BTG 60 - 40+ Athlete Goals

Hey guys, what's going on? This is David Avlon with another episode of Breaking the Guard. To today's episode, I'm going to talk about what your goals should be for being a 40 plus athlete. But if you're not in that age category, I think it will help to still listen because if you plan on being in your 40s, which hopefully all of you are if you're below 40, there are some things you're going to want to know as far as setting yourself up for success later in life. Okay, but before we get into that, some things that are popped up in the news. Uh, one that I saw that was this is a cool thing was that Mikey Musi apparently got a sponsorship deal with Meta and he's like I guess they're doing something with the VR which is super cool. U hats off to him for getting that. Apparently he's trained with Mark Zuckerberg a bunch of times so they're doing they didn't really elaborate too much of what it is but it'll be interesting to see if they can actually get grappling into VR. I would personally think that would be a very challenging thing to do because without feedback, it's going to be harder be able to do that type of motion of setting up arm locks or whatnot if there's nothing to feel. I've done the VR boxing before. That's pretty cool. Um, you don't really need the feedback as much because hopefully you're not getting hit slipping punches, you know, or blocking. You could do it with VR pretty well. I think striking, especially just the hands, works pretty well in VR, but grappling, I think, would be a unique challenge without having some type of feedback to resist your motions. But, uh, who knows? Let's see what they can do with it. In any case, it just brings more attention to grappling and jiu-jitsu, which is wonderful. We could definitely use more of it, especially with a good ambassador like someone like Mikey, who's a cleancut kid. So, hats off to him for for getting that sponsorship deal or that partnership. I also saw a couple of my former students in the on the news. There's one which I'm sure you guys seen that was going viral where a wrestler throws a guy who with a knife who's trying to assault them in the parking lot. It was actually one of my former students, Javier Bayz. He did a great job of executing that throw and uh I'm glad that he didn't get hurt and he was able to put the guy down safely. But it just goes to show, you know, even just and that was pretty much all grappling there. Just slipped, got into like a had an arm position, but more of a arm triangle style and lodged him and then choked him out, took the knife away, waited for the police uh to take care of uh or to apprehend that suspect. So again, happy that he was able to stay safe and it just goes to show the value of good martial arts training and particularly grappling, right? That was there was no striking in that exchange. So good job, Jav. We also s on the other side of things, maybe not so great, I also saw Jorge Masfit uh in the news. Apparently, he was able to plea down uh from a felony, a few felony charges to like a misdemeanor assault and uh when he struck Colby, I think it was like a year ago or so, and pretty much jumped him from my understanding of the case, knocked the tooth out and all that stuff. But he got the plea down to a misdemeanor. I think they said there was like a $10,000 fine and he's sentenced to time served, so basically no jail time. And you would think, well, okay, you know, it's two fighters. Even even though in my opinion, you know, that was pretty messed up. There should be some uh I would think a more serious punishment for that because if it was what they said, which is he just sucker punched him, you know, if that was just an ordinary guy you sucker punched and he knocked their teeth out, you would expect some serious consequences. Uh because that's that's uncalled for. You know, it wasn't like they both squared up with each other and they started fighting. That's a different thing, you know, and within reason that I I can see like that being like a slap on the wrist, but particularly with two adults consenting to fight, sure. But if you're just getting a sucker shot, you know, without warning, without any type of consent to that fight, I think that's uncalled for. But to make things worse, he kind of doubled down. And after getting pleed down, he then went on the record and I guess he was getting interviewed outside the courthouse saying that it's not over. That the next time he sees Colby, something's going to happen. It's going to be interesting. And then he goes, I want to knock the rest of his teeth out. So it's like, what are you doing, George? You know, you're supposed to be retired. You have your own fight promotion. like why are you getting into and you're threatening more violence which I imagine the judge probably is not going to care for too much and of course a lot of this this could be for attention which it probably is because he went out in other interviews and he called out Chel Sonnen which you know Chel Sonnen instantly responded to him and now they're going back and forth so I'm not sure is this just a ploy to attract a lot of