On The Immortal Podcast with Matt Brown, two time world champion Dante Leon was asked about ecological jiu jitsu. His answer was pointed.
Leon acknowledged the approach has some merit.
“I think it has drawn a lot of attention and it’s drawn a lot of support and there’s things from it that are very good, I would say,” he said. “But I don’t think that any of them are like revolutionary or anything that hasn’t been done, practiced, or seen before.”
His sharpest criticism targeted the framework’s stance on drilling.
“The idea of not drilling is not something I necessarily agree with because I think in some form there just has to be, you just have to drill. Driving a car if you’re a race car driver can be drilling. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something like uber static and just like hitting a one-two combo or whatever. You can easily, especially with grappling just because of how involved it is, drill dynamically. You can easily drill by me telling you what I want from you or you telling me what you want from me. We could easily drill like that and get something out of it. And I think that that’s drilling. I don’t know how it’s not. So that’s why when I hear people talking about, you know, this is constraint-based and stop wasting your time drilling and blah blah blah, I’m like, what the [—-]. And you’re drilling. It’s exactly what you’re doing, just because you approach it a little bit differently. You’re doing the same [—-] that I do.”
On static drilling specifically, Leon was equally direct.
“I don’t need the ecological system to tell me that drilling closed guard armbars is [—-]. I’ve known that’s [—-] for 15 years.”
He clarified:
“If I’m going to warm up my closed guard and I’m just going to sit in the gi and work on going two-on-one, pulling your arm, pulling it across, if I’m like a purple belt level at jiu-jitsu, especially being a competitor, we really don’t need to do that anymore. At some point this becomes kind of [—-]. So I didn’t really need the ecological system to have a convoluted explanation to let me know these things are probably useless or we’ve moved on from here.”
Leon’s final point concerned what people actually want from seminars and instruction.
“Nobody goes to a seminar and says, ‘I want to learn how to ecologically train.’ People go to a seminar to learn moves, to learn techniques, to learn things, to hear how people talk about things. Nobody goes to your seminar to say, ‘Matt Brown, ecologically tell me how to do the clinch.’ They’re like, ‘Bro, show me something.’ That’s what they paid money for, so that they can leave the seminar and say, ‘This is what I left with.’ Not a theory or a different thought process. People are paying to learn techniques, to see your techniques. And then if they’re good, they’re going to build on it and exchange this with their training partners and be able to come back with something better.”
“The rest you can kind of figure out.”
