I can't get that old, ever. I am 45 next year, and it's like Oscar Wilde had said: "The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young" and you have to show that. Starting with jiu jitsu next month. Let's roll!
Only if you let it. Treat every injury as a sign to rest and recover, don't overdo it, and don't fight a submission you already lost.
I've been doing it for 17 years and I feel great. Had a few injuries over the years and I always take time off and do active recovery instead while I'm injured.
Oh I know not to fight when something is lost, but in nogi my shit just gets wrecked superfast because it's so explosive and people treat your neck like it's a handle.
I've been doing martial arts in general for almost 30 years now, and I definitely was too careless when I was young. Bad advice about injuries where I got sent to a chiropractor instead of a surgeon meant I already had to get hip surgery before I had turned 40. (Bad FAI angles aggravated by trying to break through the pain, for over a decade, since I believed everyone I was being lazy and soft) I'm luckily more careful now, but there's still days where I'm in pain just from walking or driving my car.
That sucks, chiros are a scam. Surgery used to be pushed hard too, when rest and appropriate PT is usually the best option. Unfortunately people ignore the PT far too often and just focus on the rest part, and end up even worse off due to not being able to maintain stabilizer muscle.
Active rest and PT really keeps a body healthy, especially as one gets older.
Yeah, I get surgery sometimes is pushed unnecessary but in my case my femur head made me have a FAI angle of only 35 degrees. Which caused physical damage to the point of oedema, osteoporosis, a cyst and shredded connective tissue. No PT is going to solve that. Recovery took over a year but at least I can now train 4-5 times a week again when before I was lucky if I could go once every two weeks.
And fuck chiropractors. I'm still angry at my former physician for referring me to a quack who cracked my neck for something that literally was a congenital problem with my femur head. I suppose I should have gotten a second opinion but I brought this up from when I was twenty untill in my thirties. It was only spotted when I got a full body RX for something else.
Im 43. Im still riding motorcycles, touching my wife inappropriately in public, and it only hurt for a couple of hours when I fell off my longboard the last time.