#11 - Are Promotions Too Subjective?

In this episode, we tackle a common debate in the Jiu-Jitsu community: Are promotions too subjective? We break down the topic by categorizing Jiu-Jitsu gyms into two main types: the structured, curriculum-driven "McDojo" gyms and the more hands-on, instructor-led "local" gyms. We explore the pros, cons, and nuances of each system, shedding light on how promotions are assessed in these environments.

Topics Discussed:

1. Defining Gym Types:
   • McDojos: Big franchises like Gracie Barra and Alliance, offering structured curriculums from white belt to brown belt.
   • Local Gyms: Smaller, often family-owned gyms with subjective promotion criteria based on instructor observation.
2. Pros and Cons:
   • McDojos:
     • Structured and systematic for beginners.
     • Clear testing requirements and online learning support.
     • May lack rolling experience for newly promoted students.
   • Local Gyms:
     • Hands-on training and personalized feedback.
     • Creativity and adaptability in training methods.
     • Risk of favoritism and tribalism in promotions.
3. Subjectivity in Promotions:
   • Challenges in local gyms where promotions can depend on loyalty, attendance, or gym politics.
   • The role of technical proficiency versus rolling experience in McDojo systems.
4. Personal Experience:
   • Host shares their journey of being a white belt for seven years, switching gyms, and facing the challenges of subjective promotion systems.
   • Reflections on being overlooked in gyms due to lack of connection or gym politics.
5. Key Takeaways:
   • Belts and promotions don’t define skill or progress; focus on personal growth and skill development.
   • Subjectivity exists in both systems, but the balance between structure and creativity is crucial.
   • Warning signs of overly restrictive or tribal gym cultures and the importance of finding the right fit.

Listener Engagement:

• What’s your take on the subjectivity of promotions?
• Share your experiences with different gym types in the comments!
• Let us know how you think gyms can strike the right balance between structure and flexibility.

Connect With Us:

• Follow the podcast for more discussions on Jiu-Jitsu training, culture, and growth.
• Drop your comments and suggestions for future topics!

Thanks for listening! Peace!

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
So hey guys, today we're going to be talking about whether or not promotions are too subjective.

(00:07):
And really in order to do kind of a deep dive within the short podcast, we have to kind
of split jujitsu gyms into two categories.
And I think there's a there's a lot of gyms that will be branches of these categories.
But from my understanding, or the way that I view them is two main categories, it's kind
of like the McDojo's and meaning like the Gracie Baja's the franchises that are out

(00:33):
there Alliance and checkmate and you know, Gracie Academy, those kind of like big, big,
big, big gyms that have curriculums from day one, every single thing that you're going
to be learning from white belt stripe one, all the way up to like brown belt stripe four,
they know like everything that you're going to be studying.

(00:56):
And it's expected for you to know those things and they test accordingly.
Versus like kind of like the local gyms, where I kind of consider these like kind of more
along the lines of the mom and pop type of gyms, right, where the owner is the one that
owns that gym, and they're pretty much the head instructor for the most part.
And they have more of a hands on feel for the students that are there.

(01:20):
And they're mainly grading or assessing promoting based off of what they see and how and what
they feel when they're rolling or, you know, the recommendations of the guys that they
trust or the ladies that they trust in the gym to promote, you know, the students.
And those are the two categories that I see.

(01:44):
And I think there's pros and cons to both.
For example, I think there are great pros to kind of like the McDojo vibe for introducing
jujitsu to people.
Because when you're introducing jujitsu in a systematic way, especially if you're raised
in any educational type of system, and you're used to like, I don't know, going to college

(02:07):
or having credits, if you will, and you need to take a certain amount of classes in order
to graduate.
And it needs to be in this order x, y, z, like if you go to college, you're like pretty
much your curriculum is already written for you.
And you just need to go and follow and maybe you can pick and choose which classes you
want to take like the type of electives, but it has to be fit within a certain category.

(02:29):
The same can be said with like these McDojos and they're the way that they introduced jujitsu
like they're going to show you certain moves and you have to know a certain percentage
of those moves of those specific moves that they showed you not other moves that you saw
on Instagram or instructionals or things like that.
No, you need to know the moves that they taught you in order for you to move on to the next
level.

