The belt: how it is tied, and why the story that you never wash it is false

Sooner or later somebody at the gym tells it: the belt is never washed, because the rank is supposedly the dirt accumulated over years on the mat — the white one darkening until it turns black. It is a story that goes round every martial art, and it does not survive examination.

The colour that disproves it

In Brazilian jiu-jitsu the adult order of rank is white, blue, purple, brown, black. Dirt does not produce blue, and certainly not purple. Belts are industrially dyed, each in its own colour. That alone settles it.

And history does not say so either

The documented reconstruction is a different one. The belt appears in late nineteenth-century judo as a functional item: it served to hold the jacket closed, since the jacket had no buttons. The black belt appears as a deliberate marker of rank around 1886, and the intermediate colours are a twentieth-century invention, and a European one at that: introduced at the Budokwai in London in 1926, then systematised in France in 1935 as part of a teaching method.

The most likely origin of the superstition is another belief: that the belt holds the knowledge you have accumulated, and that washing it takes that away. It is an idea that predates microbiology by a good margin.

Why washing it is worth doing anyway

The belt spends hours against the mat, on you and on your training partners, and then ends up in a closed bag. In grappling, skin infections are a real and documented problem: a systematic review of wrestlers reports a pooled prevalence of tinea gladiatorum of 34%, and among the risk factors identified is not washing your kit at least once a week.

There is a practical argument too, for anyone who competes: the rulebook bans uniforms that are dirty or that give off a bad smell, and the belt is part of the uniform and gets inspected. A belt that has never been washed is, literally, outside the rules.

How it is tied

There is no official knot. The IBJJF rulebook prescribes only the result: a belt 4-5 cm wide, worn over the jacket, two turns round the waist, a double knot, and the tails hanging between 20 and 30 cm.

1. 1Find the middle of the belt and hold it against your navel.
2. 2Take the two ends behind your back, cross them and bring them back to the front.
3. 3Pass the upper end under both turns and pull it upwards.
4. 4Finish with a double knot, checking that the two tails stay the same length.

From there the variations are many and each carries the name of the gym that teaches it. The only practical constraint, beyond the measurements, is that the rank stays visible.

How the ranks work and how long they take: BJJ belts explained.