To Belt or Not to Belt? The Real Issue Isn’t Rank – It’s Honesty

Every few years, this debate resurfaces: Should martial arts have ranking systems at all? And once again, Filipino Martial Arts finds itself in the crosshairs.

The common refrain is predictable: “Skill is rank.” It sounds good. It feels pure. But it’s also incomplete.

Skill is performance. Knowledge is understanding. Experience is context. Teaching requires all three. Pretending otherwise is romantic, not practical.

In a small, tight-knit group – where everyone knows exactly who the teacher is and who the students are—rank is irrelevant. That’s how my early Balintawak Eskrima training worked. There was no confusion. No need for labels. Just teacher and student.

But that model doesn’t scale.

Once you start teaching larger groups – once you take on the responsibility of educating the masses – you need a way to identify levels of knowledge, proficiency, and readiness. Not for ego. For safety. For efficiency. For clarity.

We already accept this in every other form of education. Kindergarten through high school. Undergraduate degrees. Graduate degrees. Doctorates. No one argues that a PhD invalidates intelligence – only that it marks depth of study.

And let’s clear up another convenient myth: I didn’t create a belting system to “modernize” Filipino Martial Arts. My teacher, the late Grandmaster Remy Amador Presas, implemented it decades ago. At a time when Filipino Martial Arts were bleeding students to karate and judo, he adapted – not by watering the art down, but by making it accessible. That decision is one of the reasons FMA survived and spread globally. History supports that, whether people like it or not.

Ironically, many who criticize belting today belong to systems that copied the same structural ideas – sometimes openly, sometimes quietly. Even now, numerous martial arts programs in the Philippines use literal belts. This isn’t foreign. It’s familiar.

What’s truly puzzling is the selective outrage.

If a system has multiple instructor levels, titles, chevrons, sashes, bandanas, or color-coded identifiers of any kind, then it already has a ranking structure. The argument isn’t really about belts – it’s about aesthetics and personal bias.

From an educator’s perspective, rank is a tool. I can glance at a student and immediately know what knowledge base they should have. That matters when teaching techniques that require safe falling, timing, sensitivity, or cooperative skill. I’m not going to put a beginner into advanced throws or high-level drills just to prove a philosophical point. That’s not tradition – that’s negligence.

Then comes the favorite accusation: “Belts are just a way to sell rank.”

No. Issuing belts does not mean belts are for sale. Awarding rank and selling rank are not the same thing.

And if we’re going to talk honestly, there are plenty of “grandmasters” in Filipino Martial Arts who hand out lofty titles to people who have never trained under them, never tested with them, and sometimes barely met them. No belts involved. Just paper, prestige, and politics.

So let’s stop pretending this is a belt problem.
It’s an integrity problem.

Rank can be sold through belts, instructor certifications, honorary titles, letters after your name, or a framed certificate on the wall. The delivery system is irrelevant. The ethics are not.

Here’s my position, clearly stated:

You don’t have to use a belting system. But if you use any structured levels and then condemn belts as illegitimate, you’re not taking a moral stand – you’re being hypocritical.

And hypocrisy, not rank, is what does real damage to the arts.

Datu Tim Hartman
Modern Arnis’ Tribal Chief

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