The Road to Yellow Belt

When I first started martial arts with a Shotokan karate class at our local junior college, the instructor handed out an article for everyone to read.  The article covered a study with statistics.  The study found that out of every 10,000 martial arts students only 100 would go on to earn black belts.  Most beginning students quit after six months and seventy-five percent quit after a year.

In the almost ten years that I have been teaching, I have found these statistics to be pretty accurate.  Due the high attrition rate, I have begun to rethink what a modern curriculum should look like.  If most students will be gone in six months and most students come to class to learn self-defense, we should focus the first six months of a student’s training on making them as “street ready” as possible.

In retrospect, I would make the beginner’s program six months long.  We would focus on learning the techniques by striking pads, sparring and practicing self-defense.  Once the student showed a significant mastery of these techniques, I would teach them the things that make a martial art: forms, traditional drills and traditional sparring.

Most martial arts programs including mine are very concerned about outlining the path for the student who wants to get their black belt.  It is important to encourage and guide those rare students who will one day be black belts.  However, it is just as important if not more so to have a solid beginning program because most students don’t go past this level.

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