BJJ After 40: How to Train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu When You're Not 20 Anymore

BJJ After 40: How to Train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu When You're Not 20 Anymore

There is something slightly strange about starting Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu when you're over 40. You walk into the academy and discover that some of the people who are about to spend the next five minutes trying to choke you look young enough to be your children. You watch people effortlessly invert, scramble around the mat and perform techniques that seem to require the flexibility of a professional gymnast, while you are still trying to work out which way your hips are supposed to move.

It can be intimidating, particularly if you have spent the last couple of decades doing relatively normal adult things rather than preparing yourself for a career in grappling. You may have a job, a family, a few old football injuries and a body that occasionally makes strange noises when you get out of a chair. Then you discover that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu involves being repeatedly thrown onto the floor and having people attempt to bend your limbs in directions they were never designed to go.

The good news is that none of this means you are too old for BJJ.

In fact, one of the great things about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is that you don't need to be young, naturally athletic or particularly flexible to enjoy it and become good at it. There are huge numbers of recreational practitioners training successfully through their 40s, 50s and beyond. Most of them aren't trying to become world champions. They are training because they enjoy the challenge, they like learning something difficult, they enjoy the social side of being part of a good academy and, perhaps most importantly, they like the feeling of getting better at something that once seemed completely incomprehensible.

The trick is understanding that training BJJ at 40 is not necessarily about trying to train like you are 20. Your body is different, your priorities may be different and your reasons for training are probably different as well. That doesn't mean you have to wrap yourself in cotton wool or turn every training session into gentle stretching. It simply means that if you want BJJ to remain part of your life for the next ten or twenty years, you need to think a little more carefully about how you train.

The question isn't whether you are too old

The question I would ask isn't "Am I too old to do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?" It is "How do I train in a way that means I can still be doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu ten years from now?"

That is a much more useful question.

When you are younger, you can get away with a remarkable amount of physical stupidity. You can train hard on Monday, feel completely battered on Tuesday, go back to training on Wednesday and somehow convince yourself that you are fine. You can sleep badly, eat whatever happens to be available, spend the weekend doing something else physically demanding and still turn up at the academy on Monday ready to go again.

As you get older, the body becomes somewhat less forgiving. A sore shoulder that would once have disappeared overnight might still be sore three days later. A badly twisted knee can take longer to settle down. You may discover that your lower back doesn't particularly appreciate being folded in half repeatedly by somebody who weighs twenty kilos less than you but has somehow managed to get both legs behind your head.

That doesn't mean that turning 40 suddenly makes you fragile. It doesn't. A fit and healthy 40-year-old can be enormously strong and capable, and in many cases will have advantages over younger practitioners that have nothing to do with physical ability. Experience, patience, discipline and the ability to remain calm when things aren't going your way are all extremely valuable qualities in BJJ.

What changes is the margin for error. You can still train hard, but you may need to be more selective about when you do it, who you train with and how much recovery you allow yourself between sessions.

That is not a weakness. It is simply part of becoming a more experienced athlete.

You don't need to win every roll

One of the biggest adjustments for older BJJ practitioners is learning to stop treating every sparring round as a competition.

This can be difficult. Most people who are attracted to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu have at least some competitive instinct, and there is a natural temptation to resist every sweep, fight every submission and use every ounce of strength available to avoid being tapped. Nobody enjoys being submitted, particularly when the person doing it is considerably younger than you.

But there is a difference between trying hard and trying to win every single training round.

Your purpose in the academy is to improve. Sometimes that means winning a position, and sometimes it means deliberately putting yourself into a position where you are likely to lose. If you are working on escaping mount, for example, there isn't much point in desperately preventing your partner from getting mount in the first place. You might learn more by allowing them to get there and then spending several minutes trying to escape.

The same applies when you are rolling with somebody much better than you. If a younger blue or purple belt is able to control you easily, there is very little educational value in exhausting yourself trying to prevent them from doing something they are clearly capable of doing. You can concentrate instead on maintaining your frames, protecting your position, conserving energy and trying to understand what they are doing.

