There comes a point in life when comfort becomes increasingly easy to find. By the time we reach our 50s, many of us have spent decades building careers, families, homes, and routines. We’ve hopefully become more financially secure. We know ourselves better, and we may have fewer reasons to prove ourselves than we did at 25.
Those are all great, but I believe there’s also a danger in becoming too comfortable. I think men over 50 need something physically difficult in their lives. We need something that challenges us, occasionally intimidates us, forces us to confront our limitations, and gives us a reason to continue becoming stronger and more capable.
For me, martial arts training is a perfect fit, though it doesn’t necessarily have to be martial arts. It could be lifting weights, hiking, rucking, running, swimming, climbing, or some other physically demanding pursuit. But I think there’s enormous value in having something in your life that requires physical effort, discipline, discomfort, and continued growth.
At this stage of life, the goal shouldn’t simply be to preserve what we have. We should still be finding ways to become better.
Our Bodies Weren’t Designed to Sit All Day
Many of us spend an enormous percentage of our lives sitting. We sit at a desk at work, we sit in the car, we sit while eating, we sit while watching television, and we sit while scrolling through our phones. We then wonder why our hips feel tight, our backs hurt, we’ve gained weight, and movements that once seemed effortless gradually become more difficult.
Exercise is one of the most obvious ways to fight back against this, though martial arts takes that a step further.
A boxing workout might have you moving around the ring, rotating through your hips and torso, slipping punches, changing levels, throwing combinations, and working through rounds that challenge your cardiovascular system.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu requires you to move your body through positions that most adults almost never encounter in everyday life. You’re pushing, pulling, bridging, framing, rotating, getting off the floor, and constantly adjusting your position against another human being.
It’s exercise, but it doesn’t always feel like exercise because there’s a purpose behind everything you’re doing. This is because you’re also learning a skill.
Martial Arts Gives You a Reason to Stay Fit
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about martial arts is that fitness isn’t entirely an end in itself, and it presents plenty of other reasons to be fit. You want to survive class. You want to keep up with younger practitioners. You might want to compete. You want to make it through another round without completely running out of gas.
And if you’re going to train regularly, you quickly discover that what you do outside the gym affects what happens inside it. You learn that you need to have a plan for continue strength training, maintaining cardiovascular conditioning, improving mobility, prioritizing recovery, dialing in your nutrition, and getting sufficient sleep.
Suddenly, “getting in shape” isn’t an abstract goal. You’re getting in shape for something specific. I’ve found that enormously motivating.
Competition Doesn’t Have to Disappear After 50
There’s obviously an unhealthy version of competitiveness. Nobody needs to turn every interaction into a contest or base his self-worth on whether he can outperform someone else, but healthy competition can be incredibly motivating, and martial arts keeps that competitive instinct alive.
Sometimes you’re competing against another person. Sometimes you’re trying to keep pace with the younger people in class. And other times you’re simply competing against the person you were six months ago.
It’s healthy to regularly evaluate whether you can move better, learn a technique, improve your conditioning, stay calm while exhausted, or simply become a better version of yourself. I think that mentality can carry over into the rest of our lives.
For many men in their 50s, these can still be prime career and entrepreneurial years. We may have decades of experience behind us while still having plenty of ambition ahead of us. Learning to compete, adapt, persist, and improve doesn’t suddenly become irrelevant because we’ve reached a certain birthday.
Martial Arts Teaches Problem-Solving Under Pressure
One of the things I love about martial arts, especially Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and other arts which involve live sparring, is that it’s essentially a constantly changing problem that has to be solved in real time.
You’re constantly adapting to a live situation with ongoing attacks and adjustments during the session. All of this happens while you’re physically uncomfortable and frequently tired.
I believe that mentality has affected how I’ve approached challenges outside martial arts. My wife and I started a business during the pandemic largely out of necessity. It grew surprisingly quickly and we now find ourselves conducting business internationally with four employees spread across multiple continents.
Looking back, I believe part of our ability to make that happen came from the competitive and fighting spirits we’d both developed over years of martial arts training. At the time, I was heavily involved in BJJ, while my wife was training in both kickboxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
After my wife was laid off from her VP position and my former industry was shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, our respective employment scenarios just became another problem to solve, like a real life sparring session.
We were simply encountering a problem and figuring it out.. When one approach didn’t work, we tried another. When circumstances changed, we adapted. When things became difficult, we kept moving. Just like rolling in class or in competition.
I’m not suggesting that martial arts magically creates successful entrepreneurs. But I do think repeatedly practicing persistence and problem-solving under pressure can influence how we respond when life presents us with difficult problems.
There’s Value in Staying Connected to Our Primal Side
Modern life is extraordinarily comfortable compared with almost every period of human history, and that’s mostly a wonderful thing. But I also think there’s value in occasionally reconnecting with something more primal.
Hit a heavy bag, wrestle with another human being, or pick something heavy off the floor. Carry stuff, sprint, climb, push yourself until you’re breathing hard, feel your heart pounding, then recover and do it all again.
There’s something deeply satisfying about remembering that underneath the emails, meetings, mortgages, smartphones, and responsibilities of modern life, we’re still physical creatures.
For me, martial arts provides that connection. It prevents me from getting too soft. Not just physically, but mentally too.
Physical Difficulty Creates Gratitude
There’s another benefit of difficult training that I’ve come to appreciate more as I’ve gotten older: Gratitude.
