The belt system in martial arts is a relatively modern creation. Before belts, Japanese martial arts used what was known as a menkyo system with licenses or scrolls that signified levels of ability and mastery etc. These weren’t visible in training; they were documents awarded privately by the teacher to their students. This “invisibility” of rank meant that a student was judged by others on their ability, rather than on their instructor’s recognition of their skills and abilities etc. It was Jigoro Kano - the creator of Judo in the 1880s – who, wanting a more systematic ranking structure, introduced the belt system. His original syllabus consisted of forty throws. He organized them into five sets of eight (the Gokyo), awarding a different colored belt when a student was competent in each set. This visibility of a student’s level was important when it came to randori (the “sparring” component of Judo), as a higher belt – such as someone at brown belt – would understand that when they were paired with a lower belt (such as someone at orange) they were dealing with someone who was less experienced than them i.e., they shouldn’t be as “competitive” as they would against a fellow brown belt etc. Kano’s belt system was simply a way of organizing his syllabus whilst allowing all students to know how experienced each other was, which was a good safety measure. I still believe that this is the primary purpose of a belt system: to organize a syllabus.

                During the 1920’s and 1930’s, other systems including some Karate systems started to adopt Kano’s belt system. Some had more material/techniques and so instead of having five colored belts before Black belt, created more colored belts e.g., you have a system with 100 techniques someone should know to be a black belt, then you might divide them up into ten sets of ten techniques, each with a colored belt to denote how far through a system a student has progressed/gone. This is why I don’t believe it’s of any worth comparing belts from one system/martial art to another, regardless of whether they are using the same belt color progression or not. When dividing up a syllabus in this manner time should also be a factor that is taken into consideration.

When I was a Judoka with the BJA (British Judo Association) during the 1980’s and 1990’s, there was the “rough” idea, that someone training a couple of times a week, would take about a year to “learn” each set of eight throws, whilst obviously improving their grappling/throwing skills during this time. There were two parts to a belt “test”. One part looked at technical knowledge and competency, whilst the other looked at the progression and development of skills. The first part could be decided/judged by an appropriate Dan grade, the other involved an open mat randori/”sparring” (no weight classes), comprising of students from the various schools in the area/region e.g., if there were twelve schools in a region, each with five students going for orange belt, then you would end up having three matches, drawn randomly from a pool of sixty. Up until black belt, you didn’t have to win all three to be awarded the belt – in fact you could lose all three but if you put up a good display e.g., you got a couple of good throws in, you handled and coped well against a much larger opponent etc., the grading panel had a degree of discretion in awarding/recognizing the belt. This system was fairly good at keeping a consistent standard, and that’s often the complaint about belts that people make, especially when it comes to Black Belt; what should that standard be?

The BJA was a national body that also governed the Olympic Team, and being a competitive sport the standard was evident in performance; when you won matches at regional and national level, you were ranked accordingly. However, many schools don’t belong to such governing bodies, and standards vary e.g., some schools have a three-year Black Belt program with a smaller syllabus and possibly a lesser expectation as to the student’s skill level, whilst another may have a five-year program with a greater expectation of what a student should be able to achieve etc. There will always be some who say three years to get a black belt is too short etc. My opinion is, why care? People practice Krav Maga, Martial Arts and Self-Defense systems for a variety of reasons. This is why I’ve never liked the term “McDojo” to refer to such programs that award black belts after a few years of training, i.e., there are great and talented instructors teaching relatively short black belt programs, who don’t deserve to be talked about in a derogatory way simply based on the way they’ve structured their syllabus. If they’re a bad instructor teaching solely for commercial reasons, then maybe the term applies.

A 3-year black belt program means someone trained for three years, a five-year one means they trained for five etc. Is it important or relevant that one person gets their black belt two years before the other? I don’t believe so. Different schools, different systems. If both schools are being run by equally competent and talented instructors, all other things being equal, I would expect the person getting their black belt at the five-year mark to exhibit better skill and technique than the three-year black belt, but if they train for another two years, they’ll be the same. Does the color of the belt matter at year four? I don’t think it does, unless the focus of a program is getting to black belt, rather than this simply being a “marker” along the way.