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About

In this episode of Tapped In, I get into why coaching white and blue belts brings me the most joy on the mats. We talk about the beauty of starting with a clean slate, why solid fundamentals beat flashy moves every single time, and how the right coaching environment helps newer students become real problems for higher belts much faster. I also touch on the responsibility coaches carry to build lasting relationships, celebrate that hard-earned first stripe, and guide students with clarity from day one.

3 Key Takeaways

• Fundamentals Create Real Problems Early: You do not need flashy social media techniques or inverted guards to be dangerous; mastering basic guard play, tight posture, and sound passing makes you a genuine headache on the mats within your first year.
• The Clean Slate Advantage: Teaching newer students is rewarding because they don’t carry rigid habits or heavy belt ego—they roll with house money, freedom to make mistakes, and an unbridled eagerness to learn.
• Coaches Build Culture and Legacy: A coach’s job isn't catering only to advanced students; it is cultivating a structured, safe environment where beginners feel seen, supported, and guided through the chaos of early training.

Chapters

• 0:00 – Welcome to Tapped In & The Clean Slate
• 0:56 – Becoming a Problem for Everyone Else
• 2:18 – Teaching for the Newer Student, Not the Black Belt
• 3:30 – Cutting Down the Timeline to Blue Belt
• 4:37 – Basics Over Flash: Why Fundamentals Win
• 6:25 – House Money: The Psychology of Lower Belts
• 7:44 – Unpredictability Keeps Everyone Honest
• 9:05 – The Significance of the First Stripe
• 10:14 – The Coach’s Responsibility and Building Legacy
• 11:51 – Connect with DFM Coaching & Outro

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Stay tapped in,

David Figueroa-Martinez

Founder, DFM Coaching Bjj

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Full Transcript

**** Welcome to Tapped In. My name is David Figueroa-Martinez of DFM Coaching, and today we’re going to be discussing why my favorite group of people to coach are white and blue belts.

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**** Uh, I think that it’s a—for the most part, it’s a bit of the clean slate. There’s no bad habits. There’s no pre-existing, like, things that they need—I need to consider when it comes to Jiu-Jitsu specifically. I understand that every human being that walks in has their own history, for example. But they are—there are no bad habits when I’m teaching a new student. I understand at blue belt, maybe you’ve picked up a few. My complete enjoyment is the fact that I can get you to understand certain things quickly.

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**** And my goal being, I want you to be a problem for everyone else. Literally part of my goal. And it’s—I don’t want to make it seem like it’s an ego thing, because it’s not really. It’s a fun thing for me. It’s a—if I can get a white belt who can become a little bit of a hindrance to people six months in, eight months in, I have done my job.

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**** I don’t think they should become—I don’t think we should have to wait till two, three, four years in before they become issues. Your white belts, I get it, they’re going to make a lot of mistakes. They don’t have the timing; they don’t have the understanding of the bigger picture. But if I can create an environment where they feel comfortable enough to ask questions, they feel comfortable enough to just experiment and fuck up—because they’re going to—and if I’m giving them the right feedback and instructions, then they can become problems relatively quicker than what I saw coming up.

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**** When I saw people coming up, you were—I want to say this nicely—you were kind of trash until, like, a year and a half in. Like, when you started approaching blue belt. And I get we can quicken blue belt faster by great instruction, but that was kind of the time period at the time. And the time depth and the understanding just wasn’t there ever.

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**** So when I can get into a position where I’ve created this environment at Gracie La Mesa or through the workshops or when I teach the evening classes at Five Peaks, my main goal is not to teach to the black belt. The black belt and the brown belt, they’re going to get something from the class, but they are not my focus at all. If they come, great. But they’re not the reason why I’m teaching; they’re not the reason why I’m teaching that specific class. My goal is to get the white and blue belts to understand whatever it is that I teach.

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**** It might be a bit more complicated, it might take me a little bit longer to get them to understand, like, the specifics, but if I can simplify it enough for them to understand it by the end of class, and then we can do some games with it, and they’re already applying it, it’s a massive win for me.

