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Your White Belt Goals

By Benjamin Strusnik, March 29, 2022

Congratulations!

You've given yourself the most important promotion of your Brazilian Jiu Jitsu journey. You've gotten up from the couch and awarded yourself the white belt in BJJ.

Hopefully, by this point you've done some research and found a BJJ academy that meets the general standards of cleanliness, friendliness, and basic credentials. In today's day and age, it's much more common to find higher belts teaching and running academies across the nation. Just 10-15 years ago, it was much different and only the larger metropolitan areas boasted brown and black belt instructors.

What This Article Covers:

In addition to understanding the lineage or where the instructor's knowledge came from it's important to understand that some school's take a different approach to the martial art. Some are more focused on the self-defense aspects of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. These schools tend to focus on the fundamentals of the art and how to protect oneself in situations where one could be threatened. Other academies have more of a sport jiu jitsu focus and are highly competition driven. Competitions are a great way to test your skills in a highly charged setting. For many practitioners, a competition creates an environment that is as close to a real and practical setting as possible, though there are rules designed to ultimately keep the practitioners safe.

For more on starting out in BJJ, check our Craig Funk's Beginner, Beginner BJJ from BJJ Fanatics!

Many schools blend both of these approaches and try to cover as much ground as possible, encouraging those students who want to compete to do so, but not requiring it. In addition, these blended environment schools typically do some work with the self-defense aspects of the art in addition to the ever-developing sport techniques that are evolving as time goes by.

Let's assume you've done your homework and found the academy that fits best for you. Now that you've learned to tie your jiu jitsu belt started attending classes it's time to look at some basic goals that will serve as BJJ white belt tips to help keep you on course and on your way to your blue belt and beyond.

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Face it, Your a White Belt/White Belt Goal #1

The BJJ belt meanings can vary and overtime, you will develop your own way to understand the ramifications of each belt. But in general, the white belt is the BJJ belt of the beginning student. In a typical class, the white belt is often understood to be the most important person or persons on the mat.

Many of the techniques and positions being demonstrated are complex and require our bodies and minds to bend in ways they've never done before. It's important that for the new student, instruction is being delivered in a way that minimizes confusion and breaks complex tasks into small digestible pieces or steps. As a white belt, you are supposed to be confused. Our bodies have instinctual reactions to certain conditions, that ultimately aren't the best to get us out of dangerous scenarios.

The process of learning jiu jitsu forces one to unlearn many of the innate reactions that you may have and replace those reactions with body movements, hand and hip placement that puts us in a better place to escape bad situations.

So goal number one of the new white belt is to accept that they are white belts and not expect too much of themselves. You're going to be a white belt for at least 6-18 months on average and if you are constantly berating yourself for not being able to understand or perform every technique with pristine and perfect execution, you are never going to last. Give yourself time to learn and focus on your improvements, no matter how tiny they might be.

White Belt BJJ Goal #2/Developing Consistent Training Schedule

One of the first questions that new students have when starting out is how often they should train. The simplest and most cliche answer in the world is, as much as humanly possible.

One of the biggest secrets to improvement in BJJ is that the students with the most mat time, tend to improve faster. Mat time itself can come in a variety of forms. Mat time includes your standard classes, it includes any additional rolling or live sparring done outside of normal class time, it includes any time spent drilling different techniques whether with a partner or on your own, and lastly, mat time can also include time spent away from the academy mats per se working on conditioning at home or in a gym. There is also one specific activity that can help improve and expand your overall jiu jitsu knowledge outside of class and that is through the study of BJJ instructional videos from the likes of BJJ Fanatics.

So looking at your life and requirements on your time, such as job, school or family, it's important to establish some baseline training schedules. If you can easily get to the academy 4-5 days a week, that is probably ideal as a beginner to get you as much class time, while also allowing a few days for rest and recovery. If you're one of these lucky folks who can invest 4-5 days a week on their training, you should strategically spread your training across the week to maximize your study. As a white belt just starting out, it's good to expose yourself to traditional Gi classes as well as the No Gi classes in which the heavy uniform is cast aside in favor of shorts and a t-shirt or rashguard. In this early stage, this will help you experience the different nuances of Gi and No Gi and may have you favoring one over another, or like many practitioners enjoying both aspects of the art or sport.

