Black Belts, Board Breaks and a Brother Who Quit at Green

There is a photo of us in our taekwondo uniforms that doesn't exist. No grainy snapshot, no proud mum print tucked into a photo album, nothing. It was the late eighties, cameras were reserved for Christmas and birthdays, and nobody thought to document two small girls dressed proudly in their brand new uniforms, clutching their beloved dog Cindy and absolutely beaming with excitement about what lay ahead. So the image you'll see with this post? That's AI. Because apparently if you want evidence of one of your proudest sporting moments from 1988, you have to ask a computer to imagine it for you.

But we remember every single second of it.

Taekwondo wasn't actually our idea. It was our mum and dad's. Growing up, we were small kids. Like, genuinely small. The kind of small where on our first day of grade one, a stranger watched us walking through the school gates and remarked that we were roughly the same size as our backpacks. Our parents, bless them, looked at their two tiny daughters running headfirst into every sport imaginable and decided that alongside all of it, we needed to know how to handle ourselves. Most afternoons we would come straight off one training session and into another, so adding taekwondo to the mix felt perfectly natural to everyone except perhaps our school bags. They signed our older brother Adam up too, probably hoping it would give him something productive to do with all that energy.

It was the best decision they ever made. For us, anyway.

We fell in love with it immediately. The discipline. The physicality. The uniforms, and let's be honest, we have always appreciated a good kit. There was something about walking onto that mat that felt completely different to every other sport we had ever played. It demanded your full attention, your full body and your full commitment every single time. No half measures. No coasting. No shortcuts. Just you, the technique, and the work.

We moved through the belts quickly. White, yellow, green, blue. Each one earned, each one a marker of something we'd pushed ourselves through. Adam moved through them too, until the day it became abundantly apparent to him (it was already obvious to everyone else), that his little sisters overtook him. Green belt was apparently his limit. We try not to bring it up. Often.

At fourteen, after years of training and one of the most intense gradings either of us had ever experienced, we were awarded our black belts. The final test included a double board break — a flying side kick, launched over three kids crouching on the ground. You either clear them and break the boards, or you don't. There is no in between. We cleared them. We broke the boards. We were awarded black belts!

Here is the thing we want every girl to understand about martial arts, and taekwondo specifically. We are still small. We are still petite. That has never changed. But what taekwondo gave us, the confidence, the bravery, the absolute unshakeable belief that our bodies are capable of remarkable things, that has never left us either. Thirty years later, we genuinely believe that if either of us found ourselves in a situation that felt unsafe or threatening, we have the skills and the instincts to get ourselves out of it. We would use every bit of training we have. And then we'd run. Fast. We still have good speed.

That is not a small thing for a girl to carry through her life. In fact, for two small girls, it turned out to be everything.

If you have ever thought about putting your daughter, or yourself, into taekwondo or karate, we could not encourage it more. Not because we want to raise fighters. Because we want to raise girls who are confident in their bodies, disciplined in their minds, and brave enough to back themselves in any room they walk into.

— Danielle and Melissa, Hero Athletica co-founders 💛🥋