Martial arts seems to lose another piece of its soul as each year passes.

It’s no secret that standards are being conveniently overlooked, history forgotten, and the meaning of Black Belt traded away little by little. And in the process, students are being neglected the opportunity to experience the amazing aspects of martial arts that used to allure.

My analysis? The bad teachers are responsible.

It seems like such a simple statement, but I want to sit with it for a minute because it has more insight to offer than you may realize at first glance.

Too difficult? Dumb it down!

It’s no secret that free sparring tends to be one of the leading reasons for low retention in martial arts schools. People just don’t like getting kicked and punched and they quickly decide that “this martial arts thing” is not for them.

Instructors and owners have caught on and severely limited free sparring or removed it all together from their curriculum.

The end result is that there are now thousands of martial arts schools across the country that have no free sparring component in their curriculum and thousands of Black Belts have been awarded to students who have never participated in a single sparring match.

Another area I’ve noticed losing a little tradition is board breaking. A quick YouTube search reveals that students at many martial arts schools no longer have to break real boards. The board breaking component is still there, but I saw a Black Belt test where the student was breaking the ultra-thin demo boards my four year olds break instead of the real ones.

And apparently, someone somewhere decided that to retain kids in martial arts, you have to play games for 20 minutes every class.

Students across the board are doing fewer pushups, practicing easier techniques, and memorizing fewer forms. Curriculums are getting thinner and students engage in less physical contact. Yet they’re being awarded more stripes, stars, and belts and achieving the rank of Black Belt faster than ever before.

Today’s martial arts schools, students, and standards share no resemblance to the schools, students, and standards of old. This isn’t a knock on change, it’s a knock on the fact that the change wasn’t for the better.

What happened?

Money is an obvious motive, but I’d argue the problem goes well beyond that. The buck stops with bad, ineffective teachers.

Bad teachers water down curriculum because they have no solution for guiding their students through difficult areas of training.

It doesn’t take any teaching ability to give a belt to a student who doesn’t deserve it in order to retain them (keep them from dropping out). A good instructor, on the other hand, has the skill and patience to sit down with the student, motivate them, and inspire them.

It’s easy to remove psychologically and physically challenging aspects of your curriculum (like sparring and board breaking) to avoid a higher drop out rate. It’s more difficult to build trust over time and navigate psychological barriers in order to lead less-confident students to success.

It’s simpler and more profitable to add belts to your rank system so students test more often and never have to display a respectable level of patience. It’s not so easy to teach them delayed gratification and long-term goal setting.

Martial arts training was designed to be difficult; to place obstacles before students in order to build character, strength, courage, and leadership through the conquering of those obstacles.

But sub-par, so-called teachers who lack the advanced skills required to help students navigate these obstacles have instead removed them altogether, effectively castrating the meaning and worth of their programs and doing lasting damage to the image of Black Belt and the profitability of schools across the globe.

Are you one of the good ones or one of the bad ones? Which do you want to be?

If you don’t have the skills required to do your job the right way, at least have the integrity to not spoil it for your students and the rest of us.

Check out our awesome sponsors...