Judo is generally a competitive sport. My advice was to look for a non-competitve (sometimes called contemplative) dojo.
In my sports club for example, there’s traditional Karate with Katas and competitive Sports Karate. Similar with Taekwondo.
The Sensei in your dojo should be good enough to adapt the training to your skill level. If you say that you “tried to take up Judo”, meaning that you had no prior experience in Budo sports, the first importance would be on learning the basics slowly, including proper falling. (Not all Dojos teach falling technique).
If the sensei has not enough experience teaching adult beginners, who learn slower than kids; if you didn’t do proper warmup first; if you aren’t paired with a partner appropriate to your skill level; if you practise throws before your falling technique is good enough - then you can injure yourself.
A good teacher in a good dojo, however, would take steps to avoid all those obvious mistakes.
A beginner student with no previous experience is of course in a difficult position to evaluate dojos and figure out before starting whether this is a good dojo or not.
Egads. That is really bad. I would question the competence of the sensei. There is no way an injury like that should be possible after six weeks. Or ever. Not unless you fell down the stairs after training. Indeed I don’t think I can recall anything as bad as that even in competition. The only competition injuries I have seen have been mostly the fault of a player being too bloody minded, and getting hurt (usually dislocations.) My old club has a hard core of ageing players, and there is now a lot more emphasis on technical work. At the same time we have some national level competition players too.
Judo can be a pretty rough sport, with lots of injuries. Lots of older guys do judo, but they generally started young and learned how to train and take falls before age caught up with them. Judo probably isn’t a great first sport for an older guy without prior grappling experience. It’s a great sport, but you’re going to have to look harder for a club that’s friendly to older beginners.
If you want to learn a grappling style, and want to be able to fight, try BJJ; it’s grappling without the falls, and will be easier on your body. Look for a place that has older guys training there. You don’t want to train with a bunch of 20 year olds who are only interested in fighting.
If you want to do a grappling martial art, and don’t expect to be getting in any fights, try Aikido, but make sure you watch a few classes first. If you see anything absurd, like people getting “thrown” without being touched, keep looking. Aikido will focus a lot on falling without getting hurt, and you can take that with you if you ever want to try judo again.
At least some of the cracked ribs came from an accidental knee to the chest during groundwork. I don’t know that there’s much that could have been done to prevent it. My partner at the time was a green belt, and pretty close to me in terms of size and weight. The same thing could have happened doing BJJ, since the ground aspects of Judo are very similar.
I didn’t realize how bad it was until I had a PET scan for an unrelated issue a few weeks later. The technicians normally don’t say anything, but this one couldn’t help sharing that my ribcage was lit up like a Christmas tree. It felt sort of like an accomplishment.
As far as the shoulder, I don’t think it was the way I fell as much as the way the other guy fell on me. The point of his shoulder drove into mine as we hit the mat, and there was nowhere for it to go. In retrospect he was being pretty overzealous, and I probably shouldn’t have been put through so much randori at my meager skill level, but I’m not bitter about it. It just made me decide to focus on less painful pursuits.
If I do go back to any sort of martial art, it will probably be fencing. That generally has fewer collisions.
A green belt shouldn’t be doing ground exercises with a white belt.
I wondered what BJJ meant - you refer to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?
Yes, during free ground fights injuries can happen, which is why they are not suited for untrained adult white belts. Sorry you got a bad sensei.
You can do Aikido or Tai Chi Chuang at any age, as long as you take it a bit slower. Dito for the katas of Karate, which you practice alone. It’s only the free-style fighting that’s not good for elder people.
Huh. That’s not the first choice I would have picked, because fencing requires lightning quick-reflexes, and so is not optimal for older people.
Yes. I did take one class in it as well, but got some wicked mat burns on my feet. They would have toughened up eventually, but I wasn’t at it long enough.
I’ve heard that those are good, but unfortunately I just don’t find them that interesting.
Well, I fenced in high school, so I have some experience to build on. Also, it’s not like I’m going to be competitive in any athletic endeavor at this point, so I might as well pick one I enjoy.
Just a few observations about dojo differences regarding lapsed training - I trained Ki-Aikido (even more kind and gentle than regular Aikido ) in college, lapsed due to a horrible time-consuming job, and then moved away.
