February 6, 2023 • 9 mins
What causes training Plateaus? | The Asana Academy Podcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So the question of the day iswhy do people hit training
plateaus?
Now, if you're working on apress handstand or any kind of
technical skill.
The thing that tends to eludemost people is once they move
past this realm of.
(00:21):
What I call, watch and copy.
And I'll talk about this in asecond.
But I want to explain.
What this phenomenon is, so youcan start to apply it, or at
least attempt to try it, applyit to your practice.
Now.
Okay.
So when you start practicingyoga, for example, you will see
people.
I'm doing say like downward dogor you'll see people doing like
(00:43):
warrior two.
And visually you can take a lookat them and say, oh, I
understand the shape of thebody.
I understand where they're goingwith it.
I can now just copy what they'redoing and I can put my body in
the same shape.
So fundamentally what we'redoing is we're just looking at
somebody else and we're copying.
And to a certain extent, that'sfine.
(01:03):
When we start, we can look atour.
We can look at all the basicstanding yoga poses we can look
at even some basic arm balanceslike Crow, and you can just
watch and copy, right?
That's the general, that's thegeneral mechanic for how people
start doing yoga.
But.
The difference.
Is everyone has a differentthreshold of.
(01:27):
Were there watching copystrategy fails.
Let's put it that way.
And then when that watch andcopy strategy fails, that's
when.
You'll get stuck where it'sokay, now I no longer can just
watch someone do something.
I can't just watch someone do apress handstand and do it.
I can't just watch someone likelift up off the ground into the
(01:47):
air and do it.
So that's where the plateauhappens, right?
Which is now my watch and copystrategy fails.
Now in order to get through tothat, and this is where the real
breakthroughs in practice startto happen and pay attention.
If you're someone who's beenstuck at a certain level in your
practice for a long time, Or,and I'm talking like months even
weeks, the thing to remember.
(02:08):
Is it's time.
Your body has to create newpatterns in order to bust
through this plateau.
And if this is the first time,and this is why people struggle
with.
Like a press handstand becauseit's not something you can do.
I don't matter.
I don't care how talented youare.
You can't just look at somebodydoing it and then just get lucky
and do it your first time.
It's just not going to happen.
(02:29):
That's not the way it works.
But instead you have to say nowI need to learn to actually use
my muscles in the correct way toreplicate that movement.
I need to replicate themechanics that are going on
piece by piece.
And so what happens in amovement?
Like press hands down.
Is, there's a lot of differentthings going on in that pose,
(02:50):
right?
Your core has to obviouslyengage to lift yourself off the
ground and stabilize yourself.
Your back muscles have to engageto support your shoulder girdle.
So you don't collapse.
Your hip flexors have to engageand strengthen it's called
compression and the hip flexorsin order to lift the legs off
the ground.
But the hip flexors, as I wasgoing to say, also have to be
(03:10):
strong enough to hold your legs.
So if you don't have thestrength in your hip flexors,
which is a thing, a lot of yogapractitioners struggle with.
Then you, aren't going to beable to hold your legs.
If the hips don't have thestrength to hold them, if that
makes sense.
What that means is amongsteverything else.
That could be the problem with apress handstand.
If the hip flexors aren't ho ifyou don't have the strength in
(03:33):
the hips to hold the legs, whenthe legs go up into the air, the
whole mechanic fails.
So those are all of the.
Those are all of the littlethings that go on in that
movement itself.
So the more and more that youstart to get into advanced
mechanics.
There's a higher level ofunderstanding within the body
(03:54):
that goes on.
And what that means is createbeing able to create these
individual movement patterns.
One by one.
So that they become automatic,like brushing your teeth, for
example, right?
The example of movement patternsthat are automatic are like
brushing your teeth, riding abike.
Throwing a ball with yourdominant hand.
Those are what are calledmovement patterns, neurological
(04:16):
movement patterns that weexecute all the time without
thinking about it.
What we're doing instead iswe're creating.
Individual movement patterns inour body.
And then we're asking them towork together.
That's what a press handstandis.
It's a series of anatomicalmovement patterns.
We create an execute together.
(04:37):
And that's the, that's how youstart to break through plateaus.
Like normally, like everybodyhas a threshold where they'll
come up against the watch andcopy barrier, which they'll hit.
And then once they hit, they arejust at a plateau.
And oftentimes that's wherepeople are stuck forever.
