How to excel in combat sport as an older athlete
There are benefits to designing sport to favour the talents of an older athlete. With each year a career is extended, another year of experience and wisdom is gained, which benefits long-term development and the education of other participants. Fighting is viewed as a young person’s game, but as aging athletes have become a worldwide phenomenon over the last generation or so, what can be done to accommodate them in martial arts and boxing?
Most elite boxers start competing in their teens or early 20s. Olympic boxers are at the lower end of this range, but professional world champions in boxing and MMA tend to be in their mid to late 30s. Usyk is 38, Crawford is 34, Bivol is 34 (at time of writing, April 2025). When I won a world title in Savate I was 35. The optimum age for champions is at the intersection where the upward line of experience meets the downwards line of age-related decline. It seems that mid 30s is a good average for attaining that balance in combat sport, after which the number of champions appears to drop off sharply. The question is: are we able to push that intersection point further along and engineer things to allow athletes over 40 more success in fight sports?
George Foreman was famously a champion at 45. Bernard Hopkins broke that record by becoming a boxing world champion at 46, 48, and 49. But if you don’t possess the ageless qualities of these two exceptions, is there a way you can – or should – train and compete in a fight sport at 40, 50, even 60 years old? There are physiological changes that affect an older athlete, and this in turn presents difficulties in maintaining an intense training regime. But if the design of fighting competition were to lend more advantages to experience and insight, it would favour the upward line over the downwards one. Realistically you won’t eliminate youthful advantages such as speed or suppleness in any fight sport worth the name, but you can begin to balance it out.
Lower damage
Begin by removing the more damaging part of fight training, such as taking repeated heavy blows, or the need to generate maximal forces when striking. Over weeks, months, and years, eliminating this toll reduces wear and tear, and therefore injury likelihood. This lower damage trajectory promotes extended careers and provides us with more experienced athletes in their 40s and 50s without career-ending injuries. We can accomplish this aim by regulating the strikes to a limit of touch contact only. This is what happens in Savate Assaut. We permit contact, and all the tactics that go with that pursuit, but not damage. This is a physical skill, not simply a prescription for taking care. The ability to touch at full speed without causing an opponent any damage takes practice and is worth learning in itself. It is also a teachable technique, like training proper foot position or turning your hips fully for a cross. It permits longevity, longer careers, and helps avoid injury.
Critics will say that this robs fight sports of their raison d’être – which is to damage or harm your opponent more than they hurt you. But is that a necessary or integral part of combat sport? Speed, tactics, agility, and fitness are all properly tested at low contact and these are all undeniably fighting skills. Insofar as all fight sports in some way strip out the most damaging strikes from competition (allowing you to compete more than once) there is nothing inherently different in making it just a bit safer. There are no elbows allowed in boxing, no headbutts in MMA, no groin shots or back of the head blows in either. So I argue it is a matter of degree. It might even be more ethical in the long run.
It is becoming more widely acknowledged that hard sparring, while essential for learning how to take a punch or for conditioning responses, should be taken in small doses. Hard sparring has a risk profile that is not always worth it when the gains from technical or controlled sparring provide so many of the same benefits. The deleterious effects of hard sparring across a career are getting more and more alarming. Cumulative damage from subconcussive blows is now seen as the bigger risk factor than a one punch knockout, and an athlete typically takes more of those in sparring than in the ring. The CTE and brain damage reckonings that are changing sports such as American Football (see NFL athletes with CTE) and Rugby will surely become boxing’s biggest headache before too long.
Photo: Me vs Janne, combined age 90 (Helsinki Savate Open 2025).
Credit: Suomen Savate Boxe Francaise FInland
Youth vs experience
To accommodate an older athlete, we may elect to award higher value scores to technique and tactics – which may be retained later in a career – over brute force and intensity. For instance, in Savate (both Combat and Assaut) strikes must be properly formed in order to score, using correct body angles and full extension. This requires anticipation, which is borne of experience, as one needs to know where the opponent will be in a moment’s time. And in order to deploy such proper technique at competitive speed, a degree of calm triumphing over aggression is necessary. Without being able to crash through a defence using force, more intelligent approaches are obliged of competitors in order to win. When no power is permitted, one must be a little more discerning about tool selection and this places higher emphasis on tactics.
With these two changes – lowering damage and promoting intelligent tactics – we open the field up to an older athlete pitching experience against those armed with youth and aggression. Novices would then be able train alongside established fighters for longer, and titles could be disputed between young and old. This adds not only to the wealth of knowledge, but permits it to be transmitted person to person, not just via books or coaching. Youthfulness would remain a huge advantage, of course, for speed, flexibility, and intensity are always tradable for success in any ring. We should never look to eliminate their utility entirely, but if we promote intelligence and tactics as equally valuable, we broaden the art, the pool of athletes, and the skillset. It can also provoke interest, as pundits love to debate contrasts of style – such as whether a puncher will beat a brawler, a shorter fighter a tall one, or age vs experience. By levelling the field we add to this richness. I also argue the approach is more ethical, in the long run.
Martial arts are supposed to fuse mind, body, and spirit. In ring sport, do we demand too much of youth and body, and too little of mind and spirit? We ask fighters to sacrifice their youth in exchange for short careers, CTE, and actual blood. A healthier balance would help to limit this sacrifice. Rather than get upset when someone like Floyd Mayweather wins using a literal interpretation of ‘hit, don’t get hit’, or a boxer takes a knee to avoid eye damage, shouldn’t we be saying – well done, you have other virtues, and they will last longer.
How to train as an older athlete
If you are over 30 and want to do a fight sport, you can. I am 45 and recently retained my world vice champion title in Savate Assaut. My opponent in the final was half my age. My opponent in the British championships, by contrast, was nearly 70. There’s a hotly contested veterans tournament in France for the over 40s. I have students and clients training and sparring safely with me in their 50s. You may need to adapt your training regime to your needs as most boxing programmes are written for elite Olympic-age boxers. Adjust your goals to suit your current status, or any previous injuries or wear and tear, and there is no reason not to progress comfortably. This may mean aiming for e.g. a mobility achievement which is simply assumed in the case of younger athletes. Or if you haven’t sprinted since you were a kid, try to experiment with it before doing an elite track workout, for example.
- Pay attention to training volume. Build up slowly and through feedback you can observe your limitations. “Older athletes may be limited primarily by the inability to maintain the same volume and intensity of training” (link),
- Recovery takes longer as you age (source), so be sure to add more rest days and give yourself time to adapt between workouts.
- Keep up variety, try different things on different days to vary the stimulus, which will reduce stress on particular muscle groups or sequences.
- Set strength training goals to reduce injury likelihood and improve your functional ability before trying more intricate techniques.
Many thanks to Janne Sinivirta, both for the many technical matches we have enjoyed in our 40s (rather proving the point of this article) and for his advice and tips in drafting it.