Crazy Count

Covid-19 has messed up Jiu-Jitsu in many ways.

For me personally, it has kept me from any partner work since the shutdown. I am in a higher-risk category due to age, and am therefore playing it safe.

This should have meant a halt to any real progress in knowledge and skill, and a corresponding halt in progressing to a next rank promotion.

There are three components to promotion.

The first is time-in-rank. The absolute fastest that a rank stripe can be received is 8 months after a previous promotion. If you don’t have 8 months or more, nothing can or will happen.

The second is a minimum attendance requirement. Until this is met, there will be no promotion regardless of how many months you have been training.

This is the part that Covid messed up for me. Before it hit, I had reached 9% of the minimum by training at my home school, 2.2% more by training at the North Vancouver school, 10% by working one-on-one with Rob, and another 24.4% training in California with the Gracies. The total pre-Covid was 45.6% of the requirement.

Since then, Gracie University has been running online Zoom classes. They count each of these as much as  a regular hour of in-class training. Rank progress is important to students, and therefore continues. In Los Angeles, physical classes are still not allowed.

North Vancouver also started up online Zoom classes of their own that also count towards rank. They have since opened up a number of small classes on the mat, but also are continuing the Zooms. Sessions of either kind count towards rank.

My local school has also started up small live classes, which certainly count towards rank. There are no Zoom sessions being created, and as far as I know there has been no announcement of a policy towards counting them from other sources.

I have been keeping track of my online attendance with Gracie University’s sessions, and North Vancouver’s, and any work I have put in on working the curriculum on my own.

All of this has been averaging 8 or 9 hours of training per week, and has totalled 55% of the training requirement.

That 55% added to the 45.6% I had from before the Covid shutdown adds up to a hair over 100% of the minimum requirement.

However, that does not mean that as soon as I reach the end of my time-in-rank 8-month period that a stripe promotion will automatically arrive.

That brings us the third and most important requirement for promotion, which is the instructor’s approval.

By then I will likely be standing at 45.6% from pre-Covid, and well over 100% worth of solo, online Gracie University work, and online North Vancouver work.

Will my instructor count anything other than the 45.6% earned pre-Covid? I have no idea. If he doesn’t, a promotion would be on hold until after I am fully back on the mat, and then about 4 month of training time beyond that. I may not not be back to partner work until a vaccine is available.

The point is really that I will have done what is possible under the circumstances.