attention to keep himself relevant and you know keep people talking about him. So, he has more of a celebrity presence, which obviously that's working. But, you know, there comes a cost to this because now I guess they're saying Kobe is going to try to pressure him. Oh, no, I'm sorry, not pressure rather, might take him to civil court. And since George already plead guilty to a misdemeanor and basically said, I did this. It's going to kind of make it very easy in a civil court to be found guilty again and be levied with heavy financial charges, you know. So, personally, if it wasn't me and and I didn't want to be in court anymore, which he has expressed he's really pissed that he was in court, I would have just been really quiet, you know, took my licking from that criminal case, you know, and just move on to something else in my life, you know, instead of trying to pick the same fight again. And um I'm not sure who is that one because a lot of people like to play gangster. George is more of a gangster than people might think he is, right? He's done some bad things. You know, uh his father was in jail and I guess his father, according to a rumor I heard, is back in jail or he's got another charge for shooting somebody, something like that. Um, again, allegedly, I'm not sure, but you know, that's not the type of guy you want to press too much. You know, he he will do silly things, you know, and by silly, I mean stupid things. Um, so I don't see any real winners at the end of that. And Kobe also has bigger fish to fry. He's got a title fight coming up in December against Leon Edwards, who's been looking really sharp. You know, he's been and been much more active versus Kobe. Has been off for a long time, you know. Uh yeah, it's just a bunch of people doing stupid things pretty much. But let's go and talk about older people doing stupid things like me, right? And maybe you if you're 40 plus, what is your goal as an athlete? And of course, this is subjective. I'm just going to tell you my opinion now since I'm 42, so I'm still in the younger side of 40. But uh what I've experienced and what I feel is my motivation for continuing to train and you know I'm doing strength training. I do conditioning. I do recovery stuff. If you've been following the blog and checking the stuff out, davidmma.com, you're going to see a lot of the things. I have a exercise outline there. I have my diet outline. So you could get an idea of what I'm doing regularly. But you might be asking why I'm not competing. I haven't competed in 10 years now. The last time I competed was in 2013 in the World Championships and that was it. Um, so why am I still training? Well, for me it's about being healthy physically, mentally, spiritually. Martial arts is part of my identity. It's something that I feel defines who I am. And a lot of that is that for me, the pursuit of mastery in the martial arts is really a mastery of oneself. And I believe my goal in life is to become a master of myself. And I'm not there yet. I'm working at it. I'm definitely gotten much closer to it. and and the clos the older I'm getting, the more I'm getting there. So, I feel proud about that, but there's still ways to go. And the training of the martial arts reinforces those things. Staying physically fit. I've felt the improvements of my life by being fit. I I grew up and when I was like in second, third grade, I blew up in weight and I was a fat kid all the way until I was like 14 or 15 when I started training in wrestling and then I got in shape. And when you have felt being on the the bad end of fitness, which is again being overweight and you know not be able to run a mile, you take a lot more stock in being healthy. And I got a recent a relatively recent reminder of that when I had the knee surgery uh for my ACL. And that was now like in 2018. So it was like five years. But I had lived for like five years without an ACL. Not really knowing that. But I knew something was wrong with my knee. I just kept training anyways. But I noticed like my wrestling kept getting worse and worse. My balance wasn't great. I couldn't really kick hard anymore because I felt like my leg was sort of fly off. And uh as a result, I couldn't run well because I had meniscus damage. So when I did get that surgery and I felt a night and day difference, I kind of reaffirmed what I should have been doing, which is always taking care of my health. And training in the martial arts does that for you. It It's Now you might say, well, there's better ways to be fit than training in the martial arts. And you know, if you're saying physically, yeah, probably true. you know like the martial arts is uh particularly mixed martial arts and doing jiu-jitsu wrestling all that is dangerous right there are a lot of elements of risk involved uh however everything has risk maybe if you were 40some and you never trained before I probably wouldn't tell you go into doing martial arts 100% sparring and you know training with UFC fighters and stuff maybe not right but in my case I definitely feel like it's a great activity I and one of the things that's going to make the activity work for you is if you're