First week of training

What is this tab on your Jiu Jitsu belt?

As we are getting closer to graduation, students that are not getting promoted to the next belt will likely to receive stripes instead. If you do not have a black tab on your belt, we cannot give you stripes. Why do we have stripes? The Gracies decided to have a stripes system in order to be different from Judo. As it takes 1-3 years between belts, it is nice to receive stripes once in a while. How often do we give stripes? It is usually done during graduation which is usually held twice a year (August and December). What if you miss the graduation event? No worries, we will give them during the following classes. How many stripes can I get? You can get up to 4 stripes. Is there a minimum number of stripes in order to get the next belt? No, in fact some schools do not bother with stripes. You can move to the next belt even if you do not have any stripes. What is the red tab for? It is for the instructors. A blue

The curse of the blue belt

I will teach you a black belt magic trick in Jiu Jitsu. If you want a student to disappear: give him a blue belt. It is recurring event in the life of an instructor and a club. If you think the drop out of white belts is bad enough, the ratio of drop out of the blue belts is worst. I am not sure if I agree with statistics on this picture. But the issue is not really about arguing about the percentages of drop out but more on discussing the reasons for such drop out and what we can do to prevent it. Reasons for the drop out: It takes a long time to achieve a blue belt. It average between 1-3 years. After 1-3 years of training, people loose interest and wants to start a new sport or hobby. The goal of the student was to achieve the blue belt and not the black belt. Personal situations changes over the years. Lot of people that start training are young single males with disposable income. Lot of them are at university level or are single. Add a few more years and they

Auckland BJJ Police Training

On the 17th of January we had our second Police training session at Auckland BJJ. Several of our members are police officers and they had asked if they can use the Dojo to do some training and practice off duty. We were happy to help and Stu and Jora helped out organizing the training. We covered a few techniques that we thought would help these officers, and then we did some sparing sessions where they could apply these techniques. Below is a video of one of our arrest the black belt sessions :-) Auckland BJJ is happy to help the NZ police. Here is a gratuitous shot of my daughter and a police car.

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