Popular business coach and mentor Derek Moneyberg has now been promoted to BJJ black belt just three and a half years after he first started training in the sport. Like many celebrity BJJ practitioners, he has been training in privates with elite coaches and competitors rather than just attending regular classes with the general public. According to Moneyberg, he spent around 3,000 hours of his time in 1-on-1 training sessions during that period. He also claimed that he has not missed any days of training during that time, which works out to be a little over two hours on the mats every single day.
Obviously taking three and a half years to reach black belt is well above the average time for practitioners around the world. It’s often cited to be around 10 years and statistics gathered by Beltchecker from thousands of black belts put the average at just over 12 years. As with anything, there will always be outliers of course. There have been several people over the years who have either the physical or mental aptitude to excel in the sport very quickly, combined with an incredible dedication to improvement. Still, even those who reached the rank faster than anyone else in the world all took around three years to do so.
This puts Derek Moneyberg in line some of the greatest BJJ black belt competitors ever, like BJ Penn and Caio Terra. It’s incredibly rare for anyone to reach the rank in that kind of timeframe and obviously surprising to see that Moneyberg has done so. It’s not entirely clear who actually promoted Moneyberg but his social media post celebrating the promotion includes MMA veterans Frank Mir, Jake Shields, Glover Teixeira, and Lyoto Machida. Although he wasn’t present in the picture itself, Moneyberg did also mention that Royce Gracie ‘said I did the work of ten years in three and a half’.
Derek Moneyberg announced the news that he had been promoted to black belt in just three and a half years in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
This quick promotion has attracted criticism from several members of both the BJJ and MMA communities, and not just because it goes against the IBJJF bare minimum time requirements of 4 years from white to black for anyone who is not a world champion. Perhaps the most high-profile figure to share their criticism publicly was legendary competitor Vinny Magalhaes:
