Plateaus

​You won’t always feel like you’re getting better. There will be lots of times in your grappling journey that you may feel like you’re stagnating or even getting worse. Most likely you’re not getting worse, and in fact you’re probably just improving less slowly than you have in the past if anything. When you start, it takes a while before you don’t feel completely lost. Then, you start to put the pieces together and usually that leads to a rapid ascent. Finally, people start to figure out counters to the things you’re doing and that’s a plateau. Your improvement just seems to flatten out. This cycle will repeat itself for your entire grappling career. The parts where you feel like you’re not getting better will vary in duration, and if you have enough tools in your bag, you may not notice them at all, but you’re not alone in feeling like you’re stagnating. In grappling we are Sisyphus, except the hill never ends and the boulder never falls back down. It just gets stuck…a lot.