Overcome Learning Plateaus

And Reignite Your Progress

17 min readMay 13, 2024

If you have ever tried to learn a skill—whether speaking a foreign language, playing a musical instrument, or engaging in a specific physical activity—be it martial arts, running, lifting, swimming, or tennis—you have certainly hit a learning plateau. It is a phase where you seem to stop making any progress. It is especially noticeable compared to your rapid progress at the beginning stage of skill acquisition.

Plateaus can be highly demotivating and debilitating. Your confidence will take a hit as your progress stalls, and your motivation may not be the same. If you compete with others, those you used to beat will seem to be making faster progress than you are. Unfortunately, learning plateaus are often the reason people quit.

First off, understand that PLATEAUS ARE A GOOD SIGN. Hitting a plateau means you have been on track up to this point.

Think about your first plateau in skill acquisition — it means that you have made significant progress — from zero to the point of, let’s call it, advanced beginner. That said, do not misunderstand me. I do not mean you should relax and get comfortable when you hit a plateau. Just don’t freak out, and don’t get too frustrated. Make sure you take the right action to deal with it — we will discuss this in a minute.

Expect the plateaus. ALL LEARNING includes plateaus.

As you continue on your learning journey, you will experience periods of rapid progress and occasional plateaus. If you understand why these happen and what you should do to overcome them, you will recognize them for what they are—a natural stage in developing your skills and knowledge. Let’s start with what plateaus are exactly.

THE WHAT

What is a plateau? How to identify it?

It is when performance stagnates. If you cannot detect improvement or growth — that is one clear signal that you have hit a plateau.
It is when motivation and enthusiasm decrease or disappear. When what used to be a fun and enjoyable learning process is no longer, that is another way to recognize a plateau.
It is when you develop a sense of comfort. You are content with where you are in your learning process, and as a result, you seek out fewer learning opportunities. You are not as “aggressive” in your learning as you used to be.
It is when the same mistakes keep happening over and over. This usually happens when you are deep into a plateau.
It is when the talk in your head is less about “this is what I am going to do” and more about “this is what I have done.” You start comparing yourself to those behind you in the learning curve rather than those ahead of you. Progress is no longer a burning desire as it used to be.

Now, let’s look into why plateaus even happen. Why can’t we maintain continuous progress?

THE WHY

Things inevitably slow down after the steep curve at the beginning of the learning process. Now that we have mastered (or think we have) the basic building blocks of whatever we are trying to get good at — the so-called fundamentals — the next things to learn are a tad more complex. This is a natural progression of the learning process. Take it as an application of the law of diminishing returns to the learning process. The more time you invest in skill development, the less progress per unit of time you will have going forward.

When you start learning anything new, the initial rapid improvement is great also because it helps maintain motivation to keep going. The pace of progress is rewarding. But as the pace drops, your motivation will suffer. Reduced motivation makes you want to put in less work. Welcome to a vicious circle.

Plateau can happen if you don’t give yourself a hard enough challenge or if the challenge is too hard. It can also happen if you don't practice enough or if you practice too much and burn out.

Scott Young, the author of Ultralearning, lists some of the insidious reasons for plateaus: comfort, practice not being separated from performance, and lack of feedback.

Comfort (Young calls this Good Enough) is easy to explain. As your skill level and performance improve, your confidence level sees a bit of an increase, and your motivation decreases accordingly. You could not speak a word of Spanish? Now you can have a basic conversation. You could not hit a free throw? Now you are hitting a reliable 50%. Inevitably, in the dark corners of your mind, your brain calculates whether further effort is worth it. You are already better than most people you know. Why bother going further?

In fact, let’s make a pause here. Why bother?— is a useful question to ask. What drives you to improve at basketball, tennis, Spanish, martial arts, or playing a musical instrument? Do you even need to? Maybe you don’t, and being an advanced beginner in a particular field is good enough? Maybe you need to focus on other areas of your life that are more important? Be careful not to let your ego guide your decisions. Your family, health, job, or finances should not suffer because you decided to perfect your jump shot or armbars. Have that conversation with yourself. How important is this for you, and why? Do you want to continue improving this skill? If the answer is no, go back to the rest of your life and enjoy it! If the answer is yes, keep reading. :)

Practice not being separated from performance is an interesting concept that is often overlooked. I often see this in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training. I don’t mind when a sparring partner poses interesting technical problems, and I then need to problem-solve. This helps us improve together. But sometimes, twenty seconds into sparring, I realize, oh, I see what it is. This guy just wants to fight. To win. Many beginners and not beginners suffer from this. And then there are sparring partners who spar to learn. To practice a specific technique or get a feel for a position. Needless to say, it is the latter group that makes progress. Those who spar to win often complain that they don’t feel they are improving, that they are plateauing. I give the same advice — leave the fight to the tournament or when you have to defend yourself in real life. Training mats are where you learn. Focus on that. Unfortunately, many don’t listen, see little improvement, and then complain again. Some quit.

