Krav Maga Belt System vs BJJ, Taekwondo, and Kali: How Ranks Compare
New students ask me some version of the same question all the time: "What belt would I be at Forge Krav Maga?" Often it comes from someone with a taekwondo black belt, earned years ago, somewhere else. It sounds like a simple question. I think it's actually one of the best questions in martial arts, because answering it honestly means admitting what a rank is, what it measures, and what it was never able to measure in the first place.
We have a test coming up at Forge this month (we hold one every three months), so this has been on my mind. But this isn't really a post about our test. It's about ranks anywhere, in any system, including the ones we train at Forge. And since a rank is just what a test leaves behind, the honest way to ask what a rank measures is to ask what a test measures.
What a test measures
When I watch someone on a test day, I'm looking at a handful of things, and only some of them are techniques.
I'm looking at skills: can you do the thing, cleanly, on both sides, against a partner who isn't cooperating much? I'm looking at attributes, the physical qualities underneath the skills, and our tests routinely run five hours, so conditioning and focus aren't footnotes. I'm looking at knowledge, because at some point you need to understand why a technique works and when it doesn't, not just reproduce it.
And I'm looking hard at fortitude and resilience, which show up in smaller moments than people expect. You got feedback in the middle of the test. Did you use it? You failed a technique. Did you ask a good question, or did you defend yourself? Was your desire to learn bigger than your ego in that moment? That's coachability, and I can see it from across the room. And the biggest one, which technically happens after the test: if you failed, did you come back to class on Monday?
Yes, I'm also looking at some memorization. I know memorization is unfashionable. It's still part of it.
Here's what I can't see from the floor, after a decade of watching tests: whether any of it shows up when you're grabbed on the street with no warm-up, no mouthguard, and nobody counting rounds. A test measures you at your best, on a day you prepared for, in a room you know. Real violence tends to arrive on your worst day. No examiner in any system has solved that problem, and the ones who claim they have are selling something you should not buy.
How different systems rank people
Taekwondo and karate. For most people, this is where the whole idea of belts comes from. White to black, a new color every few months, kids lined up by rank. The part almost nobody knows is that the colored belt is younger than the telephone. Jigoro Kano introduced the black belt in the 1880s at the Kodokan, his judo school in Tokyo, as a way to mark his senior students. The colored belts between white and black came even later, in 1930s Paris, when a judo teacher named Mikonosuke Kawaishi noticed that Western students stuck around longer when they had visible progress to show. In other words, the colored belt was a retention tool on the day it was invented. Karate borrowed the scheme from judo, taekwondo inherited it from karate, and by now the whole thing feels ancient. It isn't. If you walk into Forge with a taekwondo black belt, your rank doesn't transfer, but your skills do. You'll pick things up faster than you expect, and your kicks are probably better than mine.
Krav Maga, twice. Krav can't even agree with itself. The lineage we come from (KMG and the broader IKMF family) uses Practitioner, Graduate, and Expert levels: P1 through P5, G1 through G5, E1 and up. No colors, no belts, and names that sound like a certification program. Krav Maga Worldwide, the other big system in the US, maps its five levels onto colored belts, yellow through brown, with black by invitation, and in many KMW schools adult students get a diploma rather than an actual belt. As I understand the history, Imi's original students in Israel wore judo-style colored belts; the level-and-patch system came decades later, as Krav went international. And beyond these two families sit dozens of smaller organizations and independents like us, each running some variant of one ladder or the other. So if you tell me you're a "green belt in Krav Maga," I need to know which organization before the words mean much. That tells you something important: rank is a property of an organization. It is not a property of the art, and it is definitely not a property of you.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Maybe the slowest belt in martial arts, and probably the most honest, because you can't fake rolling. Ten-plus years to black is normal. The stripes between belts exist for the same reason Kawaishi invented colors: a decade is a long time to go without visible progress, and stripes keep people moving through the desert between belts. It only half works. The most commonly cited number, from Rener Gracie, is that around 90 percent of people who start BJJ quit before blue belt, and gym owners will tell you another big wave leaves right after getting it. Nobody has published real data on this, even though every academy has the numbers sitting in its member software. Make of that what you will. But the pattern is folklore for a reason. And notice what it implies: if rank were purely a retention machine, the biggest exits wouldn't come right before and right after the first reward. People are more complicated than the incentive.