(02:49):
And so if you're a beginner, that's really nice because you don't have you don't really
know anything about jujitsu.
So it's like to do research, you might be watching something online that's like terrible.
It's bad jujitsu.
It doesn't work.
It's dangerous.
It's unsafe, right?
You don't know that because you don't have any experience.
It just looks like, oh, wow, that's maybe something that I can do.
Whereas like if you're at the McDojo and they're telling you exactly what you need to learn,

(03:13):
then it's kind of like the effort like, oh, I don't need to worry about that.
They have their own online learning platform.
I can just watch the videos online and learn, reinforce my learning of what I just learned
in class.
That's amazing, right?
I can actually continue to grow in that way.
And for me, that's how I was introduced to jujitsu versus kind of like a meathead approach.

(03:36):
Not all local gyms are like this and I think a lot are starting to evolve and starting
to grow as they become more and more business savvy in terms of customer retention, keeping
the students, right?
The retention rates are very important for gyms, especially amongst white belts and blue
belts.
So a lot of it, but traditionally what will happen in jujitsu is somebody comes into the

(03:59):
gym, they get thrown in part of the class, they're the trial guy, they learn to move
and they roll with everybody else.
Maybe some schools might, you know, you sit out a week or you sit out a couple of your
first classes and you observe.
But you know, for the most part, that person gets beat up.
And I think it takes a very specific type of person to walk into an ass whooping and

(04:27):
be okay with it and want to learn and want to get better.
I don't know if that's necessarily the majority of people that will be okay with that.
They might get beat up too badly and be in too much pain the next day.
Maybe they're like, you know, they might have got choked out and so their neck is sore and
they're uncomfortable with that feeling and they don't know what happened.

(04:48):
Right.
And so they're just like maybe a little bit less likely to come back.
Whereas with the mcdojo approach, you're not getting choked out, you're not getting beat
up, right?
You're practicing technical things and they're going to introduce those techniques in a safe
way to you.
So as you progress, you might not even roll for six months, you might not roll for a year
at some gyms, right?

(05:08):
And then you're going to start rolling after you show the proficiency of the moves that
they showed you and that you understand those moves.
But you might get a blue belt and you know, this is the negative side of things.
They might give that individual blue belt, but they never really rolled.
So then when you match them up with a blue belt, yeah, sure, they know the technical

(05:29):
things, but they're not accounting for the speed, the aggression, right?
They're not accounting for strength.
They're not accounting for any of that.
They're not accounting for the savvy that the local gym blue belts will have, right?
Because they're going to have all of that because they've been rolling since day one.
And there's no way that you can not roll for a year and just learn technique and not apply

(05:51):
in a realistic type of situation like a roll.
And then a year later, you learned all that technique, but never really put it together
and then roll against a blue belt that's from day one only been putting things together.
You're going to have a really, really, really, really rude awakening.
That blue belt is going to probably mop the floor with the local gym blue belt.

(06:12):
It's going to probably mop the floor with the McDoja blue belt.
So that's why they actually created additional belts, like as a way, kind of like a fifth
stripe, but it's basically a belt with the stripe in the middle.
I know the Gracie academies do that as a way to not necessarily give you a blue belt, but
say, all right, you're technically proficient and now you need to start putting your stuff

(06:33):
together in order to be on level of a blue belt.
And I think that's a really smart thing that they actually started to do.
Now the problem where it starts to get kind of tricky because the McDojos, they have everything
kind of organized and systematized.
So it's not really subjective.
There's no personal opinion on whether or not they think that you're ready or not.

(06:56):
Either you can do the moves or you can't do the moves.
Now if your personality sucks and the owner doesn't want to promote you and they don't
want you in their gym, that's completely different.
We're going to kind of keep that aside a little bit for now because I think both the McDojos
and the local gyms, as the owners of businesses, they have every right to not promote you because
your personality sucks and they don't want somebody to have a brown belt and their morals

(07:20):
are off and they talk downly or poorly to women or whatever the case may be.
Like absolutely, they have a business to run at the end of the day.
Now that aside, when we're talking about just loyalty, things of that nature, like whether
or not you've been at the gym long enough to get a belt, that's where it becomes extremely

(07:41):
subjective and even maybe sometimes even the McDojos might be a little bit guilty, but
since they actually test and some of them you have to pay for a test, you can pretty
much like opt to pay for those tests and get your belt, right?
If you can perform the moves.
From my understanding, that's how I understand it.
That's what I see.
I know BJJ Globetrotters, they do like Jiu-Jitsu camps.

(08:03):
You can go around and you can actually test at those camps and get belted on the spot.
They don't care about anything besides your skill.
Now local gyms is more personable because again, the owner is the head instructor usually
and if they don't know you, they want to see.
Some are very, very tribal.
They want super loyalty.

(08:25):
They don't want you to compete with it.
They don't even want you to go to other open mats at other schools.
They don't want you to do cross training at all.
Red flags by the way, if that happens, you just get out of there.
Just get out of there.
Just waste your time.
They become really subjective.
In my experience of being a white belt for seven years, I think I went to nine gyms.

