Fitness & health

Most people think they have to get fitter before they are allowed to start. This shelf is the answer to that in all the shapes it turns up in: too old, too heavy, a knee that has never been right, asthma, a back that went out years ago and never fully came home.

Start with the answer on age, then the one on being overweight. Rex turned pro in MMA at forty-two, so he is not the man to tell you your forties are late. The work scales to you. A private session gets built around what your body will do that day rather than around a class of twenty people you have to keep up with, and if you are carrying something, that is the strongest argument there is for training this way.

None of these answers are medical advice and none of them pretend to be. If a doctor has told you something, that outranks anything written here. What Rex can tell you is how sore you will be after the first one, how to recover between sessions, whether lifting belongs alongside this, and how people actually get hurt in training, which is almost always ego and going too hard too early rather than the training itself. Tell him what hurts before you start. He coaches around it instead of pretending it is not there.