Pekiti Tirsia Kali. My favorite rank story, because PTK originally had no ranks at all. Leo Gaje Jr learned the system from his grandfather weapon by weapon, start to finish, no belts, no levels. When he brought it to America and needed a structure, he took the names from the Filipino school system of his childhood: Yakan for the elementary student, Lakan for the high school student, Guro for the teacher, Tuhon for the principal. The ranks were invented for export, roughly a century after the art itself. In the PTTA, where I train under Grand Tuhon Jared Wihongi, the ladder counts in hagdans, which is Tagalog for steps. Three hagdans of Yakan, three of Lakan, then the instructor ranks, each with their own steps, all the way up to Tuhon. Grading is explicitly based on skill, understanding, and character, in that order, and the association says plainly that demonstrating techniques alone is not enough. I like that framing more every year. As I write this, my students test in two weeks, and I test for my next Kali rank, right after they do. I find that ordering appropriate. I also don't get to grade my own test, which also feels appropriate.
Boxing, Dutch kickboxing, Muay Thai. No ranks at all. The record is the rank. A boxer's credential is 12-3, not a belt color, and everyone in the gym knows exactly what it means. Dutch kickboxing works the same way, which is why asking "what belt are you in kickboxing" gets you a funny look at any serious gym. Muay Thai is the proof of the whole pattern: there's no rank system in Thailand, but the moment the art was packaged for Western hobbyists, gyms invented colored armbands for students who expected belts. Every art without rank grows one the day it's sold to civilians. Every single one.
Why rank systems exist at all
The reasons we say out loud are real. Ranks let students see the shape of a long journey. They let instructors group a room so a first-week student isn't partnered with someone throwing knees at their head. They give you a rough benchmark against other schools and other systems. They give everyone something to aim at. And they're part of a lineage; many of us carry belts from other arts and would feel like something was missing without a structure.
Then there are the reasons we mostly don't say.
Ranks keep students training. That's been the design since Kawaishi, and I don't consider it a scandal. They keep instructors training too. Ranks are a safety gate: the reason our P2-and-up classes require approval is that rank is how you keep an enthusiastic beginner out of a room that's ahead of them. Ranks are the instructor pipeline. We have coaches in training at Forge right now, and their path to teaching runs through rank, in our system and every other one I know of. And rank is external credibility for the person standing at the door trying to decide whether we're legitimate.
One more, and this one I hold personally. The test that guards the rank does one more job: it audits the teaching, not just the student. If one student misses a technique, that's their gap to close. If half the room misses the same technique, that's my failure, not theirs. I led the curriculum design, with a lot of contributions from our coaches, and a pattern of misses on test day points up the chain before it points down. We're living this at Forge right now with third party protection. We saw in classes that people weren't getting it, so we slowed down and reinvested: cleaned up the curriculum, got more specific about what we expect to see at each level, and we're now spending time every week covering and re-teaching it. That's what a test is for. It found the gap. The gap was mine.
Why Forge runs levels, belt analogues, and themes together
At Forge we stress the level: P1, P2, G1. The belt analogue exists to translate for people coming from other systems, because "P3" means nothing to a BJJ purple belt and "roughly a blue belt" means something. And each level carries a theme, which is the part I care most about, since the themes are where the curriculum design lives.
That design gets revised every year, and I wrote about how the process actually works in How I Run a Martial Arts School With AI.
