Can you practice into “old age”? 

It’s a question no one has the luxury of running from… and yet it’s not such a popular topic. And when it is confronted, it is done so with the belief that if you are going to continue practicing with age, it ill have to be a watered down version, performed with less intensity. 

But an attitude of resignation is unwarranted. There is room, not just for optimism, but for an uncompromising excitement for the future. A movement practice not only persists into old age, it transforms and evolves with you. And it can be done full on, with maximum intensity, without sacrificing work ethic. 

People equate a serious work ethic, going “full on”, with damaging the body. There are many ways to practice full on; it’s highly simplistic to treat physical load and standard stress to standard tissues as the marker of the intensity of a practice. 

Go full on... in layers such as focus, attention to detail, patience. Even asking the difficult questions “is this the right thing for me to be working on?“

And that’s the other issue here… what is the orientation of your practice? Not the “what”, but “where” you are going with it? Is it deliberately chosen, or did it choose you, by falling into your lap at the right moment? 

If you don’t re-orient yourself, if you don’t change the what (or even the how), it you don’t let things evolve, you’re in trouble. No amount of periodization and volume management schemes, no matter how complex, will change that. If all you do is handstands and strength work, where the diversity of “what” is so minimal, you’re going to pay the price. 

We are all dealing with it at some level, and we can’t afford to turn away from that question - whether we know it or not, we are making the choices now that define the future. The good news here is that you can practice till your last moment, and you can do it beautifully, without sacrificing the things that make movement practice singularly special - quality and attention to detail, the work ethic it demands, the fears it puts you up against, the way it connects the seemingly disparate, the exploration and adventure and growth that characterize it.

It’s not about delaying the age at which you stop practicing; nor is it about holding onto the past; it’s about embracing the wheel of time - we want complexity, growth. How could we grow, our prime mandate, if we hold so strongly onto the past? If you can’t figure it out on your own, age will try to force you into seeing the bigger picture; yet sometimes we manage to keep our eyes shut and continue marching forward along a path that takes us to a place we have no desire to be. 

You can go infinitely hard, you can maintain a beautiful ever-evolving, ever-complexifying practice into old age, until the day you die, if you can respect that.