That approach changes the experience of BJJ enormously. Instead of every round being a little battle that you have to win, training becomes an opportunity to experiment. You can try techniques that might fail. You can deliberately put yourself into difficult positions. You can tap, reset and try again without feeling that your entire evening has somehow been ruined.

For somebody over 40, that mindset can make the difference between enjoying BJJ for a few years and still enjoying it twenty years later.

Technique becomes more important as you get older

There is an interesting thing that happens as you spend more time in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. The physical attributes that beginners often rely on most heavily — speed, strength, explosiveness and sheer effort — become less important as your technical understanding improves.

That is particularly encouraging for older practitioners.

You probably aren't going to become faster than the 22-year-old athlete who trains five times a week. You don't need to. Your objective is to make their speed less relevant by being in the right place before they get there.

Good positioning, frames, grips, timing and pressure can save enormous amounts of energy. Knowing what your opponent is trying to do before they actually complete the movement is even more valuable. Instead of reacting to every movement, you begin to recognise familiar patterns and anticipate what is coming next.

This is one of the reasons experienced older grapplers can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to deal with. They aren't necessarily stronger or faster than the younger person in front of them. They simply understand the position better.

That is something you can continue developing for decades.

In fact, one of the attractions of BJJ is that the sport gives you a way of replacing some physical advantages with technical understanding. You may lose a little speed as you get older, but you can compensate by becoming more efficient. You may not have the same cardiovascular capacity you had at 25, but you can learn not to waste energy. You may not be able to explode out of every bad position, but you can become much better at avoiding those positions in the first place.

That is a pretty good deal.

Be selective about your training partners

One of the most important things you can do as an older BJJ practitioner is to become comfortable choosing who you train with.

There is sometimes an unspoken culture in martial arts that suggests you should be willing to roll with anybody, regardless of their size, experience or temperament. I don't think that is particularly sensible. A good training partner is not simply somebody who can give you a hard round. They are somebody who can give you a productive round without unnecessarily putting you at risk.

Most academies have plenty of people like this. They are the experienced practitioners who know how to control their intensity, who don't spaz out when something goes wrong and who understand that the person on the other side of the roll is their training partner rather than their opponent in a cage fight.

Those are the people you want to spend time with.

There is nothing wrong with hard sparring. It can be extremely valuable and, for many people, it is one of the most enjoyable aspects of BJJ. But hard and reckless are not the same thing. A controlled black belt giving you a difficult five-minute round can be much safer than a physically strong beginner who has no idea how much force they are using.

You should also feel completely comfortable telling somebody when something is bothering you. If your shoulder is injured, tell them. If your knee doesn't like a particular movement, modify it. If somebody is consistently rolling in a way that leaves you injured, find somebody else to train with.

You are not required to prove your toughness to anybody.

Your objective is to keep training.

Recovery becomes part of your training

When you're younger, recovery can feel like something that happens automatically. You train, you get tired, you sleep, and somehow you are ready to go again.

That tends to become less reliable as you get older, which means recovery becomes something worth thinking about rather than something you simply assume will happen.

Sleep is probably the most obvious example. If you regularly train BJJ late at night, get home, eat something, stay awake scrolling through your phone and then get five hours of sleep before going to work, eventually the lack of recovery is going to catch up with you. The same applies to nutrition, hydration and the amount of other physical activity you are doing.

This doesn't mean you need to turn yourself into a professional athlete. Most recreational BJJ practitioners don't need complicated recovery protocols, expensive supplements or a cupboard full of gadgets measuring their sleep. The basics are remarkably effective: eat reasonably well, stay hydrated, get enough sleep, maintain your general strength and fitness, and give yourself enough time between hard sessions.

You also need to recognise that BJJ doesn't exist in isolation. If you are training three times a week, lifting weights twice, playing football at the weekend and spending your working day on your feet, your body is experiencing a lot more stress than your BJJ timetable might suggest.

Sometimes the smartest training decision is to have an easier session.

That can be difficult for competitive people to accept, but there is no prize for accumulating the most exhausted training hours. The goal is to make consistent progress without constantly digging yourself into a recovery hole.

