I recently earned my black belt in karate, AMA

8 min readJul 14, 2025

Recently, I did an AMA around the process of earning my black belt in karate from UWS Kenshikai. What follows are my answers more or less as is, slightly edited for clarity. This was a fun time, it really made me think about the experience, and I hope you find it interesting and useful!

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Good morning! I’m Adam, I’ve been an overweight non-athletic computer geek my entire life. My kids took up doing karate as an afterschool activity, and I got jealous and picked it up about 8 years ago, in my early 40s. They both gave it up to focus on other sports, but I earned my shodan (first degree black belt) a few months ago. I wrote about it (a personal reflection essay is part of the process).

“How long did it take you, from zero to black belt? In terms of years and/or hours.”

Roughly seven and a half years. Hours — I haven’t really been keeping track. Figure maybe ~35 hours a year for the first two years and ~120 hours a year for the rest, so maybe somewhere between 700 and 800 hours?

“What was it like getting into martial arts in your 40s? Were there other people your age doing it too, or was it mostly younger folks?”

It was shockingly easy. The classes are all mixed age, there are a bunch of teenagers, a bunch of people in their 20s and 30s, and a few people in their 60s/70s. Everyone has been extremely welcoming.

“To be more direct with a question: how did you take this on and not injure yourself horribly?”

Gradually!

I’ve had minor injuries from time to time, usually around some joint that’s not sufficiently supported for the motions, but for most of those I recovered in a few weeks and there was nothing debilitating. The motions themselves, you can work up to throwing with force, and you develop strength and flexibility by doing them.

It’s a core tenet of our dojo that the most important thing is to show up and do what you can do. Can’t kick to your head? Kick to a leg, and try to get it at the same height or a smidge higher next time.

Karate is broken up into three main categories — kihon (basics), kata (sequences of moves), and kumite (sparring). For the basics and katas, risk of injury is low overall, except for what I described about unfamiliar motions.

For sparring, it really depends on how it’s done. In our dojo, we mostly do light contact sparring in a particular form that discourages injuries. It’s highly collaborative — no one is actively trying to hurt you. There is contact, and at the higher levels you might get bruised, but it’s all very respectful. We wear shin guards and boxing gloves, but no other pads and no head guards. Punches to the head are not allowed. Straight kicks are only allowed to the body, only round kicks (roundhouse, hook, crescent) to the head and legs. These are relatively easy to block and deflect, and the standard is to pull kicks to the head before making actual contact — there’s an acknowledgement that you scored a hit and would have done some damage if you’d made contact. That said, I’ve taken a few kicks to the face by accident, and it hurts.

One thing I’ve learned recently about why it’s so respectful is that the dojo is monthly membership only. We all know each other and there aren’t any random people just showing up looking to pick fights.

An important thing is that sparring is a very mental game and there’s a lot of technique involved. Partially, you avoid getting hurt by dodging and blocking, and getting better at those things. But again, it’s very collaborative — you and your partner will set the energy level together, and nobody will go hard with you if you don’t want to. Typically the junior of the two will set the pace, and as a more senior partner with more experience it’s not that difficult to adapt to that.

At the lower levels, the motions are very broad strokes. You build precision, snap, and power over years of repetition on the same thing.

I didn’t really start to throw some force behind my techniques until advanced green / brown belt. Prior to that, it was mostly going through the motions and building blocks. I wrote about how at one point, my fist became a separate thing, and I feel that viscerally. A tight fist that you’ve clenched over and over builds grip muscles that require practice, and it’s transformative. That’s a building block for throwing a firm punch without injuring yourself. It takes years.

One of the persistent lessons over these years of practice is that there is a substantial difference between knowing the path and walking the path, and they’re both important.

“As someone who is very (very) early in her journey — what tips do you have? What do you wish people would have told you earlier in your journey?”

A first caveat — I still feel like I’m very early in my journey!

