How Many Black Belts!?

[Steve_K]

Does anyone have any solid statistic on what percentage of the world population has a blackbelt? I have been told that less than 1% of the world's population has a black belt in some kind of martial art. Can anyone confirm this or correct this?

i would definately believe that <1% of people are truely PROFICIENT at the martial arts, but I just would like to know about official black belt martial artists and the ratio of them to everyone else.

Thanks for your responses.

[granmasterchen]

less than one percent would be my guess

[Freddy]

did 1% of the world population even try any kind of MA?

[Why_Worry]

ITs only really her.e in america and a few other places were we have those mcdojos, so not many peopel in other pats of the world have experience in martial arts and the ones who do are good because its a good dojo. So i would say excluding the mcdojos deffinately less than 1%. But then like 0.5% of people who get their black belts reach 2nd dan. Thats a whole lot lower.

[Jay]

i reckon it is about 0.3%

[y2_sub]

less than 1% of the world population train (or have trained ) in martial arts and 90% of them never make it to black belt

So we - black belt holders - are the best of the best

[Why_Worry]

Wow, so 1 percent of people do martial arts, then according to y2_sub 90% of them dont reach black belt and of that only about 0.5% from what i have read reach 2nd dan/degree. Wow, thats low. I just put it in a calculator and the percent of people in the world who ever reach their 2nd dan/degree black belt is 0.0000005%. Thats pretty low, but after that most peopel continue training so it doesnt get as low of percentages for the next belt ranks of those who have already reached 2nd dan.

[usc96]

Monthly World population figures:

09/01/05 6,463,701,322

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html

move the decimal point over two to get 1% = 64,637,013.22

I would guess substantially less than 1%. Maybe even less than 1/10th of 1%, or less than 6.5 M.

[Jay]

good post

[b3n]

Interesting statistic.