A Year of Purple Prep

So what do the Gracies look for when somebody tests for Purple Belt.

First off, they look to see how familiar you are with the official curriculum. For example; there is nothing about body triangles in the material released so far, so they don't expect people to demonstrate this. They only test what the students are supposed to have learned.

Even so, cannot possibly test all the material released, either. There is just too much already.

There are 35 Combatives techniques, as well as 60 from BBS1, 60 from BBS2, plus 8 released from BBS3. You would think that would add up to 163, but as each has on-average more than three variations, it is actually well over 500.

If they wanted to test all of them (at the average speed of current White Belt, BBS1 and BBS2 exams) at 15 seconds per variant, that would take over two hours, and the candidate would collapse from exhaustion long before they were done.

Instead, they thoroughly “spot check.” Candidates must still know it all, even if they only get called on a couple of dozen items.

The rest of the exam is dedicated to the student's comfort and ability in sparring. Here's where you can throw in stuff from outside the curriculum, but again, you don't have to.

They say that they know within minutes if a candidate is ready or not when they see him roll. They also say that they don't let him know until a significantly later. They want to see you push on. Ryron Gracie says that's fun.

There is no time to waste; Purple Belt preparation for me starts now.

My 4^th and final Blue Belt stripe promotion should come in a tad under 3 months, and after an indeterminate amount of time at that level, I will be testing for Purple.

Let's call it at least a year from now; likely more.

So how do I prepare for so distant a test?

Simple; I need to solidify my technique the best that I can, and to do whatever will make me seem as awesome as possible on that distant exam day.

Every candidate wears a Blue Belt with 4 stripes on it. That is the prerequisite. Most have nothing plain white stripes, which is fine.

Some people have 3 plain stripes, with the other being a bid fancier. That difference represents all the effort that went into passing the optional BBS1 exam.

A few might have 2 of the fancy stripes. That would tell the examiners that these people not only did the BBS1 exam process, but that they were both dedicated and psychotic enough to go through it again at the even harder, but still optional, BBS2 test. Currently there are no higher tests in the BBS series.

This can't hurt. In martial arts evaluations both effort and dedication count, and these funny little belt decorations show these characteristics in spades even before the actual testing begins.

That means that to suck up to the Purple Belt examiners, I should get myself a BBS2 stripe in addition to the one for BBS1 that I already wear.

Doing so also forces you to greatly tighten up on knowledge and understanding of the curriculum, which is exactly what they try and catch you up on during a Purple Belt examination.

To get it all done might take me as much as a year of very hard extra work, but that's alright. I will likely be done before any Purple evaluation for me will happen.

The only trick is in finding training partners through all of that.