Why You Are In The Intermediate Plateau
If you haven't been here yet then I have some bad news about the future
Everyone hits the plateau. This is the point where the habits that have brought your career to it’s current point - commonly something like training a few times a week, throwing sessions with a friend, a couple of gym and track sessions - are no longer making you better. You’re trying as hard as ever but don’t seem to be improving or getting a bigger role.
I’ve called it the intermediate plateau because this is when most people get stuck - after the early years of beginner gains and progress. But it’s possible to be here later, or be stuck on plateaus multiple times. As you get better and set your sights higher progress inevitably gets more and more difficult. So the reasons here will apply no matter where you are: if you want to get better but feel you aren’t these are some of the major reasons why.
Before I talk about why you are stuck: you might be happy on the plateau. Hey, you had to work to get here. Enjoy it if you want, make peace that you’re not going to be the best player on a championship team and soak in the journey. That’s probably a more fun way to live.
But if you’re here because you do want to get better and you need to know why you can’t seem to then here are my top reasons, from my experience, why players stop improving.
You Don’t Have A Clear Goal
When you start playing the game at school or university there is a natural progression. You are both consistently learning new skills and strategies on a weekly basis and you rising through the team ranks year by year - at some stage you’ll be among the handful of most experienced players on that team.
Once you leave those environments the natural structure goes with it. You know a lot more about the game and have probably picked all the low-hanging fruit of improving basic skills.
What normally provides a bit of structure outside these environments is the process of trialing for club and national teams. Once you start making those teams - particularly once you are in a club - this is when the progression wall can really hit. Moving up the ranks in a club team is completely different to the natural linear progression of a school or college team. You can be part of a club for 5 years, and in that time the best players stay there and the club recruits more exciting young prospects.
You also are past the point where you are seeing rapid progress, learning ‘new’ skills and strategies naturally over the course of a season. You’re now trying to improve and enhance existing skills. It’s MUCH easier to say to yourself ‘I need to learn a backhand huck’ after playing for a year than to say ‘I need to be better at throwing backhand hucks…in some way” after playing for seven years.
To compound all this, because of the natural, linear* progression up to now you probably have never learned the skills of goal setting. But now you need them.
Along with setting goals it’s important that you work on your self-image. If you want to get better you have to see yourself as worthy of it. If you think of the best players in your club, region, nation, continent, planet as inherently better than you then you won’t be able to get past the point you are at. It’s fine to see them as better than you at this moment in time…but you have to see yourself as capable of being among them or surpassing them.
You Don’t Train Any Differently
OK, so now we know that the early years of progression as an ultimate player are relatively simple - you show up every week and put effort in and you are almost bound to get better. But now you are doing that and you’re not getting better.
It’s quite probable that you’ll now need to work harder** but you definitely need to work smarter.
Smarter has two components:
it needs to be specifically aligned to your goal
it needs to be something designed appropriately for the purpose
To explain that further, let’s say your goal is something simple (in concept!) like getting a strong forehand huck.
Your throwing practice should be aligned to getting a better forehand huck i.e. going out for an hour throwing practice and spending most of it working on shorter throws or backhands is probably not efficient
But also going out and just throwing forehand hucks at your partner for an hour might not be much smarter - you probably have done this before and it didn’t work. A structured progressive training plan is what you need (and a generic one you find online written for someone else - although a step in the right direction - might not be the thing you need)
Your throwing time, gym time and small pod work are areas where you have direct influence over what you are doing and can definitely do smarter in.
But for your larger pods and full team trainings you can still approach things differently. You might not be able to change what drills and games are run at the session but your approach to them can change. But now we’re getting close to the next factor.
You Don’t Take Risks
A natural reaction to the plateau and being unsure of your place on a team is to narrow your focus onto not making mistakes.
If you are going to improve your game you are going to need to be comfortable with making mistakes. It’s unlikely you acquired your currently skillset by playing within yourself and not making errors, so you need to continually go through that process.
You should be thinking about what aspect of your game are the coaches and captains going to look at and say “I want that ability on the field in this situation”. It can’t be that you don’t make mistakes because, well, you definitely do make mistakes. So then what are you bringing to the team?
The best players I have coached make more mistakes than the rest. They know when to play within themselves, and it’s only in that last 10% of the season. It’s definitely not early season pod sessions.
Of course, you may not be part of an environment that supports this. It’s the wrong environment in that case. If you really love that team and can’t change it from within, you might need to make peace with where you are at.
You Think Too Short Term
This may be more a European problem, but there are so many different competitions and it’s easy to get locked into a cycle where you are continually trialing for teams or trying to impress to make the roster for a particular tournament, or playing a tournament every few weeks where you are trying to win and play to the maximum of your current ability.
All of that is going to hold you back from working towards intelligent long term goals and taking more risks with your play. You need to be comfortable with potential short term pain because you are focused on working towards something bigger.
Your Core Skills Aren’t Good Enough
I am a huge proponent of adding skills to your toolbox, but you should of course forensically examine your basic skills. It’s pretty easy to skim over the development of a skill early in your career and never really cement it.
Some example might include:
You have developed a beastly forehand huck but everyone still covers their eyes when you need to throw an around reset
Your first step is lightning quick but you can’t be certain you’re going to actually catch the disc when it comes
Your communication and switching is elite on defence but you get roasted when you do have to go 1v1
You don’t need to be perfect at everything but you can’t be a liability at anything. If you were to really get some raw honesty from your teammates, you might learn that you have a weakness similar to the above. Even if it’s only a perceived weakness it’s probably going to hold you back unless you do something to solve it.
I’m limiting myself to these 5 reasons. I’m sure you recognise these in yourself or a teammate - and you can probably think of more! If you improve on these 5 however I think you’ll see some major improvement. It’s easier said than done, but if you’re aware of what might be holding you back it’s easier to do something about it.
* it’s not really a linear process, but it’s certainly more linear than it is later on
** the players ahead of you probably work very hard, and you are already worse than them.