What I’ve Learned After 1,000 Classes of BJJ

On Saturday, Sept 27th, 2025, after 1,000 classes of training, I was promoted to purple belt.

Logging a thousand classes seems like a noteworthy milestone, so I thought it’d be interesting to write one of those ‘Here’s a list of things I’ve learned along the way’ posts.

So what have I learned after 1,000 classes?

1. Pressure
2. Space
3. Time
4. Community
5. Jiu Jitsu Works
6. Control
7. Belts don’t matter
8. Actually, they do matter
9. On the Blue Belt Blues
10. Mat Time Matters
11. Safety First
12. The Rule of Opposites

Pressure
Let it work for you. Find stable positions where your opponent is carrying your weight. Don’t let it work against you: build frames. Pressure is like fire: it can work for you, or it can completely smoke you.

Space
Whatever you think “tight” or “no space” means, it’s tighter and is even less space than that. When your instructor tells you to keep your elbows tight, he means keep them so tight you could use the pinch pressure to keep your phone trapped without it dropping. If you’re on bottom, you need to create space. How can you use your biggest muscles (e.g., your legs, your hips, your core) to create space? If you’re getting smashed in bottom side control, how can you create space to build frames to get out of danger?

Time
I’m learning that timing is super critical. I love that Rener Gracie quote: “The right move at the wrong time is the wrong move.” So true. Also, not moving at the right time is the wrong move. The windows of opportunity are fleeting. And also, I’m increasingly seeing that many opportunities are predictable, such that if I attempt X, I’m 99% certain you’ll have to respond by doing Y. So it’s not that I’m reacting to you doing Y quicker than you thought I was, I was expecting you to do Y, I was ready for it. I was hoping you’d do it! The upper belts (anyone better and/or higher ranked than you) are so good at this. If it feels like they’re at least a step or two ahead of you, they are.

Community
All belt promotions are group achievements, all progress is a product of the community. None of us could do jiu jitsu without our training partners. Be grateful for them. Be cool to them. Take care of them and they’ll take care of you. When everyone is looking out for everyone else, it’s good for you, it’s good for your instructor, and it’s good for the gym culture and community.

Jiu Jitsu Works
There’s no shame in tapping to a lower belt who’s using Jiu Jitsu, because Jiu jitsu works, regardless of who is using it. A 12-year old girl can choke you just as unconscious as the instructor if she’s able to lock in a solid, rear-naked choke. You tap to techniques, not to belts, so who’s to say a white belt can’t develop a formidable submission?

Control
Everyone says “position before submission”, and now I know it’s true. Control is everything. The entire point of jiu jitsu is to pit your strength against their weakness to make them do what you want them to do. It may look cool to do some inverted, cartwheel-style pass, but if you don’t have control once you land, you just wasted energy and accomplished nothing.

This attitude towards control is undoubtedly informed by the style of jiu jitsu my instructor teaches, and he teaches a brand of jiu jitsu founded on basic principles: get a takedown, pass guard, establish a controlling position, go for a submission. He’s 155 lbs in a sweaty gi, but he’s a 4th degree black belt, and when he gets to knee-on-belly, you can bet all 155 of those pounds is going to be focused in a 3-inch diameter spot directly on your diaphragm where they’ll feel like 255 lbs. Unreasonably heavy pressure from an otherwise, normally-sized human.

His means of establishing control are all done through heavy pressure, stable positions and posture, and incremental gains, all in service of the inexorable submission.

Belts don’t matter
Belts don’t matter. In one sense, belts are like the colors that make up white light; they’re just part of the spectrum of jiu jitsu. And for most people – especially people that start training in their 20’s or earlier – if they stick with jiu jitsu, they’re going to be black belts longer than every other belt combined. The belt was just a bit of exterior validation for what your coach saw inside of you. If your instructor saw that you met his or her standard for promotion (I heard it described similarly to judging art: you know it when you see it), then they issued it to you because you had shown that you were regularly meeting the standard. Which is to say, you have to possess the skills before you get the belt. When you get that next belt, it’s because you have the skillset commensurate for that belt. Obviously, the belt doesn’t give you skills, but it does give you status. Not necessarily about head-to-head matchups – though they can be a useful guide – but about work ethic and commitment and relative improvement. If you see a purple belt at your gym, it’s a pretty good bet they’ve been training at least 5 years. They’ve put some work in to earn that belt, and that alone is worthy of respect.

