The color purple is associated with joy and uplifting thoughts and experiences in life. You paint your living room purple because you’re on cloud nine and bouncy happiness is dancing around you every step you take. But in BJJ, the color purple is a whole different new game. It’s the color of momentum, movement, and adequate takedowns.
This explains why it is one of the hardest belts to achieve. It takes a blue belt anything from 2 to 3 years to achieve the purple belt. As for a BJJ novice still in the first stages of the journey, they’ll have to work tirelessly for up to 5 years to get to the purple color. It’s a coming of age sort of stage in your BJJ development. Which explains why it takes so long to get there.
If the white belt was about getting the basics down and blue was about mastering the defense and offense techniques, purple is all about laying the BJJ foundations as a way of life and coming into your own. But what does it really mean to have a purple belt in BJJ and how good is the belt both in the sport and in life in general?
How Good is the Purple Belt in BJJ?
First things first. What is the significance of having a purple belt in BJJ? Is it just another high ranking color that makes you feel superior to white and blue belts? Far from it. If anything it’s the other way round. The purple belt practitioner is full of humility. He or she understands that they’re half way through their BJJ journey and there’s still so much to learn.
So they’re less prone to show off or let the spirit of competition and ego blind them to the fact that the path is still long and fraught with hardships. They have learned a lot and got many techniques down to an art over the past few years making their way from white to blue belts. But there’s still more to work on, a lot to explore, and many holes in their techniques and style to plug.
This explains why the BJJ belt ranking system has laid down a rule for the minimum age for a person to achieve the purple belt. It’s 16 in theory. But in practice, many people manage this elusive belt late in their 20s and early 30s at least. And while age should not come in your way since BJJ is a sport for all ages, still a level of maturity is often a prerequisite for getting to the purple level.
What this means in practical terms is that if a white belt goes up against a purple belt, they absolutely have no chance of scoring a win. A purple belt has a solid game and as for grappling, they got this down too. In a one on one game between a purple belt and blue belt, the purple has the upper hand since they can find chinks in the blue armor rather quickly and explore them to their advantage.
The bottom line is, the ranking system is not just a meaningless set of rules that reward colorful belts to practitioners at random. Every belt builds on the foundations laid out painstakingly by the earlier stages. It takes years and a lot of blood and sweat both on and off the mat to move up the ranks in BJJ.
Purple is Movement and Momentum
As a middle stage between white and black, purple is the type of level that gets you searching your soul more. Don’t get me wrong. You still need to learn new techniques, hone your skills, and find flaws in your style to improve and work on. But mostly you’d be thinking about what BJJ means to you and how it has changed the way you look at life and those around you.
To use an analogy from the life of birds, the white belt is you trying to gain strength and learn as much about the basics hoping to grow feathers quickly. The blue belt is you learning the basics of flying. You fumble and fall many times as you try to spread your wings and fly without crashing in the trees and hurdles around you. As for purple it’s your soaring to the skies and getting a look at the big picture for the first time.
By the time you’ve got your purple you have already learned the basic and advanced positions such as
- Full guard.
- Half guard.
- Mount.
- Side control.
- Knee mount.
- Back control.
- Butterfly guard.
- De La Riva.
- North-south.
- Spider guard.
- Lasso guard.
With so many techniques under your belt, you feel confident you can escape any bad position you find yourself in and you have proved your mettle on the mat and in tournaments many times over. But now it’s time you’ve learned about the power of momentum. Both movement and momentum play a major role in winning.
While BJJ is a self-defense system at its heart, you still need to get your offense game up to speed to be the all round practitioner you hope to be. You’ll be using your body weight to control your opponent and gain momentum. Your movement becomes more fluid and most of the time, your instincts kick in even without your conscious mind taking part.
This comes from long hours of practice and gaining a lot of experience taking part in competitions. You learn to become one with your body. Escapes are achieved easily and pinning down the rival on the mat becomes an art in itself rather than a technique you execute blindly.
What does a Purple Belt Mean Skill-wise?
This is all fine and dandy, I hear you thinking, but what does it mean to have a purple belt in BJJ? What skills will I learn and how are the techniques I master a purple belt different from those I learn as both a white and blue belt? These are all valid questions and I’m only too happy to venture a reply.
One of the first things you will learn is to bolster your submissions portfolio. You already know the basics of triangles, chokes, armbars, and key locks. But now it’s time you soar over the basics and add a few more techniques. Guillotines and rear chokes are worthy of exploring more to find the nuances that improve your mastery. Then there’s the anacondas, joint locks, and d’arce to name but a few. The more techniques you master the easier it gets to win competitions.
Does this mean that a lower level cannot submit you? Well, no, they cannot. No matter how many stripes a blue belt has, with your amount of experience you should be able to read your rival’s weaknesses and exploit them. So what if you get submitted by a lower level? It either means you’re not training as you should or that the opponent isn’t really a blue or white belt at all.
The purple belt teaches you to lose your tension and learn to be fluid. You don’t use guard pulling to get a takedown. Instead, you have learned other ways to take the player to the ground using your body weight and momentum. It’s not about muscle or strength alone. It’s more about being in the zone so to speak. A blend of experience, skill, and unique style all take over and create an opening for you to take down the opponent and achieve a win.
Why does it Take so Long to Get the Purple Belt?
As you can imagine, it’s not easy to reach that state of BJJ nirvana. Here your body and mind work in tandem. You don’t even have to think to get the technique right. It’s not your muscle, it’s your muscle memory that guides your movement on the mat.
And it takes many hours to get there. Technical knowledge alone isn’t enough. You can watch others practice all day long but unless you get on the mat you won’t learn what it means to be a true BJJ player. So it’s all about training and competing. How much training you need to put in on a weekly basis is up to you. But the more classes you attend the better.
This is why some BJJ practitioners take less time to rank up than others. It’s not just that they have the right attitude and aptitude for the sport, they also put in more hours and effort than the average person. And of course it helps if they have previous experience in grappling.
Grappling is at the core of BJJ. If you happen to come to the sport without any experience in grappling, then you’ll be needing more time to get to the next rank. So if you want to get to the purple color without delay, be prepared to train 3 to 4 times a week, and breathe, eat, and live BJJ. In the immortal words of the Mandalorian, “This is the way!”