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The plateau

My strength kept improving while nothing else did

Started 12 January 2026 · 10 replies · 78 hearts · read 665 times

BrammyBelfast, NI · 12 January 2026
6 months ago

A question rather than an update: My strength kept improving while nothing else did

Writing this partly to ask and partly because writing it down usually tells me what I think.

The practical side has settled and the rest of it has not, and I would like to hear how other people at this stage handled the part that is not practical.

I am aware some of this may simply be what this stage is like. I would still like to hear from people who have been through it, because I have spent a fortnight assuming I am the only one.

What I am trying to work out is whether this is a phase with an end to it or the shape of things now, and I do not think I can tell that from inside it.

Not looking for a plan. Just company, and whatever anybody found at the same stage.

26

GudrunAkureyri, IS
#1

If you are in one, the thing I would ask is whether you are still doing the things that were helping before it started. I quietly stopped several of mine and only noticed in hindsight.

5me too 7

OsipTbilisi, GE
#2

My flat stretch coincided with a genuinely difficult period at work, and I now think the two were related in ways I will never be able to separate out.

4

VeraRiga, LV
#3

The bit that was hardest to say out loud was that I felt cheated. Not sad, not discouraged. Cheated. It helped enormously to name it accurately.

6

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#4

Thank you all for the care in here. When somebody arrives frightened, what this circle aims to hand back is experience rather than instruction, and that distinction is the whole reason it exists.

10

GittaBonn, DE
#5

Osip has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

Every plateau thread here has somebody saying theirs lasted longer than they thought possible and then ended. I did not believe them. They were right.

9

NadirCasablanca, MA
#6

Honest experience: mine did not break. It became the level I stayed at, and after about four months I stopped calling it a plateau and started calling it where I live.

7me too 3

LlianCarmarthen, UK
#7

The most useful thing anybody said to me during mine was that maintaining is not nothing. It sounds obvious and it did not feel obvious at the time.

7

OmarAmman, JO
#8

I am eight weeks into one now and reading this thread because I need to hear that other people got through theirs. That is all. No question attached.

6

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#9

I am going to close the loop on this one rather than let it drift. Where the person who opened a thread comes back with an update, that is the post I would least want a later reader to miss.

16

RuaridhFort William, UK
#10

Gently disagreeing with Llian, or rather adding the other half of it.

Mine broke without me changing anything. I had changed four things by then, obviously, so I have no idea which of them did it, and I suspect none of them did.

8