As you have gotten older, have you altered your training at all to stay healthy?
The main thing with age is you can stay proficient for a long time. I don’t think you will get much better but you can retain your skills for awhile. The recovery is the main concern. It takes much longer to recover and you have to be very, very careful about overtraining. Grapplers are a notoriously overtrained group. Most grapplers are chronically fatigued and injured. A lot of people fail to realize that grappling is a form of resistance training. You are facing a live, resisting opponent and you are expending a great deal of energy. And then when you add in supplementary training on top of your jiu-jitsu training, you can become quite overtrained very quickly. So, in order to avoid overtraining, I am very careful about how I train. I don’t train hard every day like I used to. Don’t get me wrong, I do train hard but I space those sessions out. On sessions where I am not training hard, I like to work my technique on the beginners and girls. I think it’s a great way to get your movements and practice your skills but you’re not turning it into an all-out sparring session. So, you can still get a nice sweat and a nice roll in; but it won’t be as hard on your body.
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