One of my earlier posts was about the Minimum Effective Dose of training. In that I wrote this:
· Orange Belt – 7th Kyu – At least half a year of training, maybe close to 1 year. At this point the student has developed strong basic technique, especially punching and blocking. The movements are feeling more natural and the student is comfortable in that arm’s length distance, and maybe even closer. In my mind, the 7th Kyu karate student is already effective against an untrained person. A hammer is a very useful tool and our orange belt has that tool… in the ability to hit a target hard. There is much to be learned, but they are not such an easy target anymore.
I thought I would share some interesting information about this specific rank – 7th Kyu/Orange Belt. It is the first colored belt at Lantern Dojo and I really love when students hit this point in their training because they're through the most basic part of training and the real fun can begin.
When is this point? Here’s is how long it took the first three
Orange belts at Lantern to reach that rank–
· Student 1 – 7 months 12 days (50 classes)
· Student 2 – 7 Months 9 days (58 classes)
· Student 3 – 7 months 7 days (55 classes)
Clearly I am becoming a better instructor with each student! At this rate, my 100th student will get to orange belt in about a month…
But seriously, 7 months seems to be about right to get to
this point given our training environment. Lantern holds classes twice a week, for an hour apiece, in a very small
group, which keeps the instruction time and repetition relatively high for any given student.
What if this was only private lessons? Would that accelerate things? I think so, but only to around 6 months at a minimum. As evidence, I’ll point out that Student 1 above reached 7th kyu before Student 2 started – meaning his entire time to Orange Belt was in private lessons. Given that Student 1 was out of the dojo traveling for an entire month during that time, I think 6 months would be a more accurate accounting of his training time. But you can see it's roughly the same amount of training hours - at least 50.
That begs the question of whether you can get to Orange Belt skill level with an intense week of training? or maybe just a month? Yea there might be something to that, but students still need time to digest material and giving the techniques "room to breathe" isn't the worst thing.
I’ll keep track of how long it takes to get to 5th
Kyu/Green belt, the next major milestone, but I expect that will vary a bit more
and moving through green belt to brown (5th kyu to 3rd
kyu) will vary even more again. The skill progression for karate is quite linear in
the beginning so I’m not surprised that three very different students in age,
fitness, and prior experience would still hit 7th kyu at the same time. As the
requirements grow in complexity, so will the time students need to digest the
material and I expect factors like age, experience, and fitness will come into
play more prominently. Hopefully we will see!
