We’ve all been there. It’s your first day of training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and you need to tie your belt. You look around and if you’re lucky enough, a senior belt helps you. If this doesn’t happen, then you can chance it and try it yourself.
There is a problem with this though, it may look awful and not function correctly. Don’t worry, here’s a guide on how tying your belt in BJJ. The good news is that after a while, you’ll do it naturally. As well, no one really cares even if it is tied incorrectly.
Table of Contents
How to tie your BJJ belt
Firstly, there’s a number of methods to tie your belt and some of them are quite fancy with equally unusual names. Instead of running through all these ways, we’re just going to show the most basic and common way to tie your belt. Ultimately, it just needs to tie and it’s not worth confusing yourself by reading thousands of ways on how to tie it.
For this method, we have chosen the example below.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of how to tie your belt. Whilst visual demonstrations work for some people, sometimes written instructions are equally as effective when trying to learn.
- Put both ends of the belt behind your back and try to get the middle of the belt touching the center of your chest.
- Tie the belt around your body twice so there are two layers of belt touching each other.
- Bring one end of the belt and thread it to the top, so it’s pointing upwards. With the other side of the belt, do the opposite. This will begin to form the knot.
- Take the top end which is pointing up, and thread this through the bottom layer. Make sure this part of the belt is still loose at the top as this will be needed later.
- Whilst this is in place, then take the bottom tail and wrap it through the hole of the top tail. Both ends of the belt should now be wrapped around each other and facing the floor.
- At this point, the belt should be loose. Give each end of the belt a stiff pull and it should now fall into place.
- To finish with, you should have a tight knot in the midlde with both parts of the belt facing down towards the floor.
Problems when a belt comes loose
Aside from looking messy, a loose belt does actually have practical issues that can cause problems further down the line whilst sparring. For example, imagine you’re competing against a lapel player. If your belt is loose, to begin with, this could potentially lose you the match.
This may sound extreme, but if you start with an incredibly tight belt then it only advantages you. Although many people don’t play a lapel-based game, they are becoming more common so it’s something to be wary of.
On a similar note, if your belt comes off and everything seems messy in a competition, you may be given time to tie it back on. If you take too long during this process, you could potentially get penalized by the ref with a disadvantage given. Having said this, in the gym it’s not a big deal.
Why do so many BJJ beginners wear high belts?
Whilst on the subject of tying your BJJ belt, there is one phenomenon that has gone on in the community for years. This is when a white belt wears their belt incredibly high. For some reason, this seems to happen a lot but is harmless enough. Other white belt problems include having a belt where the ends stick upwards, which seems hard to do even if you tried this on purpose.
Nonetheless, it goes on. In short, white belts seem to have a hard time when dealing with belts. However, at some point they mysteriously learn and like their Jiu Jitsu, everything seems to come together at once.
Things to note when buying a belt
When training, most people will be given a free white belt when they sign up at a gym. In fact, many gis come with a free white belt which is handy for beginners. Usually, after this people are awarded belts by their teacher who gives them out for free during promotions.
Sometimes though, people will be given a belt which is too long, or too short. Ultimately, this depends on your size and weight. For instance, an A2 may be too small for a big guy, whereas an A4 belt may be too big for a small person.
In some instances if this happens, you can always buy a new one. Thankfully, BJJ belts are fairly cheap in the big scheme of things. Seeing as you’ll usually be at your belt rank for at least a couple of years, it’s not exactly a big purchase either.
Hygiene is more important than image
As we’ve established, most belt issues in BJJ aren’t major. However, some people don’t really wash their belts which is where bacteria can easily gather and lead to infections such as ring worm. Obviously, this is gross and can stop people from training which is problematic.
To counter this, try to wash your belt as regularly as possible after training. Too often, people avoid doing this out of laziness or superstition. Really though, you should be washing your belt often. Although it may not get as dirty as your gi, it still holds dirt which is bad for you and your training partners. Really, washing it is respectful towards them as much as anything.
Does it matter?
To be completely honest, no one really cares about how a belt looks and if they do, then they shouldn’t. So long as it does its job, then it doesn’t matter how a belt is tied or what way it looks. Luckily, most BJJ practitioners aren’t bothered about how a belt looks either and just want to train.
In fact, in some very rare cases you can bump into higher belts who literally never learned how to tie their belts properly. Whilst this is uncommon, it’s still pretty cool to see and these people can still be savages on the mat. Overall, you may want to spend 5 minutes here and there trying to tie your belt correctly. However, in the big scheme of things it doesn’t matter.