Strength training can help enormously

For people over 40, maintaining strength is increasingly useful, both for BJJ and for life outside the academy.

You don't need to become a bodybuilder or start trying to squat enormous weights. The purpose of strength training is much simpler: maintain the physical capacity that allows you to move, train and recover effectively.

A sensible programme involving basic movements can help support your joints, maintain muscle mass and give you a greater physical reserve when you are grappling. It can also make everyday life easier, which is arguably just as important. Being able to pick things up, carry things, get off the floor and move confidently is useful whether you are wearing a BJJ belt or not.

The important thing is to remember that strength training should complement your BJJ rather than compete with it. If you destroy your legs in the gym on Wednesday and can barely walk into the academy on Thursday, you haven't necessarily made yourself a better grappler.

As you get older, training intelligently becomes more valuable than simply training more.

Don't become obsessed with flexibility

BJJ has a strange ability to make perfectly normal people believe they need to become contortionists.

You watch somebody effortlessly invert, put their foot behind their head or escape from a position that appears to require several additional joints, and suddenly you start wondering whether you should be spending an hour every morning stretching.

Mobility is certainly useful in BJJ, but you don't need to be extraordinarily flexible to become a good grappler. What matters much more is having enough mobility to move comfortably through the positions you actually use.

For older practitioners, this becomes particularly relevant because aggressive stretching isn't necessarily the answer to every mobility problem. Regular movement, sensible mobility work and gradually improving your usable range of motion are generally much more useful than forcing yourself into extreme positions because somebody on YouTube can do them.

Your body doesn't need to perform tricks.

It needs to move well enough for you to enjoy your training.

Don't ignore the little injuries

This is probably one of the hardest lessons for people who have been physically active for many years.

You develop a slightly sore elbow and tell yourself it will be fine. You train again, because it doesn't hurt that much. Then you train again because you've already paid for the membership and don't want to miss class. A couple of weeks later, you discover that picking up a shopping bag has become strangely uncomfortable.

BJJ can encourage this kind of behaviour because there is always another class. There is always another technique to learn, another open mat and another opportunity to roll.

But small problems are worth paying attention to.

That doesn't mean stopping training every time something aches. Anyone who has trained for a reasonable amount of time knows that there is a difference between normal post-training soreness and something that is becoming an actual injury. The important thing is not to ignore persistent or worsening pain simply because you really want to train.

Modify the position. Take a few days off. Ask your coach how you can work around the problem. If something isn't settling down, get appropriate professional advice.

The goal isn't to create a life where you never experience an injury. That is probably unrealistic if you train BJJ for long enough. The goal is to avoid turning a manageable problem into something that keeps you off the mats for six months.

Learn to tap without feeling bad about it

If there is one thing every older BJJ practitioner should become comfortable with, it is tapping.

There is no shame whatsoever in tapping to a younger, smaller, less experienced or more experienced training partner. You have nothing to prove. The purpose of the submission is to show you that you have reached a position from which you cannot safely escape. Your job is to recognise that position and tap before something gets damaged.

Sometimes ego gets in the way.

You know the armbar is there. You know you aren't getting out. You can feel the pressure increasing, but there is still a little voice in your head telling you that you might somehow escape if you can just hold on for another few seconds.

Those few seconds are not worth it.

Your training partner isn't going to think less of you because you tapped. In a good academy, they will probably be far more concerned about accidentally hurting you than about whether they "won" the round.

Tap, reset and carry on.

Your ego will recover almost immediately. Your elbow may take considerably longer.

Learn to love the fundamentals

One of the nicest things about getting older in BJJ is that you can eventually learn to appreciate the things that initially seemed boring.

When you are a beginner, it is easy to become fascinated by complicated techniques. You want the fancy submissions, unusual guards and clever sweeps. You watch instructional videos and find yourself convinced that the secret to becoming good at BJJ is learning another 47 techniques.

It usually isn't.

The longer you train, the more you appreciate the fundamentals: posture, frames, hip movement, base, grip fighting, guard retention, passing, pressure and escapes. These things aren't particularly glamorous, but they are what allow the more complicated techniques to work.

