What Belt Are You?

When people find out you practice a martial art, one of the first questions they ask you, right after how high can you kick and how many boards can you break, is what belt are you?

When someone walks into our school for the first time, I think they are surprised to find us wearing normal work out clothes...no fancy pajamas and *gasp* no colored belts.

"OK, I get it, you guys are Chinese martial arts, so I understand why you're not wearing a Japanese gi, or the Korean dobok, but shouldn't you guys be wearing the kung fu uniform?

...you know, the ones with the fancy buttons, and a colored sash to show what rank you are?...and you're the sifu...shouldn't you be dressed like Yip Man???"

If you could time travel back to Hong Kong to say, 1955, and walk into Yip Man's school, you would see the students wearing loose fitting pants, and possibly a T shirt. Yip Man would probably be sitting over to the side wearing what we would describe as a "kung fu uniform", unless he was up crossing hands with his students, then he might very well have taken the jacket off and was wearing a T shirt as well. Why? Because there was no kung fu uniform...they wore the clothes that they wore every day to class, which just happened to be loose fitting pants and perfect for training martial arts in. The jacket with the buttons were just normal, every dress for them, it wasn't a uniform.

We carry that tradition on here at CBC. Now granted, we don't always wear loose fitting clothes here in the US in our normal day to day, so we'll change into some form of athletic wear so we can move comfortably and effectively while training. And of course since we're a club, we have to have the cool club shirt to wear, with the various colors to distinguish our level of training...I guess no one''s perfect.