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**** I want people to get to each belt faster than when it was with me coming up. I think you can get your blue belt in a year. Depending on how often you’re training and how diligent you are with things, a year shouldn’t be out of the question. I think the average for much of what I’ve experienced was, like, two years. I think we can cut that. And I’m not saying that I’m in a rush to promote people or I’m in a rush to get people to a certain level necessarily, but I want to get them competent where they become problems for people. And when people see the white belt or they see the blue belt, they don’t think, "Oh, this is going to be easy."

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**** Now, am I talking to the professionals? No, absolutely not. That’s a different category that I’m not really invested in, nor do I care about. But I want people to feel comfortable or competent in what they’re doing just six months in. "Hey, I understand how guard kind of gets played. Hey, I understand how I sort of pass the guard. I have a weapon or two that I like to go to once I get into a good position." That’s kind of what I want, and then we can build off of that as we go.

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**** I love teaching simple fundamental shit to new people, and then emphasizing that to everyone else so that they don’t forget: hey, fundamentals go a long way. With so much where we get hyped up by the flashy technique, the flashy sweep, the guard pass, the flashy submission—those things hype us up when we look at social media and the other things, and they funnel money into instructionals. It’s great.

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**** Me, I want them to start beating people with pressure, fundamentally sound guard passing, fundamentally sound guard play, and just beat people with basic shit. Just become problems with basic shit. That’s my goal when I teach. It’s not to teach you a bunch of flashy shit; you can get that anywhere else. I think that we gloss over that.

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**** So when I can get that student who’s eight months in starting to understand armbar really well, starting to understand maybe a scissor sweep really well, they’re becoming problems in certain areas, and I can watch them roll and I’m like, "Okay, they’re putting it on someone. Someone who should probably be a little bit better than them, who should really crush or stop all this. They’re doing well." They’re not winning the round, but they’re the annoying little brother or sister, and they’re just causing enough of an annoyance that it forces the other person to be like, "Ugh, this shit. Why is this happening? Why is that happening?" That’s really what I want.

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**** And I don’t want any of the flashy stuff. I don’t look for a ton of, like, berimbolo stuff and all this. I want you to just be fundamentally sound, kind of like when I watch Chris Paines do his videos. His stuff is basic, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s basic. If I can get you to understand two-on-ones, whether you want to do, like, arm drag or physical two-on-one with like sleeve—great. If I can get you to understand elemental guard passing at a simple level—great. If I can get you to understand that you need three to four points of contact when you’re playing guard—great. If I can get you to understand to protect your ribs and keep your elbows close—great. That alone separates you from a lot of the other belts or students that are coming up into blue and then purple. Separates you quite a bit.

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**** The other thing that I like about that category, the white and blue belts, is that they’re eager. There’s an eagerness to it without being, like, frustrated or jaded with the sport. Sometimes they’re too eager when it comes to training—maybe there’s a little spazzy, and I don’t mean that derogatorily, but sometimes they want to do too much at once. Sometimes they get too addicted to the sport and they’re putting all their eggs into this one thing instead of maybe balancing their home life and Jiu-Jitsu—that’s a whole another thing.

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**** But I love the eagerness. It’s fun to work with. It’s like being an adult and working with kids—and I don’t mean that disrespectfully—but the thing that I loved about teaching kids was their unbridled joy. They didn’t know what they didn’t know; they didn’t harp on what they didn’t know. And they knew—the kids don’t know this, but the newer adults know that they’re not very good, and they’re happy with it. They’re happy with getting an almost sweep. They’re happy with the little win that they get here and there.

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**** When you get to late purple, brown, sometimes the students get frustrated and they get down on themselves because they feel like they should be better. The white and blue belt knows they’re at the bottom of the totem pole. They know that they’re not good. There isn’t a whole lot of expectation from them, so you don’t hold that; you don’t put that weight on your shoulders. Upper belts do, and sometimes it’s a challenge to break through that, and that is often their hindrance. The white and blue belts don’t have that. They go in: "No, I’m terrible. I suck. Or I’m going to get smashed today, but I’m coming in anyway."

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**** And there’s a beauty in that. There’s an energeticness in that that’s contagious, because you don’t have the walls up. You’re just playing to play. It’s almost like saying, "I have house money. Someone gave me this $100 and I get to bet it or gamble it. I don’t care where it goes. We’re just going to play the game and have fun."

