Why No One Trains Jiu-Jitsu Forever

Advice from a 27-year-old with back problems.

Los Angeles, CA — Photo by OV Films

Jiu-Jitsu as a lifestyle is inherently unsustainable.

All sports, however, are the same. There’s a reason why you don’t see very many professional athletes in their 40s, 50s, or 60s.

The human body is not designed to maintain a high level of performance for more than a few decades if that.

At 27, I am old enough not to be the youngest guy in the gym anymore and to have a plethora of overuse injuries, but I’m also young enough to have to listen to much older grapplers tell me “how good I have it”.

Here’s the truth:

Younger grapplers don’t have perspective to tell you about longevity.

But most older grapplers don’t really have it either. Jiu-Jitsu is too new of a sport for people to have decades of experience competing.

There’s very little good advice out there on longevity in BJJ.

Very few grapplers are competing at the highest levels for long periods of time without doing a ton of steroids, destroying their bodies, or both. Pretty much no one is talking about how to train healthily and for performance. It’s usually one or the other.

So I figured, why not me? I’ll try to find the middle ground.

Here’s what I’ve learned about health from destroying my body doing Jiu-Jitsu.