Am I too old for this …. (Fill in the blank)?

The surprising answer, “Yes, you may be.”

Hello, this is Master Mikel Steenrod of Water Mountain Martial Society.

If you are a member of Water Mountain or a client of one our services then you have heard of Water Mountain Martial Society’s founding motto,”Training You Can Do!” 

This one little motto shapes both the programs that I and my staff design during our system design meetings, and it shapes how I and the instructors train to teach our those programs.  Basically, the motto means steady systematic training that gives people at a wide variety of starting points the ability to make good progress.  Part of the training design is to shape the behaviors needed to be highly successful at the training, so success is not a mystery.  As a result, we produce world class results in a class environment, or even in our at home study courses.  It is that type of performance that has resulted in Water Mountain soon being featured in S.W.A.T. Magazine.

Okay, time to get at the meat of it.  I have been asked the “Am I too old for this?” question many times, and I know in many older adults it is a concern, even if it is not said.  It’s really NOT a matter of physical age when the question is being asked.  It is a matter of fitting in, fitness level, and bounce back from injury.  Age by itself is not a real issue.

The question raises a valid concern and it needs more than a cheery, “Of course, you can do it!”

The truth is that there are serious physical limits on martial arts (Not qi gong.  Qi gong is a Chinese standard for dealing with issues of aging.  If you’re an older adult, and you’re not studying qi gong somewhere, you’re “older” than you need to be!) that anyone past the age of 18 should consider before undertaking any study of martial arts, lest you carry around nagging injuries for the rest of your life.

Many martial arts have been built with a peak age in mind.  This peak is when the practitioner is at his or her physical best in the art.  It’s the shape of the peak, its length and the time it occurs in a person’s life that you should know.  As your age moves outside of the physical peak, you get into an area of larger risk.

Many martial arts peak in the low twenties.  There are 6 reasons for this.

1. Males in their twenties are typically aggressive and are resolving issues of issues of pack placement, rites of passage, etc..  Martial arts favor this process.
2. The amount of strain placed on the joints by the training process makes it physically difficult to continue practice after the twenties.
3. The mental drives of the martial art are very aggressive and based on adrenal highs typical of the twenties.
4. The lifestyle of the practitioners of the art is often typical of people in their twenties.  When a person no longer wants to be part of the lifestyle, they drop the art.
5. The strain on the back is difficult for people past the age of twenty to bear.
6. The art assumes a body fat percentage that is low enough to fit only people in their twenties in the west (America is the fattest country in the world).

Many of the arts in America are young arts and so have do not have generations of experienced, aged practitioners that have seen the negative effects of the art’s training system on the body.  As an art gets older, the practitioners become more aware of what the typical injury patterns are simply because there is enough repetition to see those injury patterns over time.

Arts with a very sharp peak in the twenties usually spend less time on technical study and immediately favor application.  The start up time for such approaches have the advantage of being very short and requiring low rep numbers to be useful, but the injury rate is high and the assumed level of physical fitness is high.  As a result of the physical strain, the drop out rate is usually also very high.

Combative sports typically use this model, because many competitors are in poverty.  They are looking to find a way out of poverty and are willing to sacrifice the body in order to establish wealth.  Many, many people that start the training in combative sports will injure out, but it is worth both the fame, reputation, and money-in the-pocket.

Competitors also realize that they have only a limited shelf-life as a fighter before the body becomes unusable in the sport.  For them, it’s the ticking clock.

As an older adult, you need to be concerned about being in an art that was not designed to fit your needs, or that was designed to fit a much more resilient body than yours.  Make sure you want what comes out of training!  Personally, I train people up to the fitness level they need to be at, and then advance that level.  If they come in already fit, that’s great.  If not, that’s fine, too.

Many times a martial arts instructor will not know the peak of the art, primarily because while he or she can be an excellent martial artist, he or she will have never actually contemplated the art as a training system for a population group.  This often happens when you get a person of technical skill that believes he can simply start coaching, because he knows the techniques.  Even if your potential instructor isn’t able to tell you anything, you can get a general idea of where an art has it’s peak placement by asking the following:

1. What age are the students at their physical best?
2. How many senior practitioners or teachers are there that actively practice?  (At the age of 30, most are unofficially retired).
3. Was the art designed for sport or quickie self-defense?

Questions you should ask yourself:

1. How good of shape do your joints need to be in?
2. Why are you taking the art?
3. How much load and rotation can your back take?
4. What level is your aerobic conditioning at?

These two question series should give you a reasonable idea of the match between an older adult and an art.  The next step is to actually experience the range of motion and the type of rotation and joint placement needed to participate in the training, usually privately.  If you can’t make it through the private, then there is a huge mismatch between you and the art.  Be very cautious getting thrown freebie style into the general class population.  This fast food approach should send up huge red flags for you, because  the lack of control in the situation can very easily lead you beyond your body's abilities.

My best regards to you!

Master Mikel Steenrod