I see this a lot with yogapractitioners.
They have been so reliant onjust copying what they see, that
(05:01):
the difficult things continue toelude them.
Because they don't have anyother tool in their tool kit
other than simply watching andcopying, but for the advanced
stuff that doesn't work.
And that's actually why too, ifyou read or actually watch.
We'll read and watch the reviewsof the hundreds and hundreds of
(05:23):
people that have gone through.
Body breakthrough.
One of the things that reallycreates that environment for
change is movement patterns.
Like when I look at people thesedays, like people will ask.
How is it that you work withpeople or what is it you do
differently with people thathelps them to break through
these things?
And the thing is it's just thedressing movement patterns.
(05:44):
It's looking at movementpatterns addressing them.
So that way you can move pastthem.
Because a lot of, because not alot, all the time, pretty much
all the time.
If you want to move your body inways that you've never moved it
before you have to learn to useyour muscles in ways you've
never used them before.
And so your current set ofmovement patterns are resisting.
(06:05):
They are.
That your current set of movingpatterns.
It shouldn't say resisting, butthey are.
Creating the movements that yourbody can currently do.
But in order to do other things,you have to create the patterns
underneath, right?
New patterns, deeper patterns,more complex movement patterns
that become automatic andsimple.
So your body can execute them.
And in turn, accomplish moreadvanced skills.
(06:28):
And that's why it's not justabout strength thing, like a
lot.
A lot of stuff with.
Like any kind of the handstandlifts that you're doing, press
handstands lifts from theground.
You see me doing like L sits andV sits to handstands.
It's not just a strength thing.
Like a lot of people will leadyou to believe.
And it's not just a drill thing.
Like I, I think a lot of peopleare misled.
(06:48):
If you look at sometimes.
Sometimes it's the classic caseof there's on the internet.
There's too much information.
And sometimes when informationbecomes free, it becomes no
good.
And that a lot of it is builtstrength.
This, if you can't do a pressHanson, build strength this way.
Or if you can't do this, dothese drills, but the thing is
none of that matters.
If you don't have the underlyingpatterns.
(07:09):
Underneath to support thosekinds of things.
Because the press handstand.
Is in a lot of ways.
Treated more like brushing yourteeth and less like a bench
press.
Because the thing with the benchpress.
Is if you.
If you can't bench press 300pounds, you can start by bench
pressing 50 pounds.
(07:29):
And it's the same fundamentalmechanic.
We w we learn the movementpattern pretty quickly.
By simply.
Grabbing less weight, but withthe press handstand, you can't
just do a lesser version of you.
Can't just cut your body weightin half and try and do press
handstand.
It doesn't work that way.
You have to work up to thispatterns, but like brushing your
(07:51):
teeth, for example.
It's there's a certain way youlearn to hold the toothbrush.
There's a certain way.
There's an angle.
If you think back to when you'rea kid.
Learning to brush your teeth.
You can't decide, use your righthand or do you use your, do you
use your left hand and thenlike, how do you grip the
toothbrush and what direction,does my elbow go?
What's the easiest way to turnthe toothbrush to get back in
(08:11):
there and get the molars.
And all sorts of your teeth,right?
You learn those fundamentalmechanics.
It's not it's hard to brush myteeth, so let me strengthen my
shoulders.
Let me go do some shoulderpresses so that I can hold my
toothbrush and then get betterat brushing my teeth.
It doesn't work that way.
And.
But that's the approach that alot of people take with the
press hand sandwich.
Yeah.
You get stronger, but it doesn'tnecessarily guarantee technical
(08:33):
abilities.
So think about it in thatregard.
Movement patterns that are soimportant, the critically
important.
Hi, like high level athletesperforming like automatic, like
basketball players shootingthree pointers or quarterbacks
throwing like pinpoint passes.
They're their movement patternsthat they create.
They're just automatic movementpatterns that they have trained
(08:54):
and drilled into them.
To the point where they're justlike brushing your teeth,
brushing their teeth.
It's the same thing over andover again.
So that's all I've got for youon today's show.
If this was beneficial, do takesome time to share it on, share
it or share Sheridan a story.
And tag me@brianaganad onInstagram.
And you can also follow me onFacebook.
(09:15):
My page.
Is it's facebook.com/baganad.
you can go there and you canalso follow me there so that's
all i've got for you on today'sshow have a good rest of your
day and i'll talk to you soon
So the question of the day iswhy do people hit training
plateaus?