When you’re young, it’s easy to assume your body will always do whatever you ask of it, but getting older changes that perspective. Training hard in your 50s can make you acutely aware of what a privilege it is to still be able to do these things.
If I can walk into a boxing gym, wrap my hands, hit the heavy bag, work through several rounds, and walk out exhausted, that’s something worth appreciating. The difficulty itself becomes part of what makes it meaningful.
Instead of thinking, I have to exercise today, the perspective gradually becomes “I get to do this”.
That’s a very different relationship with physical activity.
We Still Need to Grow
One of the biggest dangers I see in getting older isn’t simply physical decline. It’s stagnation.
We become established in our careers. We know what we’re good at. We develop routines. We gravitate toward familiar people and familiar experiences. It’s very easy to stop being a beginner. Martial arts doesn’t allow that for very long.
There’s always another technique you don’t understand, somebody better than you, or another weakness to address. And there’s always some aspect of your game that needs improvement. Even after years of training, you can walk into the gym and discover how much you still don’t know. I think that’s healthy, especially as we age.
Being a beginner keeps us humble, learning keeps us engaged, and struggling keeps us growing.
Turning 50 doesn’t mean that our years of personal development are behind us. There should still be things we’re bad at today that we might become good at tomorrow.
Don’t Let the Old Man In
There’s a line associated with Clint Eastwood that I’ve always loved: “Don’t let the old man in.”
The idea isn’t that we should pretend we’re 25, because we’re not.
Training intelligently after 50 means acknowledging reality. Recovery becomes more important, injuries matter, and training volume may need to change. We need to listen to our bodies and choose our battles more carefully. But accepting our age isn’t the same thing as surrendering to it.
There’s an enormous difference between recognizing that you’re getting older and deciding that being old is now your identity. Physical challenges give us a way to resist that mindset.
I’m not training because I believe I can stop aging. I’m training because I want to continue discovering what my body and mind are capable of as I age, and I believe that’s a much more interesting question.
Martial Arts Creates Community
Another thing that can become increasingly important as we get older is community.
Adult life has a way of shrinking our social circles. People become busy with careers and families, friends move away, and relationships may change.
Martial arts gyms provide something that’s increasingly uncommon in adult life: a place where people of different ages and backgrounds regularly come together around a shared pursuit.
You suffer through the same workouts, you learn from one another, and you help each other improve. Laughing together, competing together, and becoming friends with people you may never have met otherwise can be incredibly beneficial as we get older.
For men especially, that kind of activity-based friendship can be valuable. You don’t necessarily have to sit down and announce that you’re building a social network. You just keep showing up and over time, community develops around you. I’ve only been training at my boxing club for a few months, but I already have plenty of teammates who I look forward to seeing each time I arrive. We discuss family, training, work, and life in general. We offer one another encouragement and support, and we even help one another out in our personal lives. This type of bonding happens very quickly in a fight gym.
Hard Training Can Help Preserve the Physical Qualities We Associate With Youth
There are also straightforward physiological reasons to keep challenging ourselves physically as we age.
Men naturally tend to experience changes in muscle mass, strength, power, cardiovascular capacity, and hormone levels as they get older. Testosterone levels also commonly decline with age.
Physical training can’t stop the aging process, and martial arts shouldn’t be presented as some kind of natural testosterone-replacement therapy. But remaining physically active, particularly through resistance training and vigorous exercise, can help preserve many of the physical qualities that otherwise tend to deteriorate with inactivity.
Martial arts can be particularly useful because it demands so many things simultaneously: strength, cardiovascular conditioning, coordination, balance, speed, power, mobility, and mental concentration.
I’d still argue that martial artists over 50 should include dedicated strength training in their routines. But martial arts gives us an unusually broad physical challenge.
The objective isn’t to maintain the testosterone level or athletic abilities we had at 25. Instead, it’s to give ourselves the best chance of remaining strong, capable, energetic, and physically engaged at 55, 65, 75, and beyond.
Your Difficult Thing Doesn’t Have to Be Martial Arts
I’m obviously biased.
Martial arts has played an enormous role in my life, and for me it checks nearly every box. It’s physically demanding, intellectually challenging, competitive, it creates community, it keeps me humble, and no matter how long I train, there’s always something else to learn.
But martial arts isn’t the only answer. Your difficult thing might be kettlebell training, powerlifting, hiking, rucking, running marathons, or climbing mountains.
What matters is that you have something that periodically takes you outside your comfort zone and asks more of you. Something where improvement has to be earned, that you can’t accomplish simply by writing a check, and something that reminds you that you’re still capable of becoming stronger.
Don’t Just Preserve. Keep Building.
There’s a tendency to talk about fitness after 50 almost entirely in terms of preventing decline, preventing muscle loss, preventing falls, preventing cardiovascular disease, and preventing weight gain.
All of those things matter, but I don’t find “decline more slowly” to be a particularly inspiring goal. I want something more than that.
I want to continue learning, challenging myself, remaining competitive, and to occasionally do things that are uncomfortable. I want to discover that something that was difficult six months ago has become easier because I’ve gotten better. And I want to remain grateful that I’m still physically capable of doing difficult things.
Maybe that’s ultimately why men over 50 need something physically difficult in their lives. We’re not just trying to hold onto the men we used to be.
We’re still building the men we’re going to become.