Additionally, there is a simple math at play here. If you have hard sparring every time, there is only so much your body can take. Fatigue and injuries will limit the amount of time you train. Meanwhile, someone else is training every day, twice a day, because they are not doing it too roughly. They end up racking up a lot more training time, which alone will likely lead to faster improvement.

This is true not only for athletic pursuits but also for activities such as learning a language, mastering a musical instrument, or any other skill development. If every time you play a piano piece, you are performing instead of practicing, progress will be difficult. One of the main differences is how you deal with errors — in practice, you can stop and work on your errors repeatedly. If you just perform in what is supposed to be a practice session, however, you will skip the error and not dedicate sufficient time and attention to it. So, establish a reasonably clear separation between practice and performance.

The lack of feedback is straightforward yet a surprisingly overlooked problem. You can only do so much by diagnosing your skill level independently. It is useful to hear from someone who is ahead of you in the skill you are trying to master—a coach, a more experienced training partner, someone who can give you just a bit of the right feedback that can help save hours, days, or even months of pointless hard work in the wrong direction. If you mindlessly grind, plateaus and frustration are inevitable.

Now, let’s get to the fun part. How do we overcome plateaus?

THE HOW

The title of a book by Marshall Goldsmith — What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, is a great principle to remember when dealing with plateaus. How you learn in the intermediate phase differs from how you learn the fundamentals.

Professionalize your training.

The first step is to understand the need to push. Make sure plateaus do not become a reason to stop trying. I mentioned comfort earlier—you should be doing your practice even when you don’t feel like it. Or rather, not feeling like it is not a good enough reason to skip practice. Here is an article you may find useful: Farnam Street’s You’re Only As Good As Your Worst Day.

You won’t always have motivation — create systems and mechanisms instead. I talk about this in my article Set Directions, Not Goals. Set clear targets for daily and weekly practice. This gives you very specific, bite-size tasks to focus on and helps you avoid having to think about the big, scary goals. One effective method I use what I call the method of Non-Negotiables — where I have daily must-do activities that are, in themselves, not particularly impressive but constitute small steps towards my objectives — here is an article where I expand on that. Make sure you track your practice and measure your progress. Here is my article you might find useful on that.

Beyond that, your practice needs to be deliberate, not random. The best material to explore on this is Peak by Anders Ericsson (see my takeaways here). I won’t go into too much detail, for the purpose of this article, let’s just say the main idea is you don’t just cruise aimlessly. Just because you are doing something related to the skill doesn’t mean you are improving. Too many people only play countless tennis games, and their skills do not improve. Maybe that is their preference — to have fun rather than get better. That is ok. But if you want to improve, remember — practice has to be different from performance.

Zoom in. The most frequent piece of advice I’ve seen on dealing with plateaus is to break down the skill you are learning into small components. Focus on the things that give you the most trouble. You are no longer a beginner. You don’t need to think about improving a skill overall but at different elements of it. This helps concentrate your training and make it more impactful. Improving my defense in this specific position is a much better objective for a training session than getting better at jiu-jitsu. Learn a vocabulary related to navigating a city — directions, addresses, asking questions, and so on — rather than improving my Spanish.

Mix things up. Challenge your brain or body in a new way. Change your practice routine. As a language learner, if you prefer to read, try watching a TV show in the target language. Or have a conversation with ChatGPT. Try podcasts, YouTube channels, an intense immersion course, or a few weeks of study with a teacher. Put together short speeches on the topics of interest to you. If you are a chess player who usually only plays slow games, try playing rapid or blitz games (these are games with faster time controls) for a while or explore different openings. If you are a piano player who always practices classical music, practice a jazz tune or a movie soundtrack. Get yourself outside your comfort zone, spar against a much more superior opponent, or read a more difficult book in the target language. One word of caution: don’t completely randomize your training. If you start doing different things each time, it becomes difficult to measure progress or even make much progress. If you switch to a new type of training, give it some time to see the benefits. Then, you can change things up again.

