I have never liked the idea of stripes. For the first several years of my training none of the schools I was at used them. On my belt display my white and blue belts are devoid of stripes. We didn’t adopt them at Infighting until we joined PTT and wanted to get in line with the rest of the organisation. But, were it up to me, I would have preferred we not use them at all.
The problem I have with stripes is that I think they give people a false impression of what progress in Jiu Jitsu looks like. It implies a sort of linear ascent to the next level. It is as if your belt was some kind of knowledge or skill meter from a video game that slowly and evenly fills up before you earn some new perk. “Oh, they have 3 stripes. That means they are 75% finished with their blue belt.” The problem is, that's not how it works. Advancement in grappling doesn’t follow a straight line on a 45 degree angle upward across time. In my experience it looks much more like a poorly built staircase. You get long plateaus and sudden jumps upward. Hell you get the occasional drop from time to time frequently preceding the next lurch forward. There is no telling how close you are to your next ‘jump’, how close you are from ‘turning the corner.’ Stripes, can make this more confusing. Just because you got your first two stripes every 6 months, doesn’t mean you are ‘due’ for another next month.
As a instructor I can’t count the number of times I have had a student come in one day with a single stripe on their white belt and suddenly out of nowhere they are moving like they deserve a blue belt right away. That is just how it goes sometimes. People make large jumps seemingly overnight. Something just ‘clicks’ as we say. So now they are seemingly ‘behind’ about three stripes. Did I miss them? Was I not paying attention? No. they just got better really fast. So now what? I can give them a stripe and they will still be behind. I can give them three at once to fill up their belt before I promote them to blue. Or I can just give them a blue belt and leave their white belt with a single stripe. None of these seem super desirable to me.
Let’s say I give them one. They would understandably look at that and think the jump in skill they just had represents 25% of their journey to blue. They may think they need to improve as much as they just did two or three more times before promotion! What’s more, they may be subject to the dreaded ‘sandbagger’ label. “Him? He’s really good. He can beat a lot of the blues but they are sandbagging him at two stripe white so he can get easy tournament wins.” Ugh. No thanks.
So maybe instead we give the newly talented white belt two or three stripes at once. They might be clearer on their own progress, but at the same time, they might rightly ask if we can skip from one to four stripes, why do we use them at all? What do they really mean? What’s more, the two or three stripe white belts who just got leapfrogged might feel as though their own progress is somehow flawed; as if they are falling behind, when in reality they are likely doing fine and just awaiting their own next jump upward.
Instead maybe we just decide to leave the white belt with a single stripe and award them their blue belt instead. Again, this begs the question for the people who are being awarded stripes at the time, what do they really mean? Does three stripes really mean I am closer to my blue belt than two if apparently you can be promoted with only a single stripe?
Ultimately I don’t like stripes because to me they put too fine a point, apply too specific a measure to ideas that are not precisely measurable. Talent in Jiu Jitsu is a largely subjective concept and impossible to peg down exactly. It is hard enough to say what makes a person a brown belt over a purple belt let alone what makes someone a two stripe brown belt vs a three. Yet the very presence of stripes implies that it is possible to do exactly that and to do it for everyone consistently.
So how do I make my peace with it? Well, I have an idea. It goes back to an old post I made about the four qualities it takes to find success in grappling. Toughness, effort, technique, and discipline. We have those words painted on the wall of the gym as a reminder that combined they represent success. There are four of them. We give out four stripes. They are connected but nonlinear. Progress is connected but nonlinear. Why not then use these four things as our measuring stick for stripes?
One stripe for toughness. Coming in and taking the hard knocks without complaint. Coming in and learning from your losses. Coming in a embracing the grind.
One stripe for effort. Putting in the work. Putting in the time. Continuing to do over and over the things you failed at the last time.
One stripe for technique. Starting to put it together at the next level. Drilling well. Helping those you can. Identifying holes in your own game and filling them.
One stripe for discipline. Being patient in your rolls, waiting for the opening to develop. Displaying restraint and keeping your partners safe. Asking yourself not “how do I win this roll” but “how do I improve this roll.” Understanding that smooth beats fast.
I have already thought that the belt ranks themselves mirror this progression. White is the belt of toughness, blue of effort, purple of technique, and brown of discipline. Black being the combination of them all. I like then that applying the same idea to stripes creates a sort of fractal where in each contains the larger whole.
Each of these characteristics come in degrees of their own right. The toughness you need to show to get a stripe on your blue belt is different than the toughness your need to show at brown. There are levels to each. It is an increasingly higher standard but essentially the same criteria. Let’s say you earned your first two stripes in your first year at purple, but now it has been another entire year and you have not received another. You can look up at the wall and say, why have I slowed down? Which of these things do I need to focus on to advance? Or better yet, come to me and ask the same thing. Instead of saying ‘just keep coming to class’ or ‘well maybe try to play more from the bottom’ we can have a discussion about what discipline looks like at purple. How that relate not just to your guard but your presence in the gym. We can talk about what technique means at purple and how it is time to start figuring out what ‘your’ Jiu Jitsu is.
This is by no means a perfect system, it still has flaws, but for my part it seems clearer. Rather than looking at your next two stripes as having 50% to go, you can look at those two stripes as having two more qualities to embody. It might not work for everyone, or every school, but for my part it is the best way to make peace with a system I have taken issue with in the past.