Now, if you're working on apress handstand or any kind of
technical skill.
The thing that tends to eludemost people is once they move
past this realm of.
(00:21):
What I call, watch and copy.
And I'll talk about this in asecond.
But I want to explain.
What this phenomenon is, so youcan start to apply it, or at
least attempt to try it, applyit to your practice.
Now.
Okay.
So when you start practicingyoga, for example, you will see
people.
I'm doing say like downward dogor you'll see people doing like
(00:43):
warrior two.
And visually you can take a lookat them and say, oh, I
understand the shape of thebody.
I understand where they're goingwith it.
I can now just copy what they'redoing and I can put my body in
the same shape.
So fundamentally what we'redoing is we're just looking at
somebody else and we're copying.
And to a certain extent, that'sfine.
(01:03):
When we start, we can look atour.
We can look at all the basicstanding yoga poses we can look
at even some basic arm balanceslike Crow, and you can just
watch and copy, right?
That's the general, that's thegeneral mechanic for how people
start doing yoga.
But.
The difference.
Is everyone has a differentthreshold of.
(01:27):
Were there watching copystrategy fails.
Let's put it that way.
And then when that watch andcopy strategy fails, that's
when.
You'll get stuck where it'sokay, now I no longer can just
watch someone do something.
I can't just watch someone do apress handstand and do it.
I can't just watch someone likelift up off the ground into the
(01:47):
air and do it.
So that's where the plateauhappens, right?
Which is now my watch and copystrategy fails.
Now in order to get through tothat, and this is where the real
breakthroughs in practice startto happen and pay attention.
If you're someone who's beenstuck at a certain level in your
practice for a long time, Or,and I'm talking like months even
weeks, the thing to remember.
(02:08):
Is it's time.
Your body has to create newpatterns in order to bust
through this plateau.
And if this is the first time,and this is why people struggle
with.
Like a press handstand becauseit's not something you can do.
I don't matter.
I don't care how talented youare.
You can't just look at somebodydoing it and then just get lucky
and do it your first time.
It's just not going to happen.
(02:29):
That's not the way it works.
But instead you have to say nowI need to learn to actually use
my muscles in the correct way toreplicate that movement.
I need to replicate themechanics that are going on
piece by piece.
And so what happens in amovement?
Like press hands down.
Is, there's a lot of differentthings going on in that pose,
(02:50):
right?
Your core has to obviouslyengage to lift yourself off the
ground and stabilize yourself.
Your back muscles have to engageto support your shoulder girdle.
So you don't collapse.
Your hip flexors have to engageand strengthen it's called
compression and the hip flexorsin order to lift the legs off
the ground.
But the hip flexors, as I wasgoing to say, also have to be
(03:10):
strong enough to hold your legs.
So if you don't have thestrength in your hip flexors,
which is a thing, a lot of yogapractitioners struggle with.
Then you, aren't going to beable to hold your legs.
If the hips don't have thestrength to hold them, if that
makes sense.
What that means is amongsteverything else.
That could be the problem with apress handstand.
If the hip flexors aren't ho ifyou don't have the strength in
(03:33):
the hips to hold the legs, whenthe legs go up into the air, the
whole mechanic fails.
So those are all of the.
Those are all of the littlethings that go on in that
movement itself.
So the more and more that youstart to get into advanced
mechanics.
There's a higher level ofunderstanding within the body
(03:54):
that goes on.
And what that means is createbeing able to create these
individual movement patterns.
One by one.
So that they become automatic,like brushing your teeth, for
example, right?
The example of movement patternsthat are automatic are like
brushing your teeth, riding abike.
Throwing a ball with yourdominant hand.
Those are what are calledmovement patterns, neurological
(04:16):
movement patterns that weexecute all the time without
thinking about it.
What we're doing instead iswe're creating.
Individual movement patterns inour body.
And then we're asking them towork together.
That's what a press handstandis.
It's a series of anatomicalmovement patterns.
We create an execute together.
(04:37):
And that's the, that's how youstart to break through plateaus.
Like normally, like everybodyhas a threshold where they'll
come up against the watch andcopy barrier, which they'll hit.
And then once they hit, they arejust at a plateau.
And oftentimes that's wherepeople are stuck forever.
I see this a lot with yogapractitioners.
