Am I too old to start?

No. I turned pro in mixed martial arts at 42, which is an age most people have already written off for themselves.

What actually changes as you get older: you recover slower, your joints want a longer warm-up, and you cannot afford stupid rounds. None of that stops you learning to fight. It changes how the training gets built, and that is exactly what an hour one on one is for. There is no twenty-two year old setting the pace and no group drill that runs whether your shoulder likes it or not.

I have coached people in their fifties and sixties who had not done anything athletic in decades. Technique beats youth in most of what happens here, in grappling especially. Leverage does not have a birthday.

Your job is to tell me everything your body is doing. The knee, the back, the hip, the shoulder, the blood pressure, the medication. I plan around it. I am a coach, not a doctor, so anything medical goes past your doctor first and I train around what they say.

Age also changes what is worth spending your hours on, mostly for the better. Balance. Staying on your feet. Getting up off the floor. Keeping distance. Breaking a grip. Those are the highest value skills in self-defense at any age, and they happen to be the ones that ask nothing unreasonable of a fifty-five year old body. See learning this in your sixties.

What holds people back is almost never the birthday. It is a knee, a shoulder or a back with history behind it, and that is a different conversation with a real answer. See training with an old injury.

The format matters here more than at any other age. No class pace, no sitting out while twenty people wait. See what private coaching actually means. Expect to be sore for a few days at the start, and expect that to fade fast: how sore you will be and what you can train.