I often have conversations about this topic (how old is too old to start dance? to keep dancing? what does it do to us to use our age as the reason that we opt out of movement or feel bad?) with others, usually either amateurs or professionals in dance, or dancers at parties who don’t consider themselves dancers, but was thinking about it more in earnest today.

Some background:

I started training aerial disciplines and contortion at 28 years old, with poor physical fitness and no prior movement background. I was fortunate to be near a training center that had affordable and frequent training for adults. Even though it was quite cheap (~$100 for unlimited classes!), I had not had disposable income for this at any prior point in my life.

For about 10 years I devoted the bulk of my free time to training. For the first time I discovered a physical practice that I loved and looked forward to; formerly I had found any kind of connection with my body unbearable.

I frequently meet people – who are younger than I was when I started – who have already given up on becoming fit or starting a movement discipline they’re interested in. I try to tell them that it’s not too late, but maybe there’s also an important prerequisite needed of being unafraid to challenge the societal expectation that only adolescents and/or certain body types should be allowed athleticism.

Milestones

For context, I’m going to provide a timeline to illustrate how long it took me to gain specific skills.

Time-to-Skill

• Unmodified push-up: 6 months
• Pull-up: 4 years (in year 2-3, I was training these 4x/week)
• Flat front split: 1 year
• Flat middle split: 5 years
• Momentumless invert: 2 years
• Straight-arm invert: 3 years (my injury at the end of 2015 really locked this in for me)

Timeline

Need to make this a little more readable… add more things? Mb include images on mouseover? Color by modality (contortion vs aerial)?

Try to find old mindbody account that has Circus Center record.

Present Day

Because I’m now both too advanced for most classes offered in the area, and because in the last year I’m on a tight budget while I change jobs, I’ve been training at home more.

I’m also investing time into other activies like visuals and community organization, so my peak 6 days/week training load is now ~2 days/week.

Depending on how frequently I train, my body feels either more or less “ready” to do extremely challenging strength tricks.

In my experience, training frequency is much more of a predictor of fitness (i.e. being capable of the type of skills I want to train) than age.

Future State?

TBC…