Go back to the fundamentals. The only way to become good at something is to practice the ordinary basics for an uncommon length of time. Yes, it can feel boring. You might want to keep building new skill sets instead of revisiting the basics. But going back to the fundamentals can give you an unexpected boost. With all the new knowledge and experience, you will discover new angles to the fundamentals and understand them better, which will contribute to your overall improvement.

Cross-training. Try something different, though perhaps something not too distant from your area of focus. For example, if you do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you can incorporate strength training. You can add yoga to improve your flexibility. You can start cardio workouts. The benefits for your primary area of focus will be surprisingly massive. If you are learning a language, try to learn about the culture or history of the country. If you are practicing a musical instrument, try your hand at a different instrument.

Zoom out. Break new ground — expand your involvement with the field. If you do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you can sign up for a competition. Spar with higher belts. Go to an open mat in another gym. Putting yourself in situations you are not used to will add a spark to your training and give you different types of feedback about your skill level and gaps in your training. If you are learning a language, schedule a vacation in the country where this language is spoken. Use social media or dedicated apps like italki.

Get Feedback. This is crucial. Get a coach if you don’t have one. Even a couple of sessions with a professional instructor will make a world of difference. Sign up for a class or a course. Remember, people who are keen and comfortable asking for feedback usually improve the fastest.

Rest. Take breaks! All professionals have scheduled breaks. Something I picked up from Farnam Street: “A break and time spent not working are very different. One fosters focus, and the other snaps it.” When it comes to resting, you need to make sure you are not just being lazy. Make sure your rest is rhythmical; it has to be a change from your usual routines, and you must be fully present. When you rest, really rest. Here is my article, where I discuss the concept of rest in detail.

Mental Training. Meditation, mindfulness, visualization techniques, affirmations. Whatever works for you. Just make sure not to use these techniques as a sneaky method to avoid the hard work of skill improvement.

Meta-learning. Learn about learning. Explore how world-class performers in your field train. Watch interviews, listen to podcasts, attend seminars. Keep in mind, the best performers are not necessarily the best teachers.

As you can see there is an awful lot you can do. Your body, your brain, and your environment will resist progress. Of course! It is not supposed to be easy. Resistance (a concept coined by author Stephen Pressfield) is strong when you are trying to learn and improve. Think of it this way — if there is resistance, I must be on the right path.

I wanted to share this short section from Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, which is one of the best books I have come across on skill acquisition (my takeaways here). Check it out.

GETTING PAST PLATEAUS

In 2005 a young journalist named Joshua Foer came to Tallahassee to interview me about an article that he was writing about memory competitions. These are the sorts of events that I mentioned earlier, where people compete to see who can recall the most digits, who can memorize a random collection of playing cards most quickly, and other similar feats. During our discussions Josh mentioned that he was thinking about competing himself in order to get a first-person perspective and that he was going to start training under a top-ranked memory competitor, Ed Cooke. There was even some vague talk about a book he might write on his experiences in these competitions.

Before Josh began working with Cooke, my graduate students and I tested his memory on a wide variety of tasks to see what his baseline abilities were. After that we had little contact for a while, until one day he called me and complained that he’d reached a plateau. No matter how much he practiced, he couldn’t improve the speed with which he memorized the order of a randomly arrangeddeck of cards.

I gave Josh some advice about getting past a plateau, and he went back to training. The whole story is told in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, but the bottom line is this: Josh did indeed speed up considerably, and he ultimately won the 2006 USA Memory Championship. The plateau Josh encountered is common in every sort of training. When you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid — or at least steady — improvement, and when that improvement stops, it is natural to believe you’ve hit some sort of implacable limit. So you stop trying to move forward, and you settle down to life on that plateau. This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.

I had run into this very problem in my work with Steve Faloon. Steve had been stuck at about the same number of digits for several weeks and thought that he might have reached his limit. Since he was already beyond what anyone else had ever done, Bill Chase and I didn’t know what to expect. Had Steve gone as far as one could possibly go? And how would we even know if he had reached some upper limit? We decided to do a little experiment. I slowed down the rate at which I read out the digits. It was just a minor adjustment, but it gave Steve enough extra time to hold on to significantly more digits than he’d ever managed before. This convinced him that the problem was not the number of digits but rather how quickly he was encoding the numbers. He believed that he might improve his performance if he could just speed up the time it took him to commit the digits to longterm memory.

