Training Plateaus

A training plateau occurs when the martial artist is training as consistently and intelligently as he can and he's no longer improving -- at least not as far as he can tell. Usually to an outsider, however, he looks fabulous and his techniques are crisply executed, fast and powerful. So what is happening?

His intellectual perceptions of skill and ability have caught up with his current level of physical abilities and surpassed them. In other words his mind is now operating fast enough where martial arts techniques are concerned to perceive the weaknesses in his physical skills and abilities that have been there all along, hidden from his perceptions in plain view. One could say that his physical execution of technique in general is not suffering it's just that his mental capacity to perceive flaws has taken a leap forward. Now he can perceive the imperfections he can improve in those problem areas.

If he continues to train diligently then eventually the physical aspect will not only catch up again with the mental but -- for a time -- surpass it. When that happens he will again feel like a full grown tiger of the martial arts world, at the top of his game and abilities. Roooooaaaar! Then, alas, fairly soon thereafter the mental perceptions will once again catch up and surpass his physical abilities and he will be standing flat footed and forlorn again on top of another wretched training plateau. For keep in mind that it does [even if only temporarily] make you feel wretched.

I bring this up because I reached my first training plateau last night after performing the Bassai Dai kata five times in a row in my driveway. The first rendition of the form was as much of a warm up and a review as a serious effort at achieving a credible performance and so I can discount it. I was very happy with the second and third renditions and was psychologically jazzed by the performances.

The fourth, however, shifted a certain way in my perceptions and felt curiously comfortable to me, as if I were not really doing the form but remembering it in a dream state -- as if I were standing outside of myself watching me perform kata. The fifth rendition, on the other hand, simply left me feeling unhappy because although I KNOW that I executed it with speed and focus, balance and power it somehow felt to me afterwards as if I had been relatively slow and clumsy and inaccurate with my techniques. Although I did not immediately recognize what had happened at the time, this morning I realize that last night I had reached my first training plateau since beginning this now six weeks old program.

This is good for so many reasons that I may not be able to list all of them but, first a confession; a training plateau is a scary thing because despite the intellectual knowledge that you WILL get past it if you continue to train with due diligence emotionally you KNOW that this is IT for you -- never again will you feel like a training dynamo, a tiger of the dojo.

It helps, of course, if the training plateau is only one of several that you have experienced over the previous months of hard training. Truth to tell, though, it's been almost fifteen years since I last experienced a training plateau while practicing a Tai Chi Chuan form -- hence my delay in recognizing what it was -- and the unexpected arrival of this one has shaken me up a bit.

That's one of the drawbacks of training entirely on one's own; YOU have to be your own wise martial arts master and recognize these things when they arise and counsel yourself when it comes time to deal with them.

Here is the good thing though; you do not hit a training plateau without having put in a great deal of hard work and time to get there. It is a blazing sign post telling you that you ARE progressing significantly in your training. When your mind is working fast enough to recognize the many flaws in what you had heretofore been considering good performances then you can and -- if you are willing to put in the work -- WILL dramatically increase the nature of your physical abilities in the near future.

One way in which to get past a training plateau is to break things down to their component parts and polish them in isolation from one another. For instance, perhaps now is a good time to review the execution of a wide cross section of basic techniques from stance work to punching and blocking to see if I can put a bit of polish on them.

The point is that the mind is ready for the body to increase its technical abilities a notch or two and it's up to the martial artist to figure out training techniques would most advantageously work for him at this time.

I am quite pleased to have hit my first plateau in this six weeks old program of retraining myself. It is a solid indicator that I AM making significant progress. So onward and upward! Avaunt!

Charleyhorse