Belts and Training

Belt ranking has its benefits but I think the negative results outweigh the benefits by a lot. It can be a good tool for measuring someone’s skill within an art form if used properly, but in my experience this usually has the effect of giving martial artists a false reality. When you let someone put a belt around your waist you are allowing them to tell you how good you are. This totally removes your responsibility to test your skills in combat because you are being told that you are at a certain skill level by someone that you THINK can fight. The person promoting you to the next belt may not even have a good idea of how to use the techniques in a real life situation or in a competitive environment. A lot of people that teach martial arts have never even been in a fight. How can you teach someone how to fight if you’ve never been in a fight? Letting someone like this tell you how good you are just because they have a black belt holding their gi together will only give you a false reality. I’ve seen many people that have a black belt on in competitions that can barely fight. Techniques need to be used in a competitive/combative training environment in order to know how effective they are. 

The artist needs to be able to apply power and force as closely as he can compared to a real fight. The artist also needs to get hit by people as hard as he can bare in order to know weather or not his defenses are correct. That way you can tell yourself with certainty what skill level you are at. Competition is best for this. In competition there are rules so you are still very safe but the main difference is that you can strike with all of your power in an attempt to knock out or submit your opponent. There is also a very real threat of being injured, knocked out or submitted without mercy. Since a lot of people don’t have the opportunity to compete they will need to “spar hard” so they can get a good feeling of things. Training partners should give each other black eyes, bloody noses, and bloody lips sometimes because sparring was just that hard. Not every time. Just on occasions. You need your training partner so don’t break him. Sparring should be practiced as often as is good. It also helps if you have a few street fights when you’re young. Most kids don’t get into fights these days and it’s turning them into little sissy’s. Get into fights before you can easily get arrested for it and before it stays on your permanent record. That makes your art form more usable once you get older because you can draw from those fights. Combining this with proper training and competitive environments as you are studying your art gives the artist a very good idea of how effective his techniques really are.