How Many Black Belts!?

[tkdBill]

Steve_K, you make some excellent points. Their are plenty of morons running around with fake or undeserving college degrees, but that's not a reason to dump the whole degree programs in educational institutions. The diploma alone does not make one qualified, but it serves as a point of reference and a starting point to make sure that someone (or yourself) has had at least a certain level of training and education. One can then look further into the reliability of the institution which granted the degree.

A black belt is very similar. Yes, there are many unqualified morons running around with black belts. But if he received it from a reputable school with a real program, he should be proud to have earned it.

Like almost everything, the belt ranking system is far from perfect. But it does provide people with important milestones that can help motivate them and let them see how far they have come and where they are headed.

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[kivikala]

I just realized a major flaw in my numbers I previously SWAG'd. I counted the number of SCHOOLs at 15,000 (approx) in the US. That is all martial art schools, including karate, takewondo, kungfu, taichi, judo, jusitsu, kendo, aikido, and even somewhatafumo.

Since only Japanese, Okinawan and Korean styles traditionally award black belts. Other systems use other possibly similar methods but if we stay strictly with "black belt" then the numbers I derrived will be greatly diluted, possibly by as much as 50%. So the number drops to somewhere below 500,000 world wide. These are just statistics and statistics lie. For all I know there may be only one Black Belt in the whole universe. So the earlier numbers reflect "advanced students of black belt or black belt like levels."

Does anyone know of statistics that show relative numbers of practicioners against different art forms? The last good statistic I saw was in the 70's where the figures were something like Shotokan 40%, Goju 30%, TKD 27% and all others less than 3% (The following year the numbers changed to like Shotokan 25%, Goju 8%, TKD 48%, Kenpo 10%, others 5%). There was something like a 300% growth in the arts overall and increased growth made the numbers meaningless. I think the growth of the arts has leveled of since then but I am not sure to what distribution.

[sk0t]

According to the Kukkiwon (WTF - TaeKwonDo world headquarters), there are 112161 registered Black Belts (from 1st poom through 10th Dan)...in the US.

That isnt that many in the Unites States.

[Belasko]

I'm not sure about nation wide or even worldwide numbers, however in the school I started in there were about 60 students initially. Keep in mind that this was a PE class in college, so some are bound to just do it for credit. By the end of the first semester there were less than 30 that came regularly. Of those only myself and one other person continued on to the rank of first Dan. What I have seen since then is that that was a bit above average for those that continue. Frequently we are told that out of 100 students that start only 1 usually progresses to blackbelt. Of those that do only about 1 in 100 stay with it and earn their 2nd dan, and that this is common for most the ranks from there on up in our organization. Understandably being associated with college we probably have a higher attrition rate d/t graduation and those that just want the credit, but still it seems like a very small number continue for a long time.

[Steve_K]

Steve_K, you make some excellent points. Their are plenty of morons running around with fake or undeserving college degrees, but that's not a reason to dump the whole degree programs in educational institutions. The diploma alone does not make one qualified, but it serves as a point of reference and a starting point to make sure that someone (or yourself) has had at least a certain level of training and education. One can then look further into the reliability of the institution which granted the degree.

A black belt is very similar. Yes, there are many unqualified morons running around with black belts. But if he received it from a reputable school with a real program, he should be proud to have earned it.

Like almost everything, the belt ranking system is far from perfect. But it does provide people with important milestones that can help motivate them and let them see how far they have come and where they are headed.

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Thank you tkdBill, well put.

[White Warlock]

There are plenty of self proclaimed "unranked, skilled martial artists" who are just jerks that learned a little of this art here, and little of that art there and claim they have developed their own system, and call it Jiu Box Fu, when in fact they are just guys who cannot commit to steady training under an instructor and think that they already know all about fighting.

It should be noted that the vast majority of these kind of guys give themselves a 'black belt' in their 'own' system.

And no, i did not take offense, anymore than a person who 'earned' his black belt should take offense for my earlier comments made on the topic.

[Why_Worry]

Yeah, i knwo what you mean because there are some franschises (i'm not going to say which ones) dojos where someone who wants to be an instructor just goes to a couple of seminars, pays 10,000 dollars or something like that and is handed a black belt and they start teaching. I would even prefer the "three year black belt" over them in the words of white warlock. Although it is a good point that the belt statistics dont really mean anything, but its still fun looking at them. I mean when y ou look at it, there arent really that many marital arts with belt rankings and they shouldnt really mean that much. I mean even in old times there was nothing other than the belt they wore to keep their gi's closed and they didnt wear the belt cause the color symbolized their rank, although sometime speople had to wear white belts, they wore them cause they liked the color basically or it was the attire everyone wore.