We learn so much faster because we don’t have to reinvent the wheel on our own. Like Sir Isaac Newton said, “If have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.
belts are not Everything
Western martial arts like boxing, kickboxing, and wrestling, do just fine without belt systems. All of the emphasis is placed on performance without the use of symbols. This is refreshing in a sense because there is no temptation to seek rank. To get better you just have to keep working.
And belts do not necessarily correlate to skill. Belts can suggest who might win a grappling match, but there are so many variables such as size, weight, age, sex, strength, mobility, cardiovascular endurance, and mat time that all have an influence on the outcome. There are competitive blue belts and elite wrestlers (with no belt at all) who could completely crush me. The black belt I wear is only a symbol. Royce Gracie was famously quoted as saying “A black belt only covers two inches of your ass. You have to cover the rest”.
When it comes to lineage, it’s important to remember that BJJ belongs to everybody. It is not owned by one person, one family, or one country. We like to honor and respect those who came before us, but if you have a body and a mind then you can be a part of this ever-evolving art.