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**** There’s also an unpredictability to it that’s a bit fun. When you roll with someone who has yet to completely learn or buy into all, like, the Jiu-Jitsu rules—and I don’t mean the physical rules of don’t eye gouge, don’t do this and that type of a thing—but like, when you get experienced, you start following a certain path that Jiu-Jitsu kind of laid out based on the structure of the martial art. When you’re new, you don’t have that yet, or you have very little of it. So when you should have done this, sometimes they do completely wild shit and get away with it because it was so unexpected that your brain didn’t capture the threat.

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**** That part is fun for me because it breaks the agreed-upon rules, quote-unquote, that we often see, and it keeps people honest. And one of the things when I’m rolling with them, it reinforces that I need to protect myself at all times. It reinforces that I need to be more aware of the weapons that they have at their disposal, because they might zig when they’re supposed to zag, but they haven’t been told, they don’t know any better, so they zag or zig, and I catch an elbow or a knee, or their weight comes down harder than it should have been, or they don’t follow the rules and they create much more space, which forces me to have to maybe stand when usually I’m used to being more in confined spaces.

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**** All that is good for you, and I take advantage of it. I roll with the white belts as much as possible. I don’t want to do it all day every day, but I like rolling with them because it forces me to be more fundamental, forces me to be more exact, because I don’t want to use all of my understanding of Jiu-Jitsu, so I placate it down or zero it down to a couple of techniques and I start playing with that. And I don’t want to overpower them, so then I start executing more timing-related things that maybe I can’t do with someone that’s more advanced because the timing window is so small. So it helps in that sense.

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**** And one of the things that I love, again, aside from making problems for upper belts, is giving them that first stripe—the first thing they earn. You don’t earn your white belt. I know there’s a meme going around that says, "Oh, it’s the first belt that you earn." No, it’s not. You just signed up for it. There’s nothing earned by it; it’s default. Now that first stripe, on the other hand, that one goes a long way. And you can see it when you give it. There’s a big accomplishment for a little piece of tape. And it’s fun to watch; it’s fun to see the excitement in their eyes and the fact that they get to be acknowledged for something when they know they’re not—you know you’re terrible, but at least this gives you: "I’m terrible, but I’m going in the right way. Like, I’m still stuck in the storm and my navigation is off, my understanding of the storm is off, I don’t know up from down, but apparently I’m going the right way." And that alone goes—it’s such a big plus; it’s such a fun thing to do. And I genuinely enjoy the first stripe, and I enjoy the first belt the most.

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**** And on top of that, I think that there’s a little—not ego-related, but there’s a part of me that really enjoys being like the legacy builder. And not that it’s tied to me, but that I get to be the first instructor or the first example of an instructor for them. And I get to show them, hey, this is the way Jiu-Jitsu should be taught, the way it should be applied, the way that it should be processed or handled. You should be having fun. You should be taught in a system. Your instructor should be telling you about game planning; they should be showing you instructions or techniques that go in hand-in-hand, so there’s a system behind the technique that they’re giving time and deciding what they’re going to teach, and not just throwing things against the wall hoping that something sticks with you.

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**** That the environment that you’re in matters, and that they’re cultivating an environment that allows you to grow and allows you to ask questions and feel comfortable enough to do those things. We don’t all get that. And sometimes when we don’t have that, it can jade our next steps for Jiu-Jitsu. It rubs people the wrong way, some of us leave, some of us never come back, some of us get disillusioned with the entire process, some of us waste time—like, I should have been somewhere within a year, a year and a half, but it took me longer because of the structure of the class that I was in.

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**** I like being the first coach for people, knowing that I’ve put in the work to make sure that they’re okay. I like checking in on them when I haven’t heard from them in a week or two. I like checking in to make sure things are okay, having that relationship so they know that, hey, your Jiu-Jitsu coach is actually supposed to give a shit about you outside of the money you give them. And that isn’t always the case. And for someone that it didn’t always necessarily have that, it’s a driving force for me to make sure that applies. And I do that with people who aren’t necessarily my students, but people that I train with or people that are coming to a workshop that I know regularly, but they are someone else’s student—because they’re coming to mine, I feel like, in some part, they’re mine too. And it goes a long way.

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**** You’re responsible for their Jiu-Jitsu habits and your responsible for their time on the mats, and you just want to make sure that everything’s good and they’re taken care of and they know that they matter.

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