Plateaus occur naturally in everything we do whether it is physical, educational, or spiritual in nature.  I have experienced several plateaus within my Aikido training.  During these plateaus, it seems as though my abilities show little to no improvement for weeks at a time.    On the advice of others, I’ve experienced several successful ways of overcoming the Aikido training flat-line.  The following are three methods that have helped me overcome a training plateau.  I have arranged them in the order that I have used them, but lately I have found myself going back and forth between these strategies - as my ukemi (Strategy I), for example, now is currently much different than it was four years ago.  What strategies have worked for you?

Strategy I: Ukemi Improvement

When I first began training, I experienced a rapid rise in learning similar to driving a car.  I found I had to pay attention to a million things at once!  Where are my feet?  What the heck is “katatedori”?  Why am I not breathing?  After a few months, I had the hang of the vocab, and usually could get my feet in the right orientation.  A few months after that, I could do the basic shapes for ikkyo, kotegaishi, and one out of ten times an iriminage with a full tenkan.  A few months after that, I had reached my first plateau.  At this point, my ukemi was still very basic, and nothing that could be considered “pro-active”.  I began to try to improve my ukemi, first by trying to take control of my own “destiny” during ukemiwaza.  So, rather than letting myself be controlled and thrown by nage, I began to take active measures as soon as my balance was taken to improve my position by rolling and breakfalls.  This had the added side effect of improving my sensitivity as nage, as well as beginning to expose potential vulnerabilities!  Both Sensei will tell you that your Aikido will only progress as fast as your ukemi, and I have found this to be very sound advice.  So, during that first plateau, try to focus on your ukemiwaza, specifically with the goal of getting to a place of safety.

Strategy II: Mix up the Training

After a few kyu tests, I had now gotten most of the basic shapes down, and could reliably produce techniques during kihon practice.  However, the nagarewaza was still a big hurdle for me.  For the life of me, I just couldn’t perform techniques if I didn’t know ahead of time what the attack would be!  As obvious as this fix should have been, it was a plateau that I spent several months struggling with.  Again, on the advice of others, I started staying after class and working just on jiuwaza.  I found that others were willing to stay and work on repeated attacks, first, slowly, with only one kind of attack (i.e. menutsuki), then mixed with other attacks.  With this practice, my body slowly started to focus on principles of movement, and less so on the specific technique.  I found that techniques would open up, with the caveat being that I had to struggle to not use the same movement – which in turn opened up the same technique over and over and over…Lastly, I had the chance to spar with a very good karate guy, who clearly demonstrated that I was completely and hopelessly unable to apply ANY aikido techniques in a live situation.  As Kuriowa Shihan noted, kihonwaza training is necessary for live application, but so is practicing with resistance.  Don’t expect to be able to apply your kihonwaza to someone who is prepared to offer resistance right off the bat, and don’t expect it to be pretty.

Strategy III: Setting One Goal at a Time

This third strategy is somewhat inspired by old school training, where a student works on a single technique until they have mastered it.  In the traditional old school Kodokan Judo, it was not uncommon to spend the first year simply watching on the side while sitting in seiza, and the second year doing nothing but getting thrown by senior students.  I remember spending five months doing nothing but Osotogari!  Of course, our Aikido classes are structured much differently, and this can lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed by the hundreds of techniques and variations we might learn in a single year.  Over the last few years, I have been employing a hybrid learning strategy that both focuses on a single elemental skill, but is applied to nearly every technique we practice over the period of an entire semester or year.  For example, in 2007 I made it my goal to focus on using my hips more.  Thus, while every class would emphasize something different (i.e. various techniques, kazushi, timing), I would always try to incorporate moving my hips in addition to what was being shown.  In 2008, I chose to focus on getting three inches deeper on every single technique, and in 2009 I focused on speeding up my timing so that I was initiating the technique.  Overall, the purpose of this strategy is to help organize your training so that you are building muscle memory reflexes, even while practicing different techniques for every class.  I was amazed at how building these elemental skills one by one helped to overcome various training plateaus!

In summary, training is full of starts and stops, and is rarely a steadily rising learning curve.  In my experience, I have found my training best characterized by periods of rapid learning, followed by periods of very slow learning.  I am sure there are many great strategies to overcome a learning curve plateau, but here are at least three strategies that have proven to be helpful in my own training.

Shoshin,

AK