Actually, Belts are Important
I just said belts don’t matter, and now I’m saying they do. That’s because both are true. Jiu Jitsu is full of dichotomies.

Belts are important because we want and need status and hierarchy. Can you imagine lining up before class without rank? There wouldn’t be a row of brown belts followed by a row of purple belts followed by a row of blue belts, etc. What would it be? A single column, with the best guy at the front, and then what? Some sort of Darwinian line that forms in behind it every time the group assembles? Would it be a fight every time? It’d be chaos. We need belts so the newly promoted blue belt – who was a white belt last week – can line up with the seasoned blue belts, and the white belts immediately behind him aren’t thinking, “Wait a second… I tapped him out 3 times already this week, why is he up there?” (see above about regularly meeting the standard)

Belts provide structure and order and in doing so, they serve a social, hierarchical purpose.

On the Blue Belt Blues
I kept hearing about the infamous “blue belt blues”, but I never had the blues. Not even once. Was I frustrated? Sure. Exhausted? You betcha. But suffering from the blues? Never. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s how I’m wired.

It could also be how I track my training.

Note that I didn’t say I was tracking my progress. I think the “you know it when you see it” saying applies to progress as well. It’s hard to measure progress, much less track it, so I don’t really try to track progress. Instead, I put in the work and keep track of my training sessions so that I can see – later – that I’ve been putting the work in.

When it happened that I’d roll with an upper belt that made me feel like I didn’t know anything about jiu jitsu, I could look back at my training log and legitimately reason, “I’ve put 300 classes in at this belt, but clearly, it’s not enough. Looks like I need to put another 300 classes in and then re-evaluate.” Keeping track helped me have faith in the process. It gave me daily goals insofar as they helped me track my weekly and monthly goals, which is really what I was paying attention to. How many classes did I train this month versus last month? If I trained for 15 classes in a month, that’s about one class every other day. The monthly goals – somewhere between 10-20 classes per month is normal, but double-digits is the minimum acceptable standard – basically forced me to keep track of my daily work ethic, and long story short, I just strapped in for the process and put the work in. I was so busy committing to the grind that I never really thought much beyond that. There wasn’t any mental ruminating going on where I had time to think about how often I’m getting my ass kicked, and what if I’m too old and too slow to learn jiu jitsu, and so on and so forth. Just put your head down and work and track your inputs.

Mat Time Matters
People sometimes ask how long I’ve been training. The answer could be misleading. I started training April 24, 2019. It took me until July 27, 2021 (825 days later) to log my first 100 classes. But it only took me 290 days to log my next 100 classes, and it only took me 164 days to log my next 100 classes after that. Since May of 2022, I’ve been consistently racking up 100 classes every 160 days or so. So when people ask how long I’ve been training, they think they’re going to hear an answer expressed in years. Instead, I answer in classes. The years don’t tell the story of how often you’re training. Nobody would think I was ready for my black belt if I’d been training once a year for 10 years. Experience is gained on the mat, not on the calendar. Schedule the class on the calendar, experience the class on the mat. It’s the best way to learn. For me, it’s the only way to learn.

Safety First
Hands down, the most important thing to me – nothing else comes close – is being able to train tomorrow. To make sure I can do that, I try to roll smart. I’m not going to make you rip a heel hook to submit me; if you’ve caught my heel, I’ve already lost, so I’m going to tap. I don’t need to add injury to the mix as well. I’ll tap, we’ll reset and then we’ll go again. I’m going to extend that to you as well. If I catch a submission – especially if it’s a submission that could result in injury (e.g., anything with “lock” in the name) – then I’m going to go easy with it. If I can’t do it slowly, with control, I’ll either lose the sub or move to something else. I’m trying to learn, not trying to ‘win’ (and besides, learning is winning)

The rule of opposites
If you’re stuck in a position, try whatever it was you just tried*, and if that doesn’t work, try to think of the opposite and see if you can do that.

*Note: Unless you’re in lockdown, in which case – take it from me – do not keep trying to move up and put cross-face pressure on your opponent. Lockdown is called lockdown for a reason, and it’s possible – maybe even probable – that if you put too much stress on your knee, you can tear or injure your ACL. Not worth it. Better to go the opposite direction: sink back to your opponents hips, keeping your shoulder pressure near their belly button – similar to how you’d work an over/under pass – and once you’re coiled up with pressure on their hips, then you can safely sprawl your leg free without fear of injury. Watch this Lachlan Giles video for additional context.