The Forge Krav Maga themes, in order:
P1: learning to move, strike, and get away
P2: fighting back, with your first sparring
P3: when they grab and hold on
P4: harder holds, and learning to finish
P5: when there's a knife
G1: working with weapons, not just against them
G2: weapons don't wait for you to stand up
G3: turning defense into control
G4: grabbed, seated, and outnumbered
G5: thinking clearly from the worst position
Read that list again and notice something uncomfortable. It isn't ordered by danger. The knife shows up at P5. Being outnumbered shows up at G4. The student most likely to actually need knife defense is the P1 who has been training for six weeks, and the curriculum hands it to her years from now. Krav Maga isn't uniquely guilty here. Every curriculum in every system makes the same trade: rank order is learning order, not threat order. You can't teach knife defense to someone who can't yet move, strike, and get away, any more than a med school can teach surgery before anatomy. But it means a rank measures where you are in a learning sequence. It cannot measure whether you're ready for the thing the sequence hasn't reached yet. Anyone whose marketing implies that a first belt makes you street ready is lying to you about what a curriculum is.
The timeline, by the numbers
Our written curriculum says P1 takes about 35 classes and P2 about 50 more, which at two or three classes a week works out to roughly nine months for the first two levels. We hold tests every 90 days, but most P-level students test about every six months, and I strongly encourage that rhythm. At the G levels, testing is about once a year. Run the arithmetic and our black belt analogue, G2, lands around year five. The full path to G5 takes about seven and a half years, assuming you never miss a test and never fail one, which nobody manages. KMW's published minimums tell a similar story: about 40 months of training just to be eligible for brown belt. My own Krav Maga expert level took twelve years.
Martial arts systems agree on almost nothing about rank: not the names, not the colors, not whether belts should exist at all. But they quietly agree on roughly what a black belt costs. Ours, at G2, is about five years in. A taekwondo black belt typically takes three to five. Ryan Hoover's Fit to Fight puts theirs in the same range, and tells you something about their priorities by putting firearms in the black belt curriculum. The PTK instructor ranks arrive on a similar clock. BJJ is the outlier at ten-plus, and BJJ people will happily tell you that's the point. Everywhere else, across systems that share almost no DNA, a black belt costs about the same number of years of showing up. That convergence says the systems are all measuring the same underlying thing, and it isn't technique. It's time under discipline.
Shane Parrish puts it better than any martial artist I know: "Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time." That's a rank. Attributes take time to build, pressure tolerance takes time to build, and no amount of talent compresses a testing cycle. A rank always measures at least two things at once: what you can do, and how long you've kept showing up. I'd argue the second is the better predictor of who you'll be in five years.
Ranks past black
So if the black belt analogue lands around year five, what is everything above it measuring?
Some of it is real curriculum; KMG's E-levels have genuine material in them. A lot of it is teaching, because in most systems the ranks past black are instructor ranks whether they're called that or not, and BJJ makes this nearly explicit: the degrees past black accrue with years, and the coral and red belts at the top essentially require a lifetime of teaching the art, not competing in it. Most of the sport's greatest competitors retire as plain black belts. And some of it, honestly, is tenure and contribution.
I think there are diminishing returns up there, and I'll go further than that: past a certain point, the next rank in your own system teaches you less than a white belt in someone else's. I'm not knocking high rank. This is just why I train four systems instead of collecting steps in one. Twelve years into Krav, I learned more in my first six months of BJJ fundamentals than I would have learned polishing my way toward the next expert level. The belt past black that changed me most was a white one.
What a rank is for
So here's my honest answer to the student with the taekwondo black belt.
A rank measures where you are in a curriculum, how long you've been training, and whether you keep showing up when it's hard. Those are real things, and they're worth measuring. But a rank does not predict a fight. It never has, in any system, at any level.
Kawaishi understood something in Paris that we've spent ninety years forgetting: the belt exists to keep you building. It's scaffolding. And when the building is done, what's standing there isn't a rank. It's you, better.
