Why Your Skills Have Stopped Progressing

The longer people are involved in training, the harder and harder it takes to hit new PR’s. However, that doesn’t mean that their skills need to slow down too. Rather, what you should be seeing is an increase in your ability to perform them, or you’re able to add onto your skills in a way that will benefit you and your workouts. Yet, for some reason many people see a slow down in their ability to perform skills, add to skills, or progress in their skills. So, I will out below some main reasons for this;

1. You are not strong enough.
   Generally speaking, when people’s skills stop progressing it is usually from them not being strong enough to build upon or progress. Usually, these people have spent too long doing the “sport version” or looking to attain a standard of a movement, thus taking away from the strength required to perform the movement itself in its strict, natural form.
   

2. Within your training, you don’t take time after your season to re-group and re-build.
   When a competition season ends, it is important for people to take a step back, re-establish their baselines, understand their “functional ceiling”, and then put a plan in place to create the new foundation that will allow them to progress.
   

3. They spend too much time chasing intensity.
   When athletes spend too much time chasing intensity, you will see a drop in strength and movement mechanics. Why is this? Well, when you are intense all the time, you are walking the line between technique and speed. As you fatigue more and more, your technique will diminish as well, and thus you will resort to poor movement standards for the sake of time.
   

4. There isn’t enough progressive overload around specific movements.
   Think about skills like a back squat. If you want to get stronger at back squatting, you are going to back squat, and hopefully build around that. Too often with skills, people are jumping all over the place and not just focusing on the component of the skill and progressively overloading it to increase their ability. 

So, what should you do now? Take a look at the work you have been doing and see if you are missing any of the above. If you are, then chances are that is why your skills have stopped progressing.

-Coach Jay