Very good grapplers often make BJJ look almost disappointingly simple. They aren't necessarily doing more than everyone else. They are usually doing less, but doing it earlier, more efficiently and from a better position.

That is an extremely useful lesson for somebody over 40.

You don't need to know everything. You need to know the things that are relevant to your game and become increasingly difficult to stop.

You don't have to train like a competitor

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a recreational BJJ practitioner.

Not everybody needs to compete. Not everybody needs to train five days a week. Not everybody needs to collect medals, chase belts or spend their evenings watching instructional videos.

For some people, BJJ will become a serious competitive pursuit. That's fantastic. For others, it will be two or three evenings a week where they get to exercise, learn something difficult, laugh with their training partners and temporarily forget about work and everything else going on in their lives.

Both are legitimate ways to train.

In fact, one of the advantages of being over 40 is that you may already have a better idea of what you actually want from the sport. You don't necessarily need external validation. You don't have to prove to anybody that you are tough. You don't need to become the best person in the room.

You can simply enjoy getting better.

And there is something particularly satisfying about that.

Finding the right academy matters

If you're starting BJJ after 40, choosing the right academy is probably more important than choosing the perfect instructional or worrying about which particular guard you should learn first.

Look for a gym where people genuinely seem to enjoy training together. Pay attention to how experienced practitioners treat beginners. Watch how people roll. Listen to how the coach talks to students. Does the atmosphere feel competitive in a positive way, or does everybody seem desperate to prove something?

A good academy should have room for different types of students. There should be competitors, hobbyists, beginners, older practitioners, younger practitioners and people who simply want to learn something interesting after work.

The best gyms understand that not everybody has the same body, the same goals or the same timetable.

That becomes particularly important as you get older because the culture of the academy can have a direct effect on how long you stay involved. A gym where everybody is trying to smash each other every night is probably not the ideal environment for somebody who wants to keep training into their 50s and 60s.

A gym where people care about their training partners is a very different proposition.

BJJ can actually help you feel younger

There is a slightly strange contradiction at the heart of training BJJ after 40.

On the one hand, the sport reminds you that you aren't 20 anymore. You become very aware of recovery, mobility and the occasional ache that wasn't there a decade ago.

On the other hand, BJJ can make you feel remarkably young.

You are learning something new. You are moving your body. You are solving physical problems. You are spending time with people who might be considerably younger than you. You are still capable of being a beginner at something, which is an experience that becomes surprisingly rare as you get older and become more established in the rest of your life.

That may be one of the greatest benefits of the sport.

You don't have to pretend you're young. You don't have to train like a 20-year-old or compete with people half your age. You simply have to remain curious and willing to learn.

There is something quite powerful about walking into an academy at 50 and still being prepared to be completely rubbish at something new.

The real goal is to still be on the mats

Perhaps the biggest change in mindset for an older BJJ practitioner is to stop asking, "How hard can I train?" and start asking, "How long can I keep doing this?"

Those questions lead to very different behaviours.

The first encourages you to push yourself as hard as possible every time you train. The second encourages you to think about consistency, recovery, injury prevention, good training partners, technical development and enjoying the process.

If you are 45 and start BJJ, you don't need to become a black belt as quickly as possible. You don't need to compare your progress with somebody who started at 19. Your journey is your own.

You might have some brilliant years. You might have periods when work or family means you train less. You might get injured and have to take time off. You might discover that your game changes dramatically as you get older. None of that matters particularly much.

What matters is that you keep coming back.

If you can still walk onto the mats at 50, 55, 60 or beyond, you have achieved something considerably more valuable than winning a few extra training rounds when you were 42.

You have made BJJ part of your life.

And perhaps that is the best way to think about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu after 40. You don't need to fight against your age. You don't need to pretend your body hasn't changed. You simply need to use what you have, keep learning, train intelligently, choose your partners carefully, tap when you need to and give yourself enough recovery to come back again.

The young guys can have the athleticism.

You have time, experience and, hopefully, a little more wisdom than you had when you were 20, use it and keep training.

OSS!

Article written by Jimmy Rose, lifelong martial artist and BJJ enthusiast.