Dante Leon: The Best Way to Get Good at Jiu Jitsu Is the Gi

The gi-versus-no-gi argument in BJJ gets relit every few months, and this week the match came from a man with unusual standing to strike it. Dante Leon — an ADCC semifinalist, a No-Gi Worlds champion, and by any honest measure one of the most accomplished no-gi grapplers of his generation — says the fastest road into Jiu Jitsu still runs through the kimono.

The academy schedule Dante Leon came up in

To understand why the statement carries weight, you have to picture the room Leon started in. He began competing in the mid-2000s, when a typical academy timetable was gi on Monday, gi on Tuesday, gi on Wednesday, and then — if you were lucky — one no-gi class shoved onto a Friday or a Saturday, attended by whoever happened to still be in the building. Leon has described it as the smallest class in the gym. That wasn't a philosophy. It was simply the only door into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu that existed.

His path from there is the reason people are listening. He came up through the IBJJF circuit, taking Pan Americans as a juvenile blue belt, then collected back-to-back bronze medals at No-Gi Worlds before finally winning the title in 2019. Gi first, no-gi second, world-class at the end of it. Watch the full interview clip on YouTube.

"I still believe the best way to get good at Jiu-Jitsu is starting in the gi," he told BJJEE, adding that in his experience the people who are good in the gi tend to be the best in no-gi as well.

The claim is getting harder to test, not easier to prove

Here is the complication nobody raises when this quote circulates. Leon belongs to what may be the last cohort for whom "start in the gi" was a real, testable proposition — because for them it wasn't a choice at all. Everyone started in the gi. When every elite no-gi competitor of a certain age also happens to have a gi background, you can't cleanly separate the effect of the kimono from the effect of simply being in the sport for twenty years.

The generation coming up behind him is running the actual experiment for the first time. A twelve-year-old walking into an academy in 2026 can train exclusively in a rashguard, watch instructionals built entirely around no-gi entries, and compete on a submission-only circuit that never asks them to grip a lapel. In another decade we will finally know whether the kimono was load-bearing or whether it was just the room everyone happened to be standing in.

Which is not an argument against Leon. It's an argument for taking his reasoning seriously rather than treating the headline as settled physics.

What the gi actually does to your Jiu Jitsu

The honest case for the gi has nothing to do with tradition and everything to do with pace. Cloth slows the sport down. Grips are stickier, escapes take longer, and a position you would have squirted out of in no-gi becomes a problem you have to actually solve. That extra half-second is where learning lives. It forces you to hand-fight before you can frame, to strip a sleeve before you can move, to understand why a position is bad rather than just scrambling until it isn't.

No-gi rewards athleticism sooner. The gi rewards it later, and taxes you in the meantime. For a beginner, being taxed is the point — it's the difference between developing Jiu Jitsu and developing the ability to out-scramble people your own size.

The part of Leon's argument everyone skips

Read past the headline and Leon says something more interesting, and slightly at odds with it. Asked about athletes who train strictly no-gi, he doesn't dismiss them. He suggests that most of them are already good in the gi, and that if they committed to it with the same seriousness they bring to no-gi, they would likely land somewhere near their current level.

Sit with that for a second. If skill transfers that cleanly in both directions, then the thing Leon is really praising isn't the fabric — it's the sequencing. The gi doesn't hold some secret unavailable to the rashguard crowd. It just arranges the learning in a more forgiving order, front-loading the details and back-loading the speed. The uniform is a teaching tool, not a source of power.

That's a far more useful claim than "gi good, no-gi bad," and it's the one worth carrying to your next session.

What to do with this on Monday

If you're new, take the advice at face value: spend your first couple of years in the kimono, and let it make you slow and precise before it makes you fast. If you're a no-gi specialist who hasn't tied a belt since the pandemic, Leon isn't telling you that you've wasted your time. He's telling you there's a version of your own game — grippier, more patient, more defensively honest — sitting in a bag in your closet.

And if you're one of the many people who quietly enjoys both, congratulations. You were never really in this argument. See you on the mats.

Original report via BJJEE.