Too far away

I've found a serious flaw in the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu system.

Nothing to do with the techniques, or the dandy progressive instruction system. It is all in motivation.

In most martial arts, progress is easy to see. Earn a belt, and the next belt is waiting for you a few months training away.

The Gracie belts don't quite work that way. Earn your Blue Belt, and the next coloured belt is waiting for you after five more years of training.

To mitigate this, they have a number of stripes on the belts that you earn in between. Each belt has four stripes to earn, but even then each stripe is over a year apart.

I have no argument with the visible, outward displays of skill such as belts and stripes taking years to earn. It is the actual progress through the levels.

Take the level I'm working on now. It has sixty parts, divided into seven chapters. Each of the sixty parts takes about a week to work on. The problem is, you don't get tested on any of it until after you've completed it all. You haven't really made any progress until you've made all the progress. The goal is so far off and so daunting, that people just aren't motivated to push towards it.
Take our own group. On Tuesday's Blue Belt class, there were three students present. All worked hard that night. The next night, there were four students present, working hard. The trouble is that other than myself, nobody was present at both classes. There were also quite a few who didn't attend either.

My solution is pretty easy. Instead of the test being in the distant future, there should be tests after each of the seven chapters. Work hard on the first 9 parts of chapter 1, and then be tested on that chapter. Done. Move on to chapter 2. That would put the completion time for that small part of the level at about 9 weeks. Much more doable.

That's my two cents, not that anybody asked me.