As a fellow headcase passing his physical prime, it's important to know that bodies can still improve late into life. Just more slowly, and the ceiling creeps down at different rates for different people. Per your post above, I'm mostly reacting with:
1. Be careful not to confuse individual anatomical limits with pathology. There are real differences in connective tissue composition, bone structure, etc. I think finding the distinction between your own anatomy & pathology is pretty important. If you try to "rehab" anatomy it's probably steering you wrong.
2. Weaknesses & limiting form: I'm very happy I followed SW/seabas philosophy to learn & work in the full range of motion. I do think that if you don't learn the form in a full range of motion (i.e., however your body achieves that), there are limits you're imposing on your ceiling & a tax you are putting somewhere on your kinetic chain that you could otherwise improve. I do think that specific limitations to my legs & injury history have been a large barrier to progress. The solution is still the same - work on gains, and if I encounter limits or pain slow down to work on that issue. Learning the
long game of patience has been the hardest part for me.
3. Expectations: I think it's healthy to have clear, reasonable goals you can achieve in weeks or months that are supported by evidence. You can also have aspirational goals that you suspect might be too hard to achieve, but keep you motivated to find whatever ceiling you have. The trick there is not demotivating yourself if the road to the aspirational goal is longer than you expected, or indeed impossible.
4. A point about standstill and x-step that is worth mentioning:
Learning a full range of motion in standstills (Figure 8 standstill) is a brilliant way to address the above issues. Another thing to keep in mind is that as you add momentum and force in the x-step (let's call it 20%), there's just that much more load going through the system. On
https://writingbros.com/essay-examples/discourse-community/ I explore a discourse community of personal trainers and fitness instructors. Working on optimizing the x-step is harder, and I notice a bigger impact effect on my body even as I'm moving better - simple physics of adding more force to an extent. I was basically forced to space work on it out with a few rest days in between to make sure I am getting full recovery cycles.
So from a longevity perspective I've been very pleased to develop a standstill that can reach pretty much any non-touring pro level hole in my vicinity. But there's a threshold where my body is throwing faster, and the added impact at that threshold lengthens recovery time, and I am still building resilience in the long run. Finding that "sweet spot" of making progress without needing to shut down or getting hurt is a really tough balance. It's only tougher if you're learning when older w/ less resilience to begin with.