That lockdown segue is the point of this lesson: If you’re not making progress going east, try going west. This idea exploits the biological fact that your opponent can’t be strong everywhere at once. It they’re strong to the west, they’re almost certainly weak to the east. If their shoulder pressure is heavy, something else must be light. Try it. You can’t do any worse than continuing to be ineffectual with your current plan. Try something else. Try the opposite approach.

I’m calling it the ‘Rule of Opposites’, but it may as well be called “push/pull”; it’s the same idea. You push in one direction so that you can pull in the opposite direction.

It’ll be interesting to see how this post holds up when I finish logging my next 1,000 classes.

I’ll keep y’all posted.

### Note: The original post ended here ###

No sooner had I published this collection of lessons learned than I realized I’d left some important topics off the list. I considered writing a second post, but, nah… it’d be more efficient to have one post than two, and jiu jitsu is all about being efficient.

So to that point, below is some more stuff that I should have mentioned the first time, but didn’t.

Angles & Frames
Two sayings about angles that have stuck with me:

1) “Angles beat frames” (Jordan Teaches Jiu Jitsu)

2) “More angle, more strangle” (my unreasonably lethal instructor referring to, in that particular example, triangle chokes)

Whether it’s beating frames or establishing a better offensive attack, angles are your friend.

I don’t have any clever saying about frames, but I do know that if you don’t make good frames, you’re going to get smashed.

Comparison
On one hand, the saying “Comparison is the thief of joy” is true. On the other hand, how do you know where you stand if you don’t have a reference point? (i.e., some point of comparison)

I think the tension here between “is comparison good” and “is comparison bad” is illustrative of the tightrope we’re always trying to walk in jiu jitsu: lean in too much, you’re going to get swept. Don’t lean in enough, you’re going to get swept the other way. Or your opponent is just going to stand up. Or, some outcome you don’t want is going to happen because you didn’t find the right balance.

And so it is with comparison. We all do it – how can we avoid it? – but typically, we all do it wrong. Typically, we compare ourselves to our training partners and – based on how we perform – reach certain conclusions. “I should have done better”, “He shouldn’t have submitted me”, “I should have submitted him”, “Have I even learned anything about jiu jitsu?” Etc. Etc. I think – and this is just my opinion, but I’m partial to it on account that I’m right – that while these are technically valid comparisons, they aren’t all that useful. The main comparison – the only one that matters, the only one that will ever matter – is are you better now than you were a year ago? That’s it. Don’t compare yourself to yesterday, because you might have had a great day yesterday, and today you’re feeling off. Don’t compare yourself to last week, or even last month. Give it time. Give it a year. Give it a year and then ask yourself if you’re better now than you were a year ago. If you’ve been training consistently, I’m willing to bet that you are.

Consistency
When I first started training jiu jitsu, I was only going one day per week. It was a No Gi class, and since I didn’t have a Gi, that was my opportunity to train. There were some other white belts training at that time, and for a while, I did OK against them. I have a wrestling background, so No Gi wasn’t that foreign to me.

Fast forward about 6-months and those same white belts that I had been doing OK against were smashing me on the regular. It didn’t take long to add it up: they were getting 3-4 classes per week in versus my one class per week. The math wasn’t in my favor, so I bought a Gi and started training more regularly (1-2 classes/week). And then more regularly than that (2-3 classes/week). And then even more regularly than that. And for me – that third increase in frequency, where I was training about 3-4 classes per week, was where I needed to be. I’d found my sweet spot of frequency and consistency. Then it was just a matter of showing up and putting the work in.

The point of this is to say that if you train super hard for 2-3 days a week, but then you have to take a week off because you’re so sore (or worse, injured) from training so hard, you’re not doing yourself any favors. I know everyone is different, but the rule of thumb here seems pretty solid: the more consistently you train, the better you’ll get.

Consistency beats intensity.

Belts
One more thing about belts: Wash your damned belt, you filthy savage.

Which is cooler: Having a sweat-soaked, nasty-ass belt full of stank, or having a fresh belt that’s looking all ragged and worn because you wash it as often as you wear it?

Exactly. Wash it. It’s bad enough to be superstitious, but to be superstitious AND stinky…

Why? There’s a better way to live, y’all. Wash that goddamned belt.