engaged, you're passionate about it, and you're also learning. And I've said this many times before, but the mixed martial arts to me is the most complex sport in the world. Like, not even close. There's no competition to it. And the reason being is that you're talking about two human bodies being intertwined and no limitation. Well, very little limitations as far as how you can manipulate the body, right? Most sports, they're very confined as far as what you can do, what you can't do. You know, there's certain time limits. There's certain areas that you can travel through. In MMA, you can pretty much do whatever you want. You can twist a guy's arm, leg, knee, neck in many different dimensions and strike in many different angles. And as a result, the strategies that you employ and the techniques that you can do were still uncovering moves. Like think about the buggy choke. It started just blew up out of nowhere and people were winning MMA fights even with using the buggy choke. And you know, we've been fighting for hundreds and thousands of years. Now, you could say maybe someone did a buggy choke back like in 2000 BC and they just never wrote it down. Sure, but it had to be rediscovered, right? So the game is constantly growing and evolving. And as a result, you'll be a student for life. And now I think I'm like 26, 27 years into martial arts training. I'm still learning every day. I still take notes. I still write things down. I have a journal. And uh so mentally, it's very engaging for me. Uh physically, obviously, it's very engaging for me. And spiritually helps keep you centered. You know, it keeps your ego in check. You know, when you go to the gym, you can't just think that you're God's gift to the earth and you can just absolutely smash everybody all the time. You know, every so often, even if you are, you know, top of the heap, you're going to have a bad day or someone's going to catch you with something and then it's going to cut you down to size and you get that that ego death that we all need every so often so that we can rebuild and become better versions of ourselves. So um again for those reasons physically, mentally, spiritually I feel the martial arts is one of the greatest activities that you're going to get involved with. And as a 40 plus athlete we I definitely want to keep at it as long as I can. But the key point here is I'm doing it for health. I'm not doing it because I I'm going to try to win a competition or win a gold medal or try to impress somebody. I'm doing it for health. So that means the focus of training is different, right? Um so in the past if you're training for competition and sometimes you're training for toughness, I might be trying to push myself, you know, very hard to the point that I get close to failure, right? Whereas if you're training for health, chances are you're not going to do that as often, if at all, right? Because the more fatigued you get, the more likely you're going to get injured. Uh so you have to be cautious of how hard you train and how often you do that, right? So there's times I go to train and I'm just flow rolling most of the time, right? So that's like a light day for me and that's more often than that these days. Uh, so I'm just rolling around trying to explore new techniques, new positions. I tinker around with things and again I'm working on skills. So it's kind of like a game for me. I'm like giving up positions. So then I kind of try to play around with techniques I've been working on or whatnot. Every so often then you might go into like a competition style role where then I'm going to push really hard, but that is seldomly. And you're also going to find that you're probably not going to be able to train every day, especially if you're going to spar every single day. That's going to be very difficult to do, right? You're the recovery is not going to be there. Again, maybe if you're I'm all natural. I don't take anything, right? Just protein powder, collagen, and lots of bison meat. That's about it. All right? So, recovery is not magical for me. It takes a few days. Um, if you're doing other things, maybe you can increase your maximum recoverable volume and be able to do more work. But I noticed that that changes year by year the amount that I can handle. So, it's like constantly going in the wrong way, you know, but uh I play it by year, you know, like recently I was doing weight training. I still am. But I was I did a cycle of strength training which was more endurancebased working on lactic capacity, aactic capacity and u aerobic. So every couple weeks the focus would shift. So like a lot of like sprinting type things, a lot of explosive motions and I felt great doing that. the toll on my body wasn't that severe and I was able to do that and still do, you know, wrestling or grappling or MMA on the same day. And I would lift three times a week and I would train four to five times a week martial arts. Then every day I generally walk and I do other things. After I finished that 8week program, then I went to a six week program of heavy strength training. So low rep ranges, you know, you're talking two to eight and