What Is a Green Belt?

Video Transcript

"When I took my first Karate class, my first Tae Kwon Do class; February 12, 1974; I knew I was going to do this for the rest of my life and I'm still at it. Here's the key point from that period of time. One of my questions was, "When do you start getting good at this?" I was in there every, I want to learn this so bad, so fast. The answer was, about Green Belt is when you start to get some competence. And you know what happens with competence, comes confidence; that's when your confidence begins to grow. In those days, that took almost a year and as someone who works with instructors worldwide, I'm knows as teacher of teachers in Martial Arts, I don't recommend it taking that long. The reason it took so long was, one, poor curriculum design; two, an idea that longer is better and that's not necessarily the case. Better is better. Longer is not better. More is not better. Better is better. So today we work with schools; we're doing less techniques; spending more time on them; disguising them, so the students they're motivated and don't get bored and we're able to reach that green belt level in about six months of training. So, find a good Martial Arts school. Find out where that green belt is. Find out what the curriculum is to get there and then attack. Train hard, get to that Green Belt; let that be your first stepping stone to Black Belt. I'm John Graden; thank you very much."