New statistics have just been revealed by popular BJJ site Beltchecker, demonstrating the average age for every BJJ belt promotion all the way up to black belt. The site offers a way for practitioners to register their promotions and get them confirmed by their training partners and coaches who are also registered. The idea was to offer a way to verify their rank and to be able to check the rank of other people, and it’s become pretty popular in the years since its inception. Beltchecker now has over 37,000 registered users and between them, over 60,000 verified belt promotions across all levels.
That amount of people will obviously produce a ton of data and this isn’t the first time that the site has managed to put out some interesting statistics. They were previously able to pinpoint how long it takes the average person to reach each belt level, and they’ve only attracted more practitioners since then. Obviously this isn’t a perfect average as they don’t have access to every practitioner in the world; 60,000 promotions across 37,000 people is most likely the best dataset in the sport. With it, beltchecker have now been able to pinpoint the average age that people will start BJJ and the resulting average age that they will be promoted to each belt rank after that.
The results are somewhat surprising, and they represent a great opportunity for coaches and gym-owners to discover their key demographic. According to the statistics gathered by belt checker, the average brand new white belt starting BJJ is actually 29 years old. The average freshly-promoted blue belt is 32 and the average freshly-promoted purple belt is 35, but the promotions tend to come faster at that point. The average person reaching brown belt is 37 and the final promotion to black belt happens at the average age of 39. This actually falls very neatly within the IBJJF belt ranking time requirements and shows that most gyms will have a key customer-base of 25-40 year olds for adult classes.