(08:46):
Over that time, obviously earlier on, a year or two in, I'm really competitive with the
blue belts.
Yet, still, I wasn't getting a promotion.
I would join and maybe two months later, they would have promotions to promote people to
blue belts or whatever.
They would look at me and be like, not yet, Davey.

(09:07):
You just haven't been here long enough.
We'll get you in the spring if it was winter.
We'll get you in the spring.
But then something would happen.
I lived in Asia.
So I would travel.
I would move around.
So I would be bouncing from gym to gym and I wouldn't be there for the next promotion.
I'll be at a different gym and then pretty much a similar thing would happen.
Oh, the next promotion, we got you.
Oh, the next promotion.
To the point where I just kind of like whatever.

(09:28):
I don't care.
We're just going to see skill level on the mat.
I'm going to get better.
I don't care if my belt is white.
But if I'm competitive with brown belts, purple belts, then I'm happy.
Like if I'm eventually going to be competitive with black belts, I'm going to be happy about
that.
I just got to increase my skill level.
That was my mindset because I realized that it is subjective.
You can't make anybody happy.

(09:49):
The belts are going to either come or they're not going to come.
At the end of the day, they don't really matter.
If you have that mindset, like we talked about it in the other video, it doesn't really matter
at the end of the day.
It does absolutely nothing for my jujitsu.
It's more of like a marketing tactic for businesses, jujitsu businesses.
It's a really, really good one.
Yes, it's nice to be accomplished, but it's very, very subjective.

(10:12):
You can't say like, oh, I deserve this belt because I beat those blue belts.
I beat those purple belts, so therefore I'm a purple belt.
Well, to some people, yes.
When you go and compete and you win gold, like all right, now it's time for you to move
on to the next level.
Whereas maybe you're not technically proficient in certain people, in certain cultures' eyes.

(10:34):
No, you need to understand jujitsu.
You need to be able to teach jujitsu.
You need to be able to explain the concepts much better.
Maybe you're a D1 wrestler and you come in and you're just mopping the floor with blue
belts and purple belts, but you don't know any submissions.
You're not good off your back.
You don't have any guard.
How can somebody give you a purple belt if you don't have a guard in jujitsu?

(10:58):
So there are certain things that doesn't really line up, but you can go into tournaments and
become gold, like you win gold for doing those things.
So it's super, super, super subjective.
And whatever side that you stand on, just know that if you're standing solidly, on solid
ground on one side, you're wrong because there's a hush-posh of things that are going on right

(11:21):
now.
There's definitely a mixture.
But a 100% McDojo is not the way to go because a lot of those students are going to be, in
my opinion, a little bit robotic.
They're going to be doing a lot of the same moves, a lot of the same things.
That's kind of boring.
In my opinion, there's a little bit of a lack of creativity, whereas you have your 10th

(11:43):
planets.
Even they have warm-ups, but it's different.
They don't have a system that you do this, this, that, and that you have cards and you
come in.
I don't really consider them as McDojos.
I kind of consider them as a big local gym, if you will.
But yeah, you have those situations in which you're much more creative in the local gyms

(12:05):
or even 10th planet.
You're much more creative because you're not stuck to this curriculum.
And Jujitsu is able to explode because of that creativity.
And you're able to find new positions and learn a lot from that.
And it's a lot more fun when you're able to do something that you've never seen before,
somebody else never seen before, and you're able to share that and grow the community.

(12:28):
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
But again, you could be doing that and not being viewed on it, or maybe you're just really
quiet and you get overlooked at some of the gyms because you don't have the personality
or you don't fit in in the cliques that are at some of these local gyms.
So then you get overlooked.
I mean, I was at one gym for a year and the instructor didn't even know my name.

(12:53):
The owner of the gym didn't even know my name.
After a year, he was like, hey, what's your name again?
I was like, oh, wow, he doesn't know my name.
And I'm very competitive in roles, and yet you don't know my name.
Obviously, I left that gym because I was like, that's wild.
I'm paying you money every single month.

(13:13):
You don't want to take the time to even know who I am.
So it's not about the belt to me.
That's not about the belt because I was still a white belt at the time.
It wasn't about that.
It was just more about the like, how do you not know my name at least?
But yeah, so I would love to hear what you guys think about this subject.
There's like a whole bunch of things that we could say more, but this is getting a little

(13:36):
bit long, longer than I wanted.
So I'll see you guys.
Let me know in the comments.
Peace.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai