How Do I Keep My Stripes From Falling Off My BJJ Belt?

It’s easy if you want to keep your stripes from falling off of your BJJ Belt, just glue the little critters in place!

Once you have glued your stripes in place it’s really hard for the little buggers to get away from you!

Athletic Tape Stripes:

Even glued in place, your stripes will take a beating.  Opponents will grip your belt, and hang on for dear life trying to keep you from passing their quarter-guard into their failed-guard, *er-hum*, I mean side control.

Athletic tape stripes are just cloth and a light adhesive.  They are not designed to stay on your skin or belt, permanently.  Every time you get your stripes, or

wraps, wet the cloth will begin to stretch and become loose.  That’s why you see so many stripe ‘rings’ just sitting on the mat, lonely and abandoned after competition class.

Keeping Athletic Tape Wraps:

If you want to keep your athletic tape wraps, the fastest and easiest solution I have found is to wrap about 1.25x – 2x overlapping rotations of plastic scotch tape around themselves over your wraps.

Scotch tape is plastic, which means that it is not going to absorb your sweat and expand.  The adhesive is also excellent on the tape and resists moisture too.

That keeps the athletic tape from expanding with sweat and motion, while not adding any more adhesive or restrictions to your joints.

Just a little life hack there.

Glue Your Stripes:

If you glue your new stripes in place as soon as you get home they will typically not come undone.  For me, the stripes are about 3x – 4x as durable.  This means that I do not need to deal with the hassle of replacing stripes every other week! :/

It is a huge quality of life improvement when you go two to three months without someone ripping off one of your stripes 😉

Step 1: Steal one of wifey’s big-ass binder clips, you know the ones.  One of the ones she uses to close chip bags,

Step 2: With your pretty new stripe in hand unwrap or re-wrap until you have the black bunting showing,

Step 3: Use your wood glue more often than me, so you don’t need to resort to using toothpicks to smear it around!

Step 4: Smear your healthy glue over the bunting and replacement stripe, and then rewrap once over the glue,

Step 5: Repeat with a second layer of glue on your same face, doubling up your glue layer,

Step 6: Flatten your wrap and place wifey’s big-ass binder clip over the stripe’s new glue,

Step 7: Clip your stripe to dry overnight, MAKE SURE IT IS DRY BEFORE THE NEXT PRACTICE!  And then toss your dried-out glue into the trash, and add new glue onto your Home Depot shopping list before you have a real project to do for wifey, and you realize your glue is dead.

Happy Hunting!

When you have fixed your belt so that you are no longer losing stripes it removes a distraction from your training.

If you are interested in how to tie your belt and eventual storage for your graduated belts, please check out this post on How To Tie Your BJJ Belt.  I know it is basic!  But by the rules, you have only TWENTY SECONDS before you start receiving stalling penalties.  You will fight competitions as you train, so get it right in practice.  Tie your belt in under twenty seconds.

While you are training, you will probably be getting smashed as classmates try to send you to sleepy land or break your arms off.  That stress can make retaining the lessons a little harder.  I have started recording my class lesson high points and even critical pieces of learning from sparing in my Training Journal.  Recording lesson points with handwriting has done wonders for my retention!

They might both help you out if you are interested.  Please check them out.

I hope they help

Doug