They have been so reliant onjust copying what they see, that
(05:01):
the difficult things continue toelude them.
Because they don't have anyother tool in their tool kit
other than simply watching andcopying, but for the advanced
stuff that doesn't work.
And that's actually why too, ifyou read or actually watch.
We'll read and watch the reviewsof the hundreds and hundreds of
(05:23):
people that have gone through.
Body breakthrough.
One of the things that reallycreates that environment for
change is movement patterns.
Like when I look at people thesedays, like people will ask.
How is it that you work withpeople or what is it you do
differently with people thathelps them to break through
these things?
And the thing is it's just thedressing movement patterns.
(05:44):
It's looking at movementpatterns addressing them.
So that way you can move pastthem.
Because a lot of, because not alot, all the time, pretty much
all the time.
If you want to move your body inways that you've never moved it
before you have to learn to useyour muscles in ways you've
never used them before.
And so your current set ofmovement patterns are resisting.
(06:05):
They are.
That your current set of movingpatterns.
It shouldn't say resisting, butthey are.
Creating the movements that yourbody can currently do.
But in order to do other things,you have to create the patterns
underneath, right?
New patterns, deeper patterns,more complex movement patterns
that become automatic andsimple.
So your body can execute them.
And in turn, accomplish moreadvanced skills.
(06:28):
And that's why it's not justabout strength thing, like a
lot.
A lot of stuff with.
Like any kind of the handstandlifts that you're doing, press
handstands lifts from theground.
You see me doing like L sits andV sits to handstands.
It's not just a strength thing.
Like a lot of people will leadyou to believe.
And it's not just a drill thing.
Like I, I think a lot of peopleare misled.
(06:48):
If you look at sometimes.
Sometimes it's the classic caseof there's on the internet.
There's too much information.
And sometimes when informationbecomes free, it becomes no
good.
And that a lot of it is builtstrength.
This, if you can't do a pressHanson, build strength this way.
Or if you can't do this, dothese drills, but the thing is
none of that matters.
If you don't have the underlyingpatterns.
(07:09):
Underneath to support thosekinds of things.
Because the press handstand.
Is in a lot of ways.
Treated more like brushing yourteeth and less like a bench
press.
Because the thing with the benchpress.
Is if you.
If you can't bench press 300pounds, you can start by bench
pressing 50 pounds.
(07:29):
And it's the same fundamentalmechanic.
We w we learn the movementpattern pretty quickly.
By simply.
Grabbing less weight, but withthe press handstand, you can't
just do a lesser version of you.
Can't just cut your body weightin half and try and do press
handstand.
It doesn't work that way.
You have to work up to thispatterns, but like brushing your
(07:51):
teeth, for example.
It's there's a certain way youlearn to hold the toothbrush.
There's a certain way.
There's an angle.
If you think back to when you'rea kid.
Learning to brush your teeth.
You can't decide, use your righthand or do you use your, do you
use your left hand and thenlike, how do you grip the
toothbrush and what direction,does my elbow go?
What's the easiest way to turnthe toothbrush to get back in
(08:11):
there and get the molars.
And all sorts of your teeth,right?
You learn those fundamentalmechanics.
It's not it's hard to brush myteeth, so let me strengthen my
shoulders.
Let me go do some shoulderpresses so that I can hold my
toothbrush and then get betterat brushing my teeth.
It doesn't work that way.
And.
But that's the approach that alot of people take with the
press hand sandwich.
Yeah.
You get stronger, but it doesn'tnecessarily guarantee technical
(08:33):
abilities.
So think about it in thatregard.
Movement patterns that are soimportant, the critically
important.
Hi, like high level athletesperforming like automatic, like
basketball players shootingthree pointers or quarterbacks
throwing like pinpoint passes.
They're their movement patternsthat they create.
They're just automatic movementpatterns that they have trained
(08:54):
and drilled into them.
To the point where they're justlike brushing your teeth,
brushing their teeth.
It's the same thing over andover again.
So that's all I've got for youon today's show.
If this was beneficial, do takesome time to share it on, share
it or share Sheridan a story.
And tag me@brianaganad onInstagram.
And you can also follow me onFacebook.
(09:15):
My page.
Is it's facebook.com/baganad.
you can go there and you canalso follow me there so that's
all i've got for you on today'sshow have a good rest of your
day and i'll talk to you soon
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