heavy weights essentially 80% to like 95% of my one rep max. And that one was also three to four times a week strength training. And instantly I noticed a difference as far as recovery is concerned where once I got into like a five rep ranges, it was really hard to do anything else that day. Especially if I lifted first, I was definitely not going to do martial arts that day. It was just too much fatigue on the body, right? And even the day after still felt pretty, you know, wrecked. So I would do like a very light day of training if I did martial arts. And I even found that even doing another weightlifting session was g was challenging because I still had to fully recovered. And even though I was doing different muscle groups, it was still just like, oh man, this is it's a heavy toll. You know, if I do legs one day and then I have to do back where I'm going to get deadlift, you know, now I'm getting still some leg recruitment there. And you know, it was rough. So, I learned from that like you know what, like if I'm going to do those heavy strength training, I definitely need more spacing involved. And personally for me, I like I'm probably not going to do it again because at least at this point, my strength is sufficient for my size. I'm pretty strong for my weight. I'm about between 200 205 pounds now on any given day. And as far as my lifts, I'm pretty close to where I remember with uh Chad Smith. Uh he runs the Juggernaut training systems. If you guys have followed me before, I've you know, name dropped him a few times because I used his programs and they're really good. They were basically he made strength training programs made for jiu-jitsu athletes and I found that they coincided really well. So I was doing a program that was not part of that. All right. uh which makes sense because it was a very different focus. This is about strength numbers. So, like I was able to get my from that cycle of training. I went uh I think I was benching 315 for for two reps. I was doing a squat of I forget the squat number, but it was 330 something. Uh deadlifting 400 plus, you know. So, you know, obviously not like bodybuilder or like powerlifter standards, but for a martial arts athlete, these are pretty solid numbers. I think if I remember correctly, um Chad would say to be a worldclass jiu-jitsu athlete, you would want your bench to be one and a half times your body weight, your squat to be double your body weight, and your deadlift to be um two and a half times your body weight. So in my case, it' be 300 lb bench, 400 lb squat, 500 lb deadlift. And for him, if you are at those numbers, you really don't need to increase your strength anymore. Right now, you're more focused on building endurance and stamina, maybe functional range of motion. Like you could get stronger, of course, but now it's like diminishing returns because the amount of time you're going to have to put in the gym to increase your strength is going to take away from the time you put in the gym to building your skill as a martial artist. And the only reason why you're lifting is to become a better martial artist. So like at that point, at least his from what I understood from him is that you're defeating the goal of weightlifting now, right? So uh I feel even though I'm well the bench side of things, I'm there. The squat and the deadlift, I'm a little bit under uh those marks, but not by much. But at least for my purposes, I'm good with where I'm at, right? I don't need to increase my strength anymore, especially since I'm finding it much harder to recover from those type of workouts and still be able to go and do my martial arts training. So, um, and that also sets in mind like why do I strength train, right? It's not because I'm trying to lift a certain number or trying to get aesthetically, you know, more pleasing build or whatnot. It's so that I I'm healthier and that I could perform um the sport that I've chosen mixed martial arts at a higher level. So I'm not ego lifting. I'm not trying to hurt myself. Like if I was to hurt myself weightlifting, I would feel really stupid. So it's like this is supposed to help me not get hurt and I got hurt doing that. It would be like going to the doctor to get a checkup and then getting injured at at the doctor's office, right? Like you would be like, "What am I doing here? All right. So, everything that I I'm expressing here is just to drive point that uh drive home that point that I train now for health reasons. Doesn't mean that I'm that competitive. Like I said, every so often I'll do like a more competitive round where in my mind I'm going to try to treat this like I'm doing ADCC round or whatnot and turn it up a gear, but that's not the everyday focus and that is not like the life overall goal focus. I'm giving up on the idea of competing. Although there I at times I'm like, you know, I'm I'm training with guys that that still compete and I'm doing pretty well with them. you know, I could definitely still compete, but it it's not a focus of mine. It's not something that I really care about, you know, I don't there's not enough incentive for me to do it, I feel like. And uh I I just