Many BJJ beginners don’t see much difference between brown and black belts. They’re both years away and the lines seem to blur between those two distinct belts. But of course, there’s a huge difference between black and brown belts in BJJ.
While the brown belt in BJJ is all about thinking conceptually, learning to plug the holes in their techniques and setting traps, the black belt is more about reflection and focusing on the big picture. Black belts also go into teaching and passing their knowledge and skill to the next generation.
As you progress on your BJJ journey, you’ll find out that the path isn’t linear and getting a promotion isn’t just about piling up knowledge and skill. BJJ is a way of life. At its heart, its core values guide you throughout your entire life. So it’s important to know how each belt marks a new milestone in one’s life.
Brown Belt
The brown belt is someone who’s been in the game for many many years. The got the basics down well and they have lots and lots of knowledge. They know many offense and defense techniques and they know how to get themselves out of a tight spot. There’s nothing new to them in the general sense of the sport.
Too much Information
A brown belt is someone who’s been through a lot of competitions. They have a lot of skill and their game is really good. But, among all the good techniques, they still have loads of unuseful fluff cluttering their mind and cramping their style in more ways than one. As you make your way from a white belt up, you tend to learn a lot of things along the way. However not all those things you learn are good or work in your favor.
After a while, that extra knowledge comes in the way. You find yourself in a tough situation, you know how to get out of it, you can see your way, but then you can’t execute the maneuver the way you’d imagined it. Why? Because you still have a lot of baggage. Small pieces of information that prevent you from honing your style. Like bugs in the code, they have to be eliminated and fixed.
Conceptual Thinking
Then you need to work on your conceptual thinking. That’s an important part of the discipline. It’s one thing to know all the details, but you have to take a step back and look at the technique or position from a new angle. You’re no longer absorbing information that your mentor is passing down to you. You’re processing that data, analyzing it, crunching the numbers, looking for flaws or ways to improve the technique.
That’s what we mean by conceptual thinking. Instead of taking the information at face value, critical thinking steps in and cuts through the noise to get to the core of the technique. At some point in their development from a learner to an evaluator, the brown belt decides to have an opinion about everything they have learned so far.
This is how you develop your own style. You no longer follow the same steps that you have been doing for years when facing an opponent on the mat. You start to go through each movement and decide for yourself whether this step could be improved on. Whether instead of reaching for the opponent’s wrist, it might be better to grab their thigh instead.
Experiment, Distill, Improve
In a way, the brown belt is distilling the information they got from their teachers, the skills they learned along the way. This is important for them to get rid of all the garbage information that keeps them from reaching the heights they hope to achieve.
You might say that the brown belt starts to come into their own at that moment. They still accept feedback and criticism from the instructor and other players. But mainly, most of the work is internal. They look for weaknesses in their game and try to improve them. In a way this internalization is an important step towards the ultimate goal of earning the black belt.
Some brown belts take a break here. They might devote their time to teaching or they might just go away for a while. This too is important for their development. You need to take time off to digest all the information you have and process it all. Time off helps them lose the fluff and what remains is the good data.
Black Belt
Reaching this stage in their progress isn’t the end of the road for black belts. Just because you have the black sash around your waist, doesn’t mean you stop learning or improving. If anything, it’s quite the opposite. Learning never stops and black belts remain students of the game and discipline.
Comprehensive Learning
It’s one thing to learn the inside out of every technique and its many variations, and it’s a totally different thing to look at the situation from both sides. The two sides of the coin is the kind of thinking that a player who has been in the game for many years can achieve.
Newton taught us that for every action there’s a reaction. The black belt is not only focussed on the action, but also the reaction. If I pass the guard to my left, what’s the opponent’s move or moves? And what if I decided to pass it to the right instead? Will that confuse them? Is the rival reading me like an open book? Should I mix my game a little? Or a lot?
This is the black belt’s thought process. And it doesn’t just happen on the mat. They think about BJJ all the time. Some even dream about it. That’s normal. Because so much commitment and dedication to the sport is the only way one can get the black belt. It’s a continuous process that never ends.
This dual thinking allows you to anticipate the opponent’s next move. Instead of being surprised by something you didn’t expect, you’re ready for the opponent and you have a ready answer for that. Compare that to doing the same thing over and over. When confronted with a novel approach you lose your edge and go on the defensive.
Keep Plugging Holes
Since the learning doesn’t stop, so the uncovering of weaknesses in your game. The more you learn, the more convinced you become that you’re not perfect. Your game is far off from the summits you hope to achieve. You’re still far away from where you want to be.
So with new learning, the black belt discovers they’re still carrying baggage from their novice days. Things they have learned and they need to unlearn. Even after all these years, misinformation still lingers in the mind of the black belt and throw a wrench in the process. It’s unavoidable and you’d be surprised to know how many black belts still cling to concepts that they learned years ago.
This is why some black belts like to train against players of lesser experience. And they put themselves at a disadvantage as well. Why? So that hey can audit all the information they have learned and weed out the bad and useless one.
Someone once said that the best way to learn more about our beliefs is by explaining them to a child. The same concept applies to BJJ. Only instead of explaining the technique, the black belt tries to practice it in every variation possible. That’s when they get deep insights into the technique and learn the flaws as well as the strengths of each one.
Cover All your Bases
The idea here is that the more you know the better prepared you are for the unpredictable. And if there’s one thing sure on the mat, it’s how unpredictable your opponent can be. Maybe they discovered an old variation and would like to try it on you. If you’re not prepared, you might as well forfeit the match.
This is why the black belt strives to learn about all the techniques and positions even those they don’t usually use. Not only that makes them well rounded players, but also prepares them for their role as teachers.
Imagine it’s your first day in your new role as a teacher or instructor at the academy and the first student asks you about a certain technique that you have never tried. You won’t look very much like a competent teacher if you brushed the question under the carpet or ignored it. You need to learn about all the techniques out there.
Even though both brown and black belts have immense levels of experience and knowledge under their belt, the differences between the two levels couldn’t be broader. While one of them is trying to sift through the piles of useless knowledge and understand their game better, the black belt is all about getting the big picture and going out of their way to learn more about the less known techniques.