When it comes to sports skills, why is it that beginners often hit a plateau so quickly in practice? During the first couple of times that you try a new sport skill, most every repetition you do seems to result in improvement because you are learning something new. Then progress appears to suddenly come to a halt. Your throw still lacks control, your footwork is still shaky, or your landing is still noisy even though you do the repetition over and over again. To a beginner, this usually doesn’t mean a lack of aptitude, rather too much or automatic practice.
A plateau sets in when the athlete is making a repetition without learning something from the action. So, what does a beginner do to move past the plateau? Rather than practicing in an undirected or overly general manner, the athlete needs to narrow the focus of the task. One option is to not evaluate practice performance by the end result. Just completing a specific task doesn’t mean that you have improved. If you are performing a task such as a basic change of direction skill, then you may want to notice when the movement fails.
Are you losing your balance because you planted your outside foot too wide? Does the upper body lean too late to support the turn? The more specifically that you can identify the problem, the better. This is the way that you can practice the solution. Beginners often describe a skill as awkward or awkward, but that doesn’t really mean anything, so try to be as physical and specific as possible. That moment when you can identify the problem and the problem has a shape, then your practice becomes a little more productive. Another common mistake is that during a plateau, the athlete often tries too many different drills too soon.
When there is not much improvement, then it is tempting to change things up quickly with a different drill every few minutes and just hope that one of them sparks a breakthrough. Often that just fragments your attention span. You are practicing for the sake of practice. So if your passing form keeps breaking under pressure, it probably doesn’t help much to add three new drills in the same session, which might leave you exhausted without necessarily improving your throw. What often helps is to stick to the core pattern and just change only one variable at a time. Slow it down, decrease the distance, reduce the complexity and let your body feel the clean version of the action before you make the task more complex.
Repetition will only be helpful if the movement remains relatively consistent across different reps. If every repetition is different then you don’t learn anything. So, what is the best way to structure practice to get past a plateau? I recommend a short block of practice with the first four minutes to work on just the core skill with the movement so slow you can sense your balance, rhythm, and body position. Then spend the next five minutes repeating that exact same action with one specific focus, such as your knee stability when you land, or your body position to minimize torso and hip movement as you perform a throw. Next spend four minutes trying out that new adjustment as you do the core action slightly faster and/or do another activity or movement that might interfere with the first action to a bit of the new technique.
Finally spend two minutes practicing the core movement without the activity and then visualize the best repetition and explain to yourself exactly what you were feeling during the most successful repetition. It is important to visualize because plateaus usually seem to last much longer if practice just ends when fatigue sets in and if there isn’t the effort to recall the positive results from the practice. Also, feedback plays a very important role during a plateau, but the feedback that beginners often try to get often isn’t very helpful.
Often positive feedback from a coach or teacher does not have much to say, and a lot of negative criticism can actually make you feel tense or anxious. Even notes to yourself can count as good feedback if they are specific enough like “stay lower before pushing” can give you something to do the next day. “Just do better today” is too general of a goal. So when does it help to break through a plateau? When your practice is very specific, when you know the task is too advanced for where you are right now, when there are a lot of compensations going on, and when the movement becomes more automatic. Skill is always built upon correcting the skill not just repeating it over and over again.