People have different goals when they take up a martial art.
The most common is to learn how to defend themselves. But people also start to get fit, to lose weight or because they want to compete.
For anyone taking up a traditional martial art, another obvious goal is to achieve a black belt. It is seen as the pinnacle of achievement.
In my experience, achieving a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the longest road in martial arts. On average, it takes a practitioner a decade to reach that goal. It took me 12 years.
The journey is long with four signposts along the way to black: white belt, blue belt, purple belt and brown – each requiring four stripes. To give you some context, I was a white belt for four years.
That’s longer than usual. I was slowed by my first school going out of business. I had to find another academy and coaches always take their time getting to know you and your jiu jitsu before they are prepared to promote you.
I got to purple belt at my second school. Then COVID hit. I ended up having to move schools again because I stopped working in the city where I used to train at lunchtimes.
Training at lunch was great. Broadly speaking, my wife didn’t care about what I did during office hours. Moving to my current school meant I could only train at night. Not ideal.
In BJJ there is an unofficial scoreboard that ranks who achieved their black belts the fastest. A super-quick progression is around four years. Those who reach black belt that quickly become the household names in our sport.
They are the people who train twice a day, six days a week. Sometimes they will pull three sessions a day. In addition to their crazy amount of mat time, they find time for multiple strength and conditioning sessions each week.
Many have crazy stories of literally living in their gym or driving hundreds of kilometres a week to train at different academies under very specific instructors.
They are also frenetic competitors, literally competing every weekend – all over the country.
You see photos of them on Instagram from a tournament with multiple gold medals around their neck while pulling a bodybuilder pose for the camera.
Good on them. They have earned their success.
What you quickly realise is these guys operate on a different level. An individual week for them represents what a hobbyist will do over an entire month – or more.
No exaggeration.
So, it’s no surprise they leave hobbyists in the dust in terms of progression through the belt ranks. Four years to black belt makes sense.
Yet as I have gotten older, these guys’ achievements have become less impressive to me. That is not to denigrate their successes. Their commitment to BJJ is insane. Their work ethic is crazy. And make no mistake, they could snap me in half on the mat.
But I have become more intrigued by the guys who take the longest to get to black belt. Their stories are often more interesting because to reach their black belt, they have inevitably had to grapple with more of life.
They are the people running businesses, moving cities for work, getting fired, or raising kids. They’ve been divorced—sometimes twice. They’ve managed serious injuries, illnesses, and the slow grind of everyday life.
They didn’t have the opportunity to train three times a day six days a week. Doing that would likely have led to their third divorce.
There is a black belt in the US who I have followed online. He is an ex-SWAT officer and former MMA fighter. He writes a lot about self-protection and personal development. I stumbled across his writing years ago and always found it inspiring.
It took him 22 years to get his black belt. Now, that is an interesting journey. I’m sure it involved twists and turns and culminated in a black belt that was beyond well deserved.
There is a common saying in BJJ that a black belt is just a white belt who didn’t quit. There is a lot of truth in that. Everyone’s journey to black belt is different and each contains its own unique set of challenges.
Pretending that you can objectively rank them based on the length of time it took to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ misses the whole point of the achievement.
My own journey had its challenges. I had to change schools twice. I was off the mats for pretty much two years due to COVID. I had to juggle a business, a wife, three kids and elbows that have spent the last five years on fire.
But it was neither easier nor harder than anyone else’s. It was just mine. And I am proud of it. And for those whose journey was significantly shorter or longer than mine, they should be proud of theirs.
I know it was hard, however long it took.
