Brown Belt Examination

On Tuesday night, I had my examination for my brown belt in Kung Fu.  In Kung Fu, brown belt is your first belt and not the belt before black like it is in Karate.  Therefore what I needed to know for my exam was fairly basic as far as the world of martial arts is concerned, but for me, however, it had its challenges.  If you want to know what I needed to know for my brown belt, check out this post.

An hour before the exam started, we had last chance training.  A final chance to polish up any rough bits and to work out our nerves. By the time last chance training was over, I was feeling fairly relaxed until the examiner walked into the hall and then my anxiety levels shot up again.

We started off our exam with a warm up as M who was going for her green belt with one stripe had to plan and teach a warm up as part of her grading.  Then we got into our lines and went through our basics. I thought I did okay at them, except for the two moves during which I found myself going the opposite way to everybody else (whoops!).  After basics, the colour belts did their further basics routines for grading whilst us beginners sat and nervously waited.  Then it was time to do our kata.  The first time was everyone all together as we did it by number.  Then, we had to do it by ourselves to our own timing.  I was up first and managed to do my kata without embarrassing myself.  With the kata over and done with I could breathe a sigh of relief and watch the colour belts do their katas, weapons and sparing.  The examination finished up with our self defence moves which after the pressure of  the basics and the kata felt almost fun.

Then it was time for the results and to find out just how tough our examiner marks us which, as I found out, is really tough.  She doesn’t watch you do the whole set of each move of the basics, which I guess makes sense, however, if you screw up the single move that she is watching you, you get a bad mark, even if you perform the rest of the set flawlessly. Therefore, the way to ensure a good mark to be able to perform the whole set flawlessly, which is something I have not yet learnt to do.  Still, I got reasonable marks and passed without any problem and got my brown belt!

They say that your grading for the brown belt is the toughest as you have no idea what to expect and how well you need to do to get really good marks.  Now that I do know, I know that I am going to have to put in a hell of a lot of work to do really well in my yellow belt exam.  I guess that hard work starts now.