How To Earn A New Karate Belt And What The Colors Mean

By Author: John Cory
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When you are the pupil of one of the many fighting styles that are being taught these days, you will be given different colored karate belts as you progress through your training. A lot of people are curious about how this interesting ranking system really works, how it all started, and what must be done to move from one level to the next. This article is intended to help those curious individuals understand this system of colored belts just a little more clearly.

This broadly used system was first started many years in the past by Gichin Funakoshi, who was the founder of Karate, as a functional variation of the Kyu-Dan ranking system that was used in Judo at the time. The Kyu-Dan system is basically just a split of many ranks, where all the high ranks are known as Kyus and the lower ranks are called Dans. There is no set number of ranks, but most schools have twenty ranks, with ten Dans leading up to ten Kyus.

The easieth thing to spot about this ranking system is all the different colors that the belts are available in, as well as the stripes that are sometimes included. Fresh students begin at the lightest ...
... color belt and work through all the colors as they darken, eventually landing at a black belt. Since there are a limited number of colors and several ranks, some ranks are represented by a stripe fastened to the end of the belt.

Though you will now notice that many schools use colors ranging from green and red all the way to black, there used to be fewer colors used in this ranking system, because there used to be fewer ranks. Students that are taking martial arts classes now can go from one rank to the next in just a number of weeks, but back when the system was first introduced, those students spent years in the same rank and could only advance when their master felt they were truly ready for that honor.

After a while, students make it to the place where they can move up a rank and get their new karate belts, and at that time, they will be instructed to complete a few tests to show what they have learned. These tests are usually in the form of a special combat performance that must be satisfactory or oral questions about the discipline they are achieving, but instructors also use their own better judgment to decide who is ready and who is not.
If you are looking for more details on this topic then you can click on Karate Belts or you might want to check also on Karate Uniform. Sincere thanks to Megan H. Sipple for making this subject matter to come into reality.