Black belt is an achievement, but it’s not “the destination” by any means. There are still another at least 6 black belt stripes above me for whatever that means, and those distinctions start to mean less. I’m very much at the beginning of just starting to understand <waves hands> all of this.

Just show up is a great piece of advice.

Sometimes it’s fine to just show up and go through the motions without having a goal, but don’t do that all the time.

Try to take one thing at a time and focus on making that just ever so slightly better.

Constant improvement is your goal, but that often manifests as periods of no apparent improvement punctuated with leaps. You can’t force the leaps, they’ll happen on their own.

You get better at kicking by kicking.

I don’t know — I heard a lot of this pretty early on, but it’s hard to internalize when it feels like the body of work to master is huge. So maybe that’s the thing — each improvement really does make the rest seem more achievable.

Keep notes about how you feel and what new and interesting things you’re able to do.

I think the most important thing is — with some exceptions for physical limitations, this is totally achievable for most people if they want it. I asked my teacher if he could tell when people first showed up if they’d make it to black belt, and he said he just assumes everyone will eventually unless life gets in the way. Some people just quit, some people move away, some people have responsibilities that take them off track and they never return. But his assumption is that none of that is going to happen and you’ll just keep going, and when you do, you’ll get there.

Another thing — there are no real prizes of any import for “winning” and no real consequences for doing badly. A belt or promotion is a thing you do for yourself, and you show up because it matters to you. So treat it with the right level of seriousness. Show up, do the work, brush it off if you have a bad day, but messing something up is really not that big a deal, and you’ll have more chances to work on it again.

Something I wish someone had told me earlier — write down all of these little speeches from the end of every class.

“I don’t know the first thing about karate (except for some vague memories of seeing The Karate Kid in my early teens), but I’m curious if getting a new belt is a compelling motivator for most people. What do they unlock and how are you evaluated to receive the next one?”

I found it to be a compelling motivator, but it’s not my primary driver. Yeah, it’s nice to get a new belt as a sign of progression, and it’s certainly a milestone and a thing to be proud of. At each level (we have ranks of white, blue, yellow, green, brown, and black, with an “advanced” stripe at each level, though I think we’ve fully done away with the advanced white and they just go straight to blue now), there are new expectations for a) some new material that you’re now “responsible for”, even though you might have done it in class before, b) some new complexity of material building on something you’ve learned, and c) new katas to learn, which also build in complexity.

There’s no real “privilege” associated with higher ranks other than lining up in order at the beginning of class. There used to be green belt and up only classes, but we don’t do those explicitly anymore, though the classes are more accelerated with less explanation if there are fewer lower belt ranks in the class. We do have a dedicated black belt only class once a month to work on the black belt material that doesn’t get focused on in the regular classes.

We don’t have “tests” for promotions. There’s material you’re supposed to know, but the dojo is small enough that owners (who currently hold the rank of “Shihan”, 7th degree black belt) know everyone and what they know. So people don’t get invited to promotions unless they already know the material, and the promotion ceremony is a chance to run through everything and show it off.

Promotions for lower belts typically take around 9–12 months per rank/stripe, a little more for brown and advanced brown.

An important precept of our school is that earning a new belt is a fun chance to suck at something new for a few months while you’re finding your footing with expanded material.

“Has anything about this process surprised you? Did you learn anything that you weren’t expecting, in any sense of the word?”

I was surprised I could do it. I wasn’t expecting the sheer sense of physicality that came with it. I simply know how to move (literally) in the world better, and that’s transformative. I hold myself with more confidence, and that bubbles out. I expect athletes of other kinds also feel this, but I wouldn’t really know, it’s foreign to me.

I’ve also learned things about discipline and the method of discipline. People say that this takes discipline, but it doesn’t really in my mind. It takes showing up and working on it — the discipline is the process.

I was specifically not expecting to ever be able to balance on one leg and put on my shoes without leaning on anything for support, on the sand at the beach.