- Abraham La Montagne, a John Danaher brown belt, says most black belts should be blue or purple belts — not because they can’t fight, but because the black belt is a teaching credential.
- His standard for rank is conceptual and teaching ability, not time served or competition results.
- He compares a black belt to a PhD: “they call you the professor,” not “the dominator.”
- The Abe Lock creator says Danaher has handed out just 12 brown belts, and that rarity is the point.
Abraham La Montagne doesn’t think the sport’s belt standards have kept up with the sport itself. The John Danaher brown belt and creator of the Abe Lock used an appearance on the Jits and Giggles podcast to argue that most people wearing a black belt today should probably be blue or purple belts instead — and his reasoning has less to do with fighting ability than with what a black belt is actually supposed to mean.
Who Is Abraham La Montagne?
La Montagne trains under John Danaher at Kingsway. On the podcast, he told host Alysa Couce that Danaher had described him as the 12th brown belt he has ever awarded, in roughly three decades of coaching. He is best known as the creator of the Abe Lock, a toehold variation launched from reverse closed guard that became one of the newer named submissions in high-level No-Gi grappling.
He also comes from an academic background, and has said the biggest skill he took from a PhD program was learning how to learn — a framing that matters here, because his whole belt argument treats Jiu-Jitsu like an academic discipline.
“We Don’t Call You The Dominator — They Call You The Professor”
The core of La Montagne’s argument is that a black belt is a teaching credential before it is a fighting credential. He draws the line against the academic world:
Nobody gets upset that they don’t have a PhD. I think you’re literally called a professor when you get a black belt, which is same as having a PhD or teaching at college.
– Abraham La Montagne –
That distinction is the whole thesis. A professor rank should be earned on the ability to explain Jiu-Jitsu — to break a position down, teach it, and justify why it works — rather than on wins, medals, or years on the mats.
The belts are indicative of teaching capability, not competition capability. We don’t call you the dominator when you get a black belt. They call you the professor.
– Abraham La Montagne –
Most Black Belts Should Be Blue Or Purple Belts
That is where the viral line lands. By the teaching standard, La Montagne argues, BJJ belt inflation has quietly pushed the professor rank down onto people who haven’t earned it. His measure is how much the art has grown since the belt system was first built:
Maybe back in the day, Helio Gracie time, you got a good half guard, maybe you’re a black belt. But today, Jiu-Jitsu is moving pretty fast. Leg locks, wrestling, passing. If you can’t wrestle, if you can’t do leg locks, why are you considering yourself a black belt? If a blue belt could just heel hook you at will, you’re probably not a black belt.
– Abraham La Montagne –
The point isn’t that black belts can’t fight. It’s that the skill floor for the rank hasn’t moved with the sport — a half guard game that read as mastery in the Helio Gracie era is now baseline, while a modern black belt is expected to navigate leg locks, wrestling, and passing exchanges that barely existed decades ago.
Jiu-Jitsu As “An Intellectual Pursuit First”
La Montagne’s belt argument is the sharp end of a broader claim: that Jiu-Jitsu is an intellectual pursuit first and a physical one second. He made the same point elsewhere in the interview, aimed at hobbyists who will happily train for ninety minutes but won’t watch twenty minutes of an instructional:
I think people are just kind of lazy if they’re not willng to watch instructionals. But that’s also because I think they don’t register that Jiu-Jitsu is an intellectual pursuit first.
– Abraham La Montagne –
He referenced a similar observation from Gordon Ryan — that people never need motivating to train but suddenly have no time for study — and argued the brain work is the part most practitioners skip. That’s the Jiu-Jitsu intellectual pursuit thesis in one line: the study is the hard part, and most people never do it. He takes his own advice seriously, keeping physical notes while studying because writing things down helps them stick.
What That Would Mean For Promotion Standards
Applied seriously, La Montagne’s standard would rewrite how most gyms hand out upper belts. The BJJ brown belt requirements and BJJ black belt requirements that many academies lean on — mat time, a decent record, loyalty — would describe a lower rank, while the professor rank would be reserved for people who can actually teach the system.
He is comfortable with what that does to expectations, both for himself and for everyone else wearing a colored belt:
You should be completely content with being a purple belt and a purple belt should be considered a very nice rank.
– Abraham La Montagne –
He also argues that open competition would sort out who actually holds that standard. Under his view, a black belt should welcome a purple belt across the bracket, not complain about the draw.
If you’re a black belt and you get a purple belt as your first round, you should be like, yes, I’m going to beat this purple belt. If a purple belt can beat you in the black belt division, then that probably means he’s better than you.
– Abraham La Montagne –
Is he right? The claim that most black belts should be blue or purple belts is deliberately provocative, and plenty of practitioners will counter that a recreational black belt who has kept people safe on the mats for twenty years carries a legitimacy the “professor” label doesn’t fully capture. But La Montagne isn’t attacking anyone’s fighting ability.
He is arguing that the meaning of the black belt has drifted, and that rarity is what gives a belt its value. Under Danaher, he says, a brown belt means something precisely because it is almost never given. That is the standard he is holding everyone else to.
