How do you overcome the intermediate plateau when learning a skill? I sympathise with your dilemma. I’ve been playing table tennis weekly for the last 15 years or so. I can beat most casual players who challenge me on holiday or at a bar.
But as soon as I come up against an elite player, I don’t stand a chance. The kicker? I haven’t noticeably improved for years.
This is the classic intermediate plateau – you enjoy rapid gains early on and reach a respectable level, but then improvement tapers off and it can feel as if you’re stuck.
Researchers have been studying these learning trajectories for well over a hundred years.
A classic study from the late 19th century tracked the progress of telegraph operators learning to transcribe Morse code messages.
They repeatedly hit stubborn plateaus as they moved through each new level of performance, from decoding single letters to recognising complete words and ultimately whole sentences.
One way to think about what’s going on – and this begins to hint at strategies for breaking through – is that in the early stages of learning a skill, you have to do everything consciously and deliberately.
This makes you’re slow and performance feels effortful. But, with practice, your brain gradually learns through trial and error to automate many of the perceptual and motor processes involved.
Performance actually begins to rely on different brain areas. Instead of the front of the brain doing the work, the task is delegated to neural structures that can run on autopilot.
I’ve experienced this shift myself. When I play table tennis today, there’s a pleasing fluidity to my game – I don’t have to concentrate on hitting the ball or think much at all. I can rely on my reflexes and return the ball consistently.
But this automaticity is also what keeps us trapped on a plateau. Once your performance becomes second nature and it’s ‘good enough’ for most of the challenges you encounter, you effectively stop learning to do anything differently.
To improve, you have to break out of your comfort zone: deliberately target your weak points, competing against more skilled opponents, or seek expert feedback on areas to improve and then target those ruthlessly.
Put bluntly, you need to make practice feel hard again. For me, that would mean drilling my weakest shots and seeking out superior players to compete against – a lot more effort than I’m used to.
A term for this approach is ‘deliberate practice’, which you might recognise from the work of the influential Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson on expertise.
People tend to focus on his finding that the most elite performers had put in over 10,000 hours of practice. But Ericsson later regretted the attention paid to that figure, which he said was an oversimplification.
To become a true expert rather than a perpetual intermediate, it’s the quality of practice that matters, not the quantity.
The reality is that there are no easy or pain-free tricks for breaking through a plateau – the most important step will be finding the motivation to make things difficult for yourself again.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Ross Thomas, Wokingham) 'What are some ways to overcome the intermediate plateau when learning a skill?'
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