Regular Advancement Keys

 

There is something that I do better at Jiu-Jitsu than anybody else I’ve ever met.

It isn’t one of the cool, flashy things, or really anything that anybody else ever notices. It is important to me, and I’ve been doing it for years.

I progress in rank faster than anybody else. This has nothing to do with being a particularly awesome practitioner. It does have everything to do with getting  something very right in my training.

I started training at the innocent young age of 55.

It has always been my belief that I had a relatively short amount of time to accomplish anything in Jiu-Jitsu.

Back then, there was really no possibility for a student in an outlying school to progress in rank very far, but in 2014 the entire system got revamped into pretty much what they do at Gracie University itself.

The rules were strict, but fair.

Every stripe beyond Blue Belt would require a minimum of 8 months in rank, and to be considered for promotion the student must have accumulated at least a hundred classes of appropriate types. Promotion to entirely new belts would require evaluation by one of the Gracies, or by a designated Black Belt.

This lit my fire. I was already attending every class possible, but for promotion to proceed smoothly I started paying very close attention to my attendance card.

I had noticed that every once-in-a-while, an attendance check would get missed. I would point this out, and it was always corrected. After a while, they let me correct my own.

The message here is that instructors are human, and make mistakes just like everybody else.

For them to actually authorize a promotion, they would go online. The Gracie website would have a place to click for promotion of every student at a school. If 8 months hadn’t passed, clicking would do nothing. That makes perfect sense. A flaw to the system is that an instructor has to remember when to go online to see if it’s time to promote a student. The system does not send the instructor a text, or an email, or any other form of notification.

So, there were two problems already. Were all of any given student’s classes getting recorded, and would they be considered for promotion at the correct time?

When this started up, I was a 2-stripe Blue Belt, and was 58 years old. An added difficulty for me is that my wife and I are off travelling about 4 months a year. As fun as this is, it can play havoc with attendance.

I had two more Blue Belt stripe promotions to earn, and four at Purple Belt since then. The fastest came in exactly 8 months, and the slowest took 9 months and 10 days.

To pull this kind of thing off so regularly I have three secrets.

The first is that I train a lot more than most people. This seems to work pretty well at nullifying the holes our travels create. For many this isn’t really an option.

The next secret is that I keep precise track of all my attendance-worthy sessions, and make sure they get properly accepted.

The final thing is that when I have my attendance set, and my date is good, I publicly pat myself on the back about it. This reminds my instructor. In my case it works to post something on Facebook.

My instructor also knows that as an old guy I am concerned about my speed of progress.

I do not cheat, and probably train more per level than any other student at our school in any given promotion period. If I have trouble with my totals, I also publicly post about that. An example is the Purple Belt level that took me 9 months and 10 days.

There is also another requirement that is involved with all this. Let’s say 8 months have passed, and the attendance goal is met. It is at our instructor’s discretion whither a student gets promoted or not.

If he were to decide that I needed to work more on something before a rank award, I would be happy as a clam about it, and would make the effort that he recommended.

So why not just let it all slide, and trust the system to work as it should do in theory?

The reason is that things don’t always work out the way they are supposed to.

That leads me to my next blog entry, which concerns my proudest moment in Jiu-Jitsu.