At another plateau Steve found that he was consistently messing up a couple of digits in one of his digit groups when he was given strings of a certain length. He worried he might have reached his limit on how many digit groups he could recall correctly. So Bill and I gave him strings that were ten or more digits longer than he had ever managed to remember. He surprised himself by remembering most of the digits — and, in particular, remembering more total digits than he’d ever done before, even though he wasn’t perfect. This showed him that it was indeed possible to remember longer strings of digits and that his problem was not that he had reached the limit of his memory but rather that he was messing up on one or two groups of digits in the entire string. He started focusing on encoding the digit groups more carefully in his long-term memory, and he rose above that plateau as well.

What we learned from Steve’s experience holds true for everyone who faces a plateau: the best way to move beyond it is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way. Bodybuilders, for instance, will change the types of exercises they are doing, increase or decrease the weight they’re lifting or the number of repetitions, and switch up their weekly routine. Actually, most of them will vary their patterns proactively so they don’t get stuck on plateaus in the first place. Cross-training of any sort is based on the same principle — switch off between different types of exercise so that you are constantly challenging yourself in different ways.

But sometimes you try everything you can think of and you’re still stuck. When Josh came to me for help with his card memorization, I told him about what had worked with Steve, and we talked about why. We also talked about typing. People who learn to type with the classic ten-finger method, where each finger is assigned to certain keys, will eventually reach a certain comfortable speed at which they can type maybe thirty or forty words per minute with relatively few mistakes. This is their plateau.

Typing teachers use a well-established method to get past such a plateau. Most typists can increase their typing speed by 10–20 percent simply by focusing and pushing themselves to type faster. The problem is that as their concentration lags, their typing speed returns to the plateau. To counter this, a teacher will typically suggest setting aside fifteen to twenty minutes a day to type at this faster speed. This does two things: First, it helps the student spot challenges — such as particular letter combinations — that slow down their typing. Once you figure out what the problems are, you can design exercises to improve your speed in those situations. For instance, if you’re having a problem typing “ol” or “lo” because the letter o is almost directly above the letter l, you could practice typing a series of words that contain those combinations — old, cold, roll, toll, low, lot, lob, lox, follow, hollow, and so on — over and over again.

Second, when you type faster than usual, it forces you to start looking ahead at the words that are coming up so that you can figure out where to place your fingers in anticipation. So, if you see that the next four letters will all be typed by fingers on your left hand, you can move the correct finger on your right hand into place for the fifth letter ahead. Tests on the best typists have shown that their speeds are closely related to how far ahead they look at upcoming letters while they type.

Although both typing and digit memorization are very specialized skills, the methods of getting past a plateau used in the two areas point toward an effective general approach to plateaus. Any reasonably complex skill will involve a variety of components, some of which you will be better at than others. Thus, when you reach a point at which you are having difficulty getting better, it will be just one or two of the components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back. The question is, Which ones?

To figure that out, you need to find a way to push yourself a little — not a lot — harder than usual. This will often help you figure out where your sticking points are. If you’re a tennis player, try playing a better opponent than you are used to; your weaknesses will probably become much more obvious. If you’re a manager, pay attention to what goes wrong when things get busy or chaotic — those problems are not anomalies but rather indications of weaknesses that were probably there all the time but were usually less obvious.

With all of this in mind, I suggested to Josh that if he wanted to speed up the pace at which he could memorize the order of a deck of cards, he should try to do it in less time than it normally took and then look to see where his mistakes were coming from. By identifying exactly what was slowing him down, he could come up with exercises to improve his speed on those particular things instead of simply trying, over and over again, to produce some generalized improvement that would decrease the amount of time he spent on an entire deck of cards.

This, then, is what you should try when other techniques for getting past a plateau have failed. First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions. Either way, pay attention to what happens when you practice; if you are not improving, you will need to try something else.

The power of this technique is that it targets those specific problem areas that are holding you back rather than trying this and that and hoping that something works. This technique is not widely recognized, even among experienced teachers, even though it might seem obvious as described here and is a remarkably effective way to rise above plateaus.

Here you go. I hope I was able to convince you that plateaus are not the end of the world, but simply a pitstop on your way to achieving your learning goals. See them as an opportunity for growth that brings you one more step closer to your objectives.

If you liked this read, check out my home page for articles about philosophy, learning, self-improvement, literature, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and more. Here are some you may be interested in:

Overcome Learning Plateaus

And Reignite Your Progress

Written by Rational Badger