Quite a few years later, I joined up with a regular Aikido dojo in another city, and let the sensei know that I had trained before, how long ago, and in a different style. We had a meeting, I went through some of what I remembered, and he asked me to wear a colored tag on my white belt to indicate that I wasn’t a rank newbie as far as the basics go. He said that that his particular dojo had a lot of people join from other places and other styles, and in his experience it made the “real” white belts a lot less anxious and competitive if they knew that people who are blowing past them in ranks had a good reason for it. I advanced in ranks there for a year or so, fairly quickly compared to when I first trained, and really damn quick compared to the ‘newbies’ who started at the same time I did.
Fast forward even more years, and I’m yet again lapsed, and moved back near my original Ki-Aikido dojo. I want to begin training again, and called up my sensei (original one) to ask what I should wear. In contrast to the Aikido dojo, he has asked me to retain my original belt color from when I was actively training with them umteen eons ago. I have indicated that I didn’t feel quite up to that level currently, and was told that I earned it fairly and that it was insulting to the dojo to back away from my accomplishments. Right-o, “Hai, Sensei!”
tl:dr - Dojos are different, lapsed training is common, mileage may vary between dojos, and yours may very well have a specific policy on what returnees are expected to do.
From what position do you say this? I’ve been fencing 4 weapons for 5 years and help teach and do demonstrations for fencing. Fencing is ideal for a very large range of ages because it is a low-impact sport which does not mandate “lightning quick-reflexes.” It helps develop balance, flexibility, and stamina, and thus can really help older folks. I routinely fence with people 70 years and up, and we have an 85 year-old at one of our salles. One of our instructors is 75 or so and he can kick any unranked fencer’s ass.
Yeah if the questioner wants to go for a D or higher they need something special, but almost anyone can have a lot of good exercise and fun fencing.
Obviously I’m not a teacher myself. I was going by the general grouping of sports into categories, in that case, of sports that demand “quick” responses (not lightning-quick, but still fast) and others.
Any competitve martial art falls into the quick category, but also fencing.
When I answered, I didn’t know that the OP already had experience with fencing, which makes a difference. I would not recommend it, or any similar quick sport, for beginners in advanced age, because learning a new sport if you are older is already difficult, and if you need to react quickly by the nature of the sport, that makes it much more difficult.
Somebody who mastered the beginnings earlier and can thus rely partly on muscle memory patterns is different.
I also would not recommend quick sports for younger people who are of the “slow” type - muscle or character, not developmentally! You know, some people have the muscle and body type to run the 100 yard dash, and other people can run the 10 000 m because they need time to get up to speed. The first type, the quick one, is better suited for quick sports, the second type not.
I don’t doubt that normal fencing has health benefits, obviously it does. It’s just that not every sport is suited for every type of person, therefore I would send a beginner without previous experience who’s older to a different type.
And I’m going to ask directly, what is your actual experience with fencing? How long have you been fencing, or when did you start? That might make a difference in viewpoints.
I disagree. I teach to middle-aged to older adults (30-50), and didn’t learn it myself until I was almost 40. Yes a younger fencer will do much better in competition - in fact, after age 30 it becomes very difficult to keep an A or B level, and many debate that the peak age for fencing is between 22-28. But anyone can see huge benefits from fencing at any age. I’ve personally seen it in my friends, students, and myself.
And right along with what you’re saying, because fencing is a low-impact non-endurance sport, it has benefits well-suited to older people that a high-impact sport or something like marathon running might not be.
hello ppl…i,m a 38 year old male who started up WTF olympic taekwondo(UK) again after a good 12 years away from the sport. Originally i trained for years back when i was younger having competed in a few tournaments and was quite promising until i quit. i began training back in Nov 2012 and my legs are beginning to get there speed back, luckily i,ve kept some level of fitness during my time away from TKd. I am weighing in at 65k at 5.6ft small but fast. i shall be competing before the end of the year and i intend to fight people younger than me…just look at bernard hopkins(boxer) for inspiration(48 yrs)…its possible for anybody…good luck to those who are in the same position as me and others.
Heck, I didn’t start martial arts training until I was past 30. Got to brown belt in Shotokan, and after a ten-year hiatus, I’m planning on getting back into it Real Soon Now at age 50-something.
) in college, lapsed due to a horrible time-consuming job, and then moved away.