If you cannot make 4-5 classes a week, 3 is also a good number and is probably what the average practitioner invests in the beginning. The time it takes to reach each belt is impacted by a number of factors, with the time it takes to get to a BJJ black belt ranging between 8-12 years for most people. The primary tool you have to impact this timeframe is your consistency of training. Students who are able to train everyday, will probably find themselves to black belt quicker than someone who is only able to train 1-2 days a week.

Anything less than 3 days a week will certainly make it more difficult to reach that coveted black belt if you're in a rush, but if you're smart, many academies afford students opportunities to take 2 and sometimes more classes is one day. So if you're academy requires a lengthy commute, perhaps taking 2-3 classes each time you attend will allow you to maximize your time when you can make it. Remember more mat time, generally means more improvement.

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Rolling breakdowns & more.

You’ll also get At Home Drills to work on, a Preview of our Upcoming Launches More!

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White Belt Goal #3/Ask Questions, but Not All Questions

There's an old saying that there are no dumb questions. While I agree with this sentiment 99.9% of the time, there are some times when perhaps the question should be held in. Let me explain.

When your instructor presents a technique or a position, they are painting the picture of a scenario of two people engaging in a physical exchange. Person 1 in the scenario takes a certain role and may perform a specific series of reactions. Your job as the student is then to watch, absorb and attempt to perform the technique that your instructor has shown you, guided by the knowledge that your partner or uke is going to perform a set series of steps representing their actions. In a sense, you're both actors in a play.

The dreaded question that will send chills down the spine and hot flashes to your instructor's face is the WHAT IF question. What if the opponent does this? What if the opponent moves his leg here or stands up, or sits down, or whatever?

The short answer is, then we would do something else to address that specific instance. In other words, if the antagonist to our protagonist goes into uncharted or unscripted territory, there will probably be a whole host of changes we will make to our reaction. But for teaching purposes, we cannot demonstrate an endless amount of variables to account for every single one of the hundreds or more different scenarios that could present themselves.

Unlike most any other question, the WHAT IF question will most likely not advance your knowledge or your understanding at all. Instead, you will guide the entire class off the path and probably leave people confused, and your instructor at least a little bit annoyed.

So when the instructor is demonstrating a move or technique against a specific series of reactions from the antagonist, accept the fact that you are in a laboratory setting and this is the technique or action you should learn to take given those specific parameters. Over time, your instructor will share with you as many specific scenarios as possible that you will digest and incorporate into your game. This will make your time from white to blue belt that much better.

White Belt Goal #4/Relax and Breathe

One of the hardest skills you should focus on in the beginning is not how to tie your jiu jitsu belt, although this is kind of important. Instead, the single most important thing I tell people when starting out is to make sure to breathe. Our bodies and brains have a weird way of showing that we're trying hard to do a physical task correctly, we hold our breath. While this might be something possibly positive for an activity like competitive powerlifting, although there's plenty of videos out there showing otherwise, as athletes find themselves passing out or falling over under the weight and strain of the barbell while they're holding their breath.

Holding your breath while you're being held in side control or mount can be one of the most regrettable things you can do. Not only will your explosive attempts to bench press the opponent off you be short lived and not very cinematic, but will almost certainly sink you deeper and deeper into the opponent's control or make you vulnerable to a submission.

Instead, by attempting to remain as calm as possible and to breathe as normally as possible, you are ensuring that healthy, oxygenated blood is moving through your body and most importantly to your brain where you can strategize the next best physical movement that will hopefully lead to your escape. Lack of oxygen will induce panic and cause you to react in less than ideal ways. Slow down, breathe, and at the end of the day, if you get yourself caught and submitted or the timer rings ending the round and your suffering, understand that it's just jiu jitsu and you're learning to inoculate yourself to incredible stress in a safe environment.

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By following the advice encapsulated in these four simple rules, you will be much more prepared for the challenges that await you, but that make the journey that much more worthwhile. After you receive your blue belt in a year or so, you'll probably have a few more that may help others move up through a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu ranks.

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