Last week, on Monday, October 21, I had an opportunity to attend Michelle Khare’s red carpet premiere event for her first feature-length episode of Challenge Accepted, “90-Day Black Belt,” at a movie theater in Hollywood, California.

I was already familiar with Michelle Khare from seeing her past Challenge Accepted episodes where she tried various different academies for the San Diego Police Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Secret Service. Having a professional background in criminal justice and law enforcement, I enjoyed watching her training and thought she portrayed her experience as well as she could in those half-hour episodes. Thus, as you’d expect, when I had a chance to screen her latest episode, I was eager to join in for it to find out what she did next.

I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that the most recent challenge she tackled was to get a taekwondo black belt in 90 days. I’ve trained martial arts and combat sports on-and-off for two and a half decades now, and my very first black belt was awarded to me in taekwondo by Kukkiwon, the South Korean government’s taekwondo governing organization, when I was 8 years old. It took me two years to earn it, and even that was considered to be pretty quick, so I was looking forward to seeing whether she was able to do it in three months.

I didn’t publish this blog post right away after the event because I didn’t want to leak anything too early, but the episode is out now on Michelle Khare’s YouTube channel as of this morning. I’m going to share some of my thoughts about it, so if you don’t want me to spoil anything, don’t scroll past the five photographs until you’ve watched the episode.

Here are some red carpet photos together with Michelle, as well as with my friend Aidan, who runs the Skip the Tutorial channel on YouTube:

Here are some photos I took from the theater—of Michelle doing her introduction before the premiere, and a Q&A session after the viewing:

I ended up liking the show more than I expected. I thought the editing was done well, the story was told in a captivating manner, and the build-up to the final result made me get invested in her success.

From the beginning, I was wondering if her master would actually assess her ability seriously, or if he had gone into this knowing that it was “impossible” but just wanted to entertain her for the challenge. A lot of martial arts schools like to “gatekeep” black belts in a sense because they don’t want to make it seem like it is achievable in such a short period of time, and I wondered if Michelle would be victimized by that notion. And sure, that is gatekeeping is reasonable for a majority of people—most taekwondo students start as true beginners and are only able to attend a few classes a week, so requiring a few years to achieve any level close to mastery makes sense. However, it seems like, not only did Michelle have a strong fitness and combat sport background already, but she was fairly dedicated and spent far more time training than the average new student.

In exchange for giving her the opportunity to take promotion tests in such rapid succession, it seems like her master ramped up the difficulty of the exams to ensure that she absolutely did deserve it every time she passed. Her color belt tests were noticeably more intensive than what I remember from my own taekwondo journey, and her black belt test was orders of magnitude more difficult than what I had to do for my black belt.

I think the way she failed her black belt test was very gimmicky. Yes, I too had to break a brick to earn my black belt, and yes, there is validity in requiring that as a component of the exam—it demonstrates strength, but there is also a material mental aspect of it where you are overcoming the hurdle of using your body to break an extremely hard object. However, there is far too much variability in brick-breaking to be able to consider it as any sort of reliable indicator of any metric.

There are different kinds of bricks, and for taekwondo, you often use cement slabs of controlled density—these are the rectangular gray blocks that you’ll see if you search online for taekwondo breaking demonstrations. The thickness of these slabs can also be controlled, and they are usually made in half-inch increments, with lighter-mass testers (like Michelle) getting thinner slabs, while higher-mass testers would either get two-inch-thick slabs or have to break multiple thinner slabs at once.

Note that I said earlier that a big aspect about brick breaking is the mental component of it. Your body will naturally not go full-force if you are about to throw your hand into an object that it knows is extremely hard, and part of the brick-breaking test is to determine whether you are able to overcome that obstacle in your mind. Having the strength to actually break the brick in half is of secondary importance, so when you have custom-made cement slabs designed for taekwondo usage, they’re not going to be as strong as landscaping bricks you buy from the hardware store. I used to coach martial arts and have handled many of these cement slabs before, and on more than one occasion, I have accidentally broken them in half because I wasn’t gentle enough with them.

I’m going to put on my tin foil hat here, and this is obviously entering conspiracy levels of speculation, but I wonder whether Michelle ended up with the thickest possible landscaping brick because they wanted her to fail. She was clearly extremely good at everything else, but I think there would have still been a lot of backlash from the taekwondo community if she had actually been awarded a black belt, especially from those who spent years working on their own black belts but are unable to view things from a more neutral and objective perspective for others in different circumstances. So, although it is unlikely, I think it is technically not impossible that her training school did this to her to have an excuse to fail her and save their reputation.

During her post-screening Q&A, Michelle said that it’s been over three months since filming concluded and she still had not earned her black belt yet. I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in her brick-breaking technique. During her black belt test, she was trying to break the brick with just her arm, as opposed to angling her body in a way that the mass of her torso drives her hand into the brick. That kind of adjustment can make a huge difference simply due to the basic laws of physics, so if she refines her strategy in that way, I have faith that she’ll pass her black belt re-test.