don't really feel like I have much to prove doing it, right? I feel if you want to be a competitor, you really have to have that drive that you're trying to prove something. Ultimately, you're trying to prove it to yourself, but you know, you might externalize it and say, "I want to prove it to the world, or I want to prove it to my coach that I'm the best ever." But if you lack that desire anymore or you have achieved like a homeostasis with yourself where you're comfortable with who you are and where you're at and you lack that need to prove yourself, it's going to be difficult to raise yourself to that next level, you know, because ultimately that's the big drive behind being a competitor is proving, right? And that's why I feel it's more of a young man's game, right? Because when you're younger, you have an ego and you're not you're you're trying to show the world and honestly trying to show yourself what you're truly capable of and you're trying to make true what you believe inside on the outside. But at a certain point, at least for me, I felt like I lost that drive. like I didn't really it didn't really drive me anymore to want to to train very hard to try to prove something. I had competed with a lot of the best athletes in the world. Some of them I beat, some of them I lost, you know, some of them I had tight matches with and it just wasn't there for me anymore. I felt that I was kind of going through the motions like you know I was I had been competing for like 15 years so it's like you know I just always keep showing up anyways but if you don't have that fire for that I feel like it's kind of a recipe for failure if you're going to trying to put yourself in there. Um so that's why I don't compete anymore on the on the side track because I get that I get asked all the time when's your next competition? And I'm like, "No, I'm not competing." And they're like, "Why are you training?" And he's like, "I I I applied to train until the day I die." Right? So, uh, whether I compete or not is irrelevant to that. I enjoy doing the martial arts. Like I said, I feel it's a great activity for health and that is my drive. So, if you're a 40 plus athlete and you might still be competing because maybe you still have that fire and that's great, right? But I would just say for me, for most of you guys out there, chances are if you're in your 40s, you're probably not competing for world titles, right? You might be competing just because you enjoy the competition aspect. It gives you like a small challenge to look forward to to keep you in training, and that's good. I would just say that the focus ultimately that I want to have is for health. I want to be around for a long time and for a good time, right? I don't want to just, you know, fade out and not be able to exercise and use my body to its fullest well into my life. So, that's my focus for being a a 40 plus athlete that I would I think it's a healthy focus that everyone can achieve, right? I'm not telling you you have to be a world champion or you have to run a fiveminute mile or whatever. No, it's just be healthy. So when I say that, that means inside and outside the gym, you know, like you should be eating right. You should be, you know, doing the proper recovery stuff. You can do like going out, walking, getting a massage, sauna, co plunge, you know, all the different things you can do to help recover, yoga, and mobility workouts. These all these things help, you know, and they will make you more resilient for life. So, I could I'll tell you that it's much harder being weak than it is being strong. All right? Uh when you're strong thing is much easier to do things, right? You can move things around easily. Uh you get people to ask you to open the pickle jars all the time. It's definitely a lot easier in life if you have strength and it makes you more durable. You can handle falls and trips and stuff. You know, they say like for elderly people, one of the greatest predictors of longevity is grip strength. And you would think like why would grip strength predict your longevity like how long you'll live. And it turns out that the studies that they find is that grip strength kind of a correlation to overall functional strength. Because if you're a weightlifter, you're naturally going to have grip strength because when you deadlift or you know you lift any weight, you have to have it in your grip. So you're going to have to have a good grip to be able to lift and move around the weight room. and in grappling sports and you know, especially if you're doing the kimono, your grip strength is going to be there. And so on one side of things, they feel like it's a predictor of physical fitness and the other part is just practical. If you're falling, you're going to have to grab onto something. And if you don't have grip strength, you won't be able to hold on to it. And you remember elderly people a lot of times they fall, they they break a hip or they fall, they hit their head on the ground. And if they had some grip strength on them to grab onto something before they fell, it's another predictor of being able to protect themselves from a serious