How Long Does It Take to Get a Black Belt?

! How Long Does It Take to Get a Black Belt?! This question, how long does it take to get a black belt, is easily answered if you look at some simple statistics. The conclusion of these statistics, flies in the face of all martial arts training and practices.! ! It takes about an average of four years to get a black belt. This is because of the ‘car contract’ system that is prevalent in schools; it is because school owners use car contracts to tie a student to a school, and thus make more money.! ! In that four years, just to take one for instance, if you do two classes a week, and you do 50 front kicks with your right leg, then in four years you have have done 20,000 kicks. Now apply that simple type of statistic to every technique or Kung Fu form or Karate kata you have to do. The results might look something like this.! ! 8,000 forms, or kata.! 80,000 self defense techniques, or form applications.! 4,000 minutes of kumite, or freestyle training.! And so on.! ! So, first, you could just divide by four, because it should only take you one year to get a black belt; that’s closer to how long it took people to get black belts before the ‘car contract’ system came into vogue. (The contracts were actually developed by a dance instructor for Tracey’s Kenpo Karate.)! ! But, even if you have trouble with that simple truth, let’s consider what would happen if you just did all those kung fu forms, karate self defense techniques, taekwondo kicks and blocks and punches and fighting freestyle a lot faster; what if you didn’t wait for the classes, but just started doing them? If an average class is one hour long, and you do two classes a week, and there are 400 classes in four years…what if you just worked out an hour every single day? Then you could do the material of those 400 classes in 400 days, which is 13 months. ! ! Don’t quibble over that extra month, and you could easily make a black belt in one year.! ! And what if you did two classes a day?! ! That said, there is only one other thing that gets in the way of a real black belt. That is the fact that there has been so much cross breeding and inbreeding in the martial arts over the last fifty years that pure systems are rare, if they exist at all. Sort of like the offspring of hillbilly marriages, they start drooling and stuttering and don’t think too fast.! ! So you must find a system that doesn’t dabble into and try to include ALL the martial arts in one system. You have to find a system that agrees with the concepts of a specific martial art, and you must do that martial art to the exclusion of all other martial arts.! ! About the Author: Al Case has 50 years of martial arts training. He is the originator of Matrixing, which makes specific martial arts true to their original concepts, and streamlines martial art training so that a person can get a black belt in a year. Check out his website: http:// monstermartialarts.com. Consider his Black Belt Course in the store menu.!