The Ultimate Black Belt Test is a complete re-thinking and redesign of what black belt testing and living in the world as a black belt should mean today.
Before I expanded the bounds of black belt testing and living with the beginning of the UBBT in 2004, the martial arts community focused largely on physical accomplishments and edurance. But martial arts is more than kicking, punching, and forms - more than self disipline, or self control. Martial arts should inspire not only personal, emotional, and spiritual growth - but should aim to apply these individual enlightenments towards the benefit of our families and communities. This is the revolutionary aim of the UBBT: our testing is not just an individual challange towards greatness, its an incorporation of this greatness into our world.
Other black belt tests are a few hours, a day, maybe even be a week-long event. The Ultimate Black Belt Test has expanded the process to last a year. Other models have testers cramming for their exam and intensifying their training before test time. This not only increases injuries and cultivates burnout, but fails to cultivate the personal and social change worked towards in the year-long UBBT.
The UBBT has presented the martial arts community with the idea that the "ultimate" black belt test is not a quick, weekend event, to be completed and forgotten - but the challenge of training day after day - for long enough to create deep and lasting change.
There are dozens of fundamental changes to the black belt testing process that the UBBT can take credit for, but perhaps the two most important are the concepts of customized black belt testing curriculum - and that the test is not about “the tester.”
The idea that you “don’t fit the foot to the shoe, but the shoe to the foot” means that each test, to truly be the "ultimate,” has to take the tester into consideration. In the UBBT’s eyes, a black belt test should be the participant's own personal “Olympic Games,” and the challenges the tester faces shouldn’t reside only in the physical realm, but in the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social realms too.
The idea that the UBBT is not “about the tester,” means that a black belt test that’s approached with a member's entire body, mind, and spirit does not only deeply affect the tester, but has an affect on everyone in the tester's “sphere of influence.” The real test of a black belt is not just about the black belt, but about his or her family, friends, and community as well. That a black belt tester should undergoe a significant personal change through the training process is a given - something everyone would expect of the effort; but for a tester’s journey to be so powerful that the lives of his or her family and community are impacted in a positive way too? That would be the ultimate - and so, this is our mission.
Part of my 7th degree black belt test has been the creation and execution of The Ultimate Black Belt Test. I believe every black belt tester should strive to create and leave behind something for others as they go through the process of training for, earning, and living with their black belt.
There are dozens of fundamental changes to the black belt testing process that the UBBT can take credit for, but perhaps the two most important are the concepts of customized black belt testing curriculum - and that the test is not about “the tester.”
The idea that you “don’t fit the foot to the shoe, but the shoe to the foot” means that each test, to truly be the "ultimate,” has to take the tester into consideration. In the UBBT’s eyes, a black belt test should be the participant's own personal “Olympic Games,” and the challenges the tester faces shouldn’t reside only in the physical realm, but in the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social realms too.
The idea that the UBBT is not “about the tester,” means that a black belt test that’s approached with a member's entire body, mind, and spirit does not only deeply affect the tester, but has an affect on everyone in the tester's “sphere of influence.” The real test of a black belt is not just about the black belt, but about his or her family, friends, and community as well. That a black belt tester should undergoe a significant personal change through the training process is a given - something everyone would expect of the effort; but for a tester’s journey to be so powerful that the lives of his or her family and community are impacted in a positive way too? That would be the ultimate - and so, this is our mission.
Part of my 7th degree black belt test has been the creation and execution of The Ultimate Black Belt Test. I believe every black belt tester should strive to create and leave behind something for others as they go through the process of training for, earning, and living with their black belt.