Martial Arts After 40: Is It Too Late to Start?
One of the questions I hear quite often is whether it is too late to start martial arts. Sometimes the person asking is in their late thirties, sometimes they are in their forties or fifties, and sometimes they have wanted to try martial arts for years but kept postponing it because they felt they had missed their chance.
I understand where this feeling comes from. When you look at a martial arts class, you might see people who are 20 years old, extremely fit, flexible, fast, and already experienced. If you are 45 and have never trained before, walking into that room as a complete beginner can feel intimidating. You may wonder whether you will be able to keep up, whether you will get injured, or whether everyone will immediately notice that you don't know what you're doing.
But here is the thing: you don't have to start martial arts at 20 for martial arts to be worth doing.
In fact, I think there are some very good reasons to start later in life.
You are not 20 anymore
Let's get one thing out of the way first. If you are starting martial arts after 40, your body is probably not the same as it was at 20. You might need more recovery, you might have an old injury, your flexibility might have changed, and you may not be able to train hard every day and feel completely fine the next morning.
That's not necessarily a problem. It is simply something you have to take into account.
When people talk about exercise and getting older, I often see two completely opposite messages. One is that age doesn't matter at all and you can do anything if you just believe in yourself. The other is that once you reach a certain age, you should forget about challenging yourself and focus only on gentle exercise.
I don't think either approach is particularly useful.
Age does matter. Your body changes, and your recovery changes. But that doesn't mean that you have to stop challenging yourself. It means you have to become better at understanding how you should challenge yourself.
The right difficulty
This is something I have had to learn myself. I started martial arts as a child, and over the years I have trained in very different ways. I have done Kung Fu, competed, taught, trained in Hong Kong for years, studied martial arts academically, and eventually started competing professionally in MMA in my mid-thirties.
I know what it feels like to train very hard. I also know that there is a difference between training hard and simply accumulating fatigue.
When you are younger, it can be tempting to think that every training session should leave you exhausted. As you get older, you may start asking a different question: What am I actually trying to improve?
If your goal is to become better at martial arts, then destroying yourself in every session isn't necessarily the best way to get there. Sometimes you need to work hard. Sometimes you need to work on technique. Sometimes you need strength training, mobility work or recovery.
All of those things are part of training.
And to add, your "work hard" can mean 100% as well as 20% on other days. Life is not black and white.
I don't think intelligent training means avoiding difficult things. Quite the opposite. It means choosing the right difficulty for the person who is doing the training.
Is martial arts a good exercise after 40?
Martial arts can be a very complete form of physical activity because you don't necessarily have to separate your physical training from your skill training. Depending on the style and how you practice, you may be working on strength, balance, mobility, coordination, flexibility and cardiovascular fitness while also trying to learn something new.
Research on martial arts in older adults has found potential improvements in several areas of functional fitness, including strength, mobility, aerobic endurance, flexibility and balance. The evidence is still relatively limited and the studies vary considerably, so I wouldn't make dramatic claims that martial arts are some kind of miracle solution for aging. But the findings are certainly interesting.
What I personally like about martial arts is that you aren't simply exercising. You are learning while you exercise. Your brain has something to do at the same time as your body is working. You have to remember a sequence, coordinate your movements, respond to another person, solve a physical problem or figure out why a technique isn't working.
For me, that makes martial arts much more interesting than simply counting repetitions.
You might actually be a better martial arts student now
There is another side to getting older that I think gets overlooked. When you are 20, you might be physically capable of doing a lot, but that doesn't automatically make you a good learner.
When you are older, you may have more patience and a better understanding of yourself. You may also be less interested in impressing other people and more interested in actually understanding what you are doing.
That is something I value enormously in martial arts. I don't want students to simply copy movements because someone told them that this is how the movement is supposed to look. I want them to understand what they are doing.
Why is your foot here? Why are you moving your body this way? What is the technique supposed to achieve? What happens if your opponent reacts differently? Is there another way to approach the movement?
Those questions don't become less interesting when you turn 40. If anything, they can become more interesting.
This is also part of the reason I called my project Kung Fu Scholars. Martial arts are physical, but they are also an intellectual practice. There is no age limit on curiosity.
What changes when you start martial arts after 40?
