Pressure on higher belts to perform well in training

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I've been training bjj for around 1.5 years and for most of this time thought I'd be cool to progress to a blue belt. I noticed recently that when new people come to the gym that are athletic and aggressive in rolling, I find myself almost under pressure to perform well against them, as I figure if I trained longer, my instructor's expectation would be for me to perform and apply techniques better. It then got me thinking that this would be further amplified if I actually had a blue belt. So this kind of led me to a conclusion that white belt is actually a pretty good place to be. You know that you know some stuff and can even (sometimes) apply it, but the pressure to do so isn't that great.

Has anyone else gone through a similar thought process? Anyone ever feel the pressure to perform well against lower belts or ppl with less experience in front of their instructors?
 
Meh. It's training. I don't really care. If my instructor has a problem with my skill level...well, he has a problem with my application of the skills I have. What's the worst he can do, say "I'll never promote you."?

Okay. That's cool, bro. I don't like the color purple anyways.

Maybe he'll start feeding me to the wolves every training? Well, I'll just get better quicker. So it wouldn't bother me either.

Just grapple. Don't worry about what's around your waist. Don't worry about how you perform against others in the gym. Just worry about how you perform against the you from yesterday.
 
Occasionally I'll put it on the blues and purples just so they remember what's what. Even experienced people can fail to recognize when you're letting you work.
 
It's that pressure to perform that makes me better. To work harder in drills and not skip rolls. To know I won't lose to lower belts, keep winning tournaments and to be my best self when new training partners from other gyms show up
 
its good and bad, dont forget to drop the ego and try some crazy shit without caring about getting tapped too.
 
Im a blue and once in a while a white belt who does mostly no-gi or a wrestler comes in and dominates me, it may be embarrassing at the time, but ultimately it just makes me want to get better.
 
my instructor knows I am a lost cause. He leaves me alone. My advice to you is: Make people have no expectations of you.

My family used to rely on me for all sorts of things, but then I lowered their expectations and now they don't bother me with requests. Basically if I am wearing pants it is a good day for them.

You can't feel pressure if there is none to give.
 
Gentle Giant said:
my instructor knows I am a lost cause. He leaves me alone. My advice to you is: Make people have no expectations of you.

My family used to rely on me for all sorts of things, but then I lowered their expectations and now they don't bother me with requests. Basically if I am wearing pants it is a good day for them.

You can't feel pressure if there is none to give.
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I cant tell if this is horrible advice or great advice
 
I used to.. well I still do to a certain degree. It's all ego driven. We all try to leave the ego at the door but I now think that retaining a bit of ego is what drives us to improve... Maybe pride is a better word.

I'm too old to worry about it now. I've accepted that I'll never be a world champion or even probably a local champion. I now compete for the training camp. How I feel I perform now goes beyond wins and losses.

The biggest thing I've re-implemented in the last few months have been to have fun and, rolling wise, to put myself in positions to execute the technique I drilled on the day. Too many times, I've seen rolling revert to a wins and losses thing and when that happens, we close up and go revert back to form, which I feel stunts development.

Apologies for the rant/random train of thought
 
I don't know. I don't usually worry about this because the people with lower belts are generally not as good as me. That's why they have lower belts. Sure, occasionally you get the outlier whose experience in another grappling art makes them seem underbelted in BJJ, but everyone generally knows who those guys are and so they adjust expectations accordingly
 
It's definitely there. I'm the highest ranked competitor at my school, and if a new guy comes in I'm the first to roll with him and if he's also ranked purple or above it's expected that I'll put it on him pretty good (not hurt him, just dominate). With guys in the gym, it's not as big of a deal. We have some really huge, athletic, and hard working blue belts who can give me a hard time, it is what it is. As you get higher ranked the differences between skill level at various belts shrinks, so you will get tapped more by lower belts. Even though I'm a new brown belt I've already been tapped more in the gym by purple belts than I ever got tapped by blues as a purple.
 
fanboysareevil said:
I don't know. I don't usually worry about this because the people with lower belts are generally not as good as me. That's why they have lower belts. Sure, occasionally you get the outlier whose experience in another grappling art makes them seem underbelted in BJJ, but everyone generally knows who those guys are and so they adjust expectations accordingly
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UFC 1-2 didn't settle shit, bro. BJJ is on trial every time you roll with a Judoka or Wrestler ;)

Honor demands blood!
 
Uchi Mata said:
As you get higher ranked the differences between skill level at various belts shrinks, so you will get tapped more by lower belts. Even though I'm a new brown belt I've already been tapped more in the gym by purple belts than I ever got tapped by blues as a purple.
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Very true. A good purple and brown aren't very different.

At some point the belts also have meaning besides just effectiveness on the mat. There are black belts that I absolutely crush, they're still legitimate black belts and, frankly, my ever advancing beyond my current brown is not particularly justified in my mind stylistically or based on grappling knowledge (I'm just really, really good at a really, really small number of things. And stupid strong. And tough. And fat.).
 
The farther I get in this journey the less I worry about such things. The journey is entirely personal and the day in and day out competition is about my improvement not how I measure up to other belts.

The exception? Competition and competition class. No respite.
 
It's normal and it's not really good or bad as long as it doesn't consume you. I sucked for a long time and then I had a breakthrough but the owner of our school stopped coming by as much due to another job, and I'd always get nervous when he'd teach because he was in so rarely, and I wanted him to see that I'd gotten better. it had the opposite effect and I'd get way too in my head. Eventually I had a good day when he was there and it went away. But yeah, if you're pressuring yourself to where you can't perform, that's good. But if you are using it as a drive to train hard and perform well then I think it's fine. Obviously if you're a normal person you're going to get swept/passed/tapped by people less experienced than you some of the time.

I really agree with Uchi Mata's post. The one thing that's important is that you're enjoying your training and not letting stuff like this keep you off the mat. I've known people that were too nervous to come to class because of guard pass/king of the hill type drills. That's obviously not good.
 
In my opinion, i think it is pretty common at a good club for the lower belts to smash the upper belts.
 
OldManbjj said:
In my opinion, i think it is pretty common at a good club for the lower belts to smash the upper belts.
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I don't know about smashed (how good of a club can it be if blue belts are smashing browns? What the have the brown belts learned in the intermediate years?), but if your club is solid you will get tapped from time to time. I got tapped by a big competitive blue belt the day I got my brown, just because he has a good closed guard and nice transition from pendulum sweep to arm bar. I'd only get pissed if he'd tapped me with something stupid, but that sequence of moves he executes at a high level. Can't get mad about that, other than maybe allowing him to get to closed guard in the first place.
 
Uchi Mata said:
I don't know about smashed (how good of a club can it be if blue belts are smashing browns? What the have the brown belts learned in the intermediate years?), but if your club is solid you will get tapped from time to time. I got tapped by a big competitive blue belt the day I got my brown, just because he has a good closed guard and nice transition from pendulum sweep to arm bar. I'd only get pissed if he'd tapped me with something stupid, but that sequence of moves he executes at a high level. Can't get mad about that, other than maybe allowing him to get to closed guard in the first place.
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Totally agree... it will happen to everyone sooner or later no matter what the rank. Just the other day I caught a 3 stripe brown in a triangle/arm bar combo and he tapped. I didn't think anymore about it than he did. We bumped fists and started over and I'm a 3 stripe blue
 
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