fall or being able to post out or whatnot. So, uh, and the other reason, like I said, to stay healthy, it's going to keep you around longer, right? So, and a lot of people have, you know, different ideas. they think doing sports is dangerous, you know, or that it's going to lead to them being crippled later in life. And that's a mistake, right? That is somebody who's doing sports wrong, right? So, like if you're in the if you're the under 40 crowd and you think like, "Oh, I'm just going to trash my body and then I'll live as a but at least I'll have some medals and trophies on my mantle, right?" It's like, no, that's not the way to think about it. Right? uh you can stay healthy. Now, I'm not saying you're not going to get injured. You're most likely if you're especially if you're a professional athlete, you're going to get injured at some point and hopefully not too severely, but you can recover from these injuries. You know, the vast majority of injuries that you suffer, you'll be able to come back from and you can still be very effective. And I'm not going to say you're not going to have some carryover pain, right? Like there's going to be some stuff that as you get older that's going to hurt more because of previous injuries or battle scars that you had, but you can live through them. They're manageable for the most part, right? Uh but it's training smart and as you get older, I know when I was in my 20s, I would hear the guys in their 40s tell me about this and you kind of just roll your eyes like they don't know how I'm built different, you know? But uh you're not really well human, right? and you're going to get to a phase where you see ah man like it's true what they were saying but I would tell you if you train smart you'll be prepared for those later stages where your recovery is not so great but you'll still be healthy enough to continue to be physically active right you don't have to stop exercising just because you've gotten older you'll just exercise differently right whether it's the different pace uh types of uh activities that you do, putting more focus into recovery, but you can still stay active later in your life, right? And maybe the guys in their 60s and whatnot might be looking at me like, "Oh, you don't know what I'm dealing with." But I've met guys in their 50s and their 60s that are still training and they're still very physically active. So, I believe that it's very possible to maintain that fitness throughout your lives, right? Again, it's not going to be at the same scale as you were when you were in your 30s and your 20s, but you're still going to be doing something. And a big part of what I'm doing also is I love giving back. And to me, it's a reward to be able to teach and to coach people and to be able to help somebody to get better. So me sticking on the mats, not only am I improving myself, but I'm trying to pass down whatever I learn to other people so they can get better. And again, I feel that's my way of contributing to that global consciousness of martial arts to elevate the sport. And that also keeps me going. That's why I'm like building out this website, you know, and and putting a lot of content in there. I want to have something to provide other people and to elevate them because I know when I was starting off, we didn't really have much of that. The internet really wasn't a thing yet. having a resource like that now, if I would have had that back then, man, I would have been doing even more amazing things, you know, at a faster pace. So, uh I feel like if I have all this knowledge, I want to definitely share it and I don't want to let it go to waste. So, that also keeps me going, right? So, but that's not for everybody. Obviously, most people who are training are not coaches, but well, the survey we did on the website is a surprising like half of you were are coaching. So maybe there's a good number of you guys that are coaching, right? So that's another driver for me as far as continuing to train the sport, right? So there just some different things you can think about, you know, particularly if you're in that 40 plus crowd and maybe you're struggling to find a reason to stay on. Uh, I would say your health would probably be the number one priority both like like I said mental, physical, spiritual. Uh, stay in there, right? You might have to modulate how much you can stay in there, how how long you train for, how hard you train for, or how many days, but you can stay in there and you can still be fit. That's my take on that. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Again, if you have any comments, feedback, feel free to to hit me up at davidmma.com. Uh, if you're hearing the podcast and you you didn't come from the website, uh, go ahead, check it out at davidmma.com. We're putting up new content every day, covering all sorts of things. And this blog is just one of the pieces of, uh, this podcast, rather, is just one of the pieces of content I'm putting up there, doing techniques, breakdowns, philosophy, training tips, mindset. So, uh, come and join us at davidmma.com if you haven't already. Thank you and I'll see you guys next week.