If you are starting martial arts after 40, you may need to approach your training somewhat differently than a teenager or a 20-year-old athlete. That doesn't mean that you need a completely different type of martial arts. It means that you need to pay attention to your individual circumstances.
Maybe you have an old knee injury. Maybe you have spent the last fifteen years sitting at a desk. Maybe you are already strong but have poor mobility. Maybe you are flexible but have never developed much strength. Or maybe you are reasonably fit but have never done anything that requires this kind of coordination.
There is no reason all of these people should be given exactly the same training.
Recovery becomes particularly important. Strength training can be useful. Mobility work can be useful. A proper warm-up can be useful. So can simply learning to recognize the difference between productive discomfort and something that your body is telling you to stop doing.
I don't believe that ignoring pain is a sign of toughness. Sometimes it is simply a sign that you are ignoring useful information.
Do you need to be fit before starting martial arts?
This is another reason people postpone starting. They think they first need to get into shape and then they will start martial arts.
I understand the logic, but it can become a very convenient way of never actually starting. You decide that you need to lose some weight first. Then you decide you need to become more flexible. Then you decide you need to get stronger. Before you know it, another year has passed and you are still telling yourself that you will start once you are in better shape.
You don't have to arrive as a finished product. All these benefits will come from your practice; they are not prerequisites.
If you have been inactive for a long time, of course it makes sense to start gradually. If you have a medical condition or an injury, you may need to modify your training and get appropriate advice before beginning. But you don't need to become fit enough to start martial arts. You can develop your fitness through the practice itself.
Being a beginner is not something you need to apologize for. That is what beginners are supposed to be.
What can martial arts give you after 40?
This is where I think the question becomes more interesting.
Perhaps you want to become fitter. Perhaps you want to improve your balance or mobility. Perhaps you want to learn something difficult, get away from your computer, or finally try something you have been curious about for years.
Maybe you simply want to challenge yourself in a completely different way.
One of the things I like about learning martial arts as an adult is that you regularly have to become a beginner again.
You might be very competent at your job. You might be used to being the person who knows what they are doing. Then you walk into a martial arts class and suddenly you can't coordinate your hands and feet. You forget which side is supposed to move. You lose your balance. You can't remember the sequence.
And then, slowly, you get a little better.
I think there is something valuable about that experience. Adults become very good at doing things they already know how to do. Martial arts give you a chance to deliberately put yourself in a situation where you don't know what you're doing yet.
That can be uncomfortable.
It can also be incredibly rewarding.
Starting later doesn't mean you missed your chance
I sometimes think we spend too much time comparing ourselves with the person we could have been if we had started earlier.
What if I had started at 20? What if I had trained more? What if I had been stronger? What if I had competed when I was younger?
These questions can be interesting, but they aren't particularly useful.
You didn't start at 20. Maybe you didn't start at 40 either.
So what?
You are here now.
A much more interesting question is: What could you learn if you started now and kept going for the next ten years?
At 40, ten years is still a very long time. At 50, it is still a very long time. Even if you never become a competitor, there is an enormous amount you can learn in that time.
So, is 40 too old to start martial arts?
I don't think there is a magical age at which martial arts stop being appropriate.
There are people who start in their 40s, people who start in their 50s, and people who start even later. Their training may look different from that of a 20-year-old competitor, and it should. The point isn't to pretend that your age doesn't exist. The point is to work with the body and the life that you actually have.
You don't have to be young. You don't have to be flexible. You don't have to be fit. You don't have to compete. And you don't have to know exactly what you are doing when you walk into your first class.
You just have to be willing to be a beginner.
Perhaps that is one of the most valuable things martial arts can teach us as adults: you are allowed to be bad at something again.
And then get better.
Want to start learning Kung Fu?
That's one of the reasons I created the online coaching program Kung Fu Scholars. I work with adults who want to learn Kung Fu seriously, but who don't necessarily want the environment of ego, intimidation and "no pain, no gain."
My students come from different countries and have very different backgrounds. Some have trained martial arts before, while others are complete beginners. What they have in common is that they want to learn, they are willing to practice, and they want to understand what they are doing rather than simply follow instructions.
You don't need to become a fighter, and you don't need to train every day. You do need to be curious and willing to put in the work.
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