Every serious student eventually hits a nunchaku training plateau — a stretch where practice feels flat and improvement seems to stop. In Lesson 16 of the Art of Nunchaku series, Alex Stick, a 2x World Kung Fu Champion and Martial Arts Hall of Fame inductee with 40 years of nunchaku experience, tackles this head-on. His message is simple and, for a lot of students, surprising: a plateau is not a wall. It is a signal that a breakthrough is close.
What a Plateau Actually Feels Like
A plateau is that level where you feel stuck. You are putting in the reps and showing up, but it does not feel like you are getting any better. For a lot of people, that flat feeling is discouraging. It is the point where doubt creeps in and the sticks start gathering dust in a drawer.
Alex wants you to recognize that feeling for what it is: a normal, expected part of learning a complex weapon. Hitting a plateau does not mean you have reached your ceiling. It means you are in the middle of the process, exactly where progress happens.
Why a Plateau Is a Good Sign
Here is the reframe at the heart of this lesson. A plateau is not the end of the road. It is the moment right before a leap forward.
When you reach that stuck feeling and you keep practicing anyway — keep drilling, keep repeating, keep showing up — you are setting up a giant jump in your development. The plateau is the quiet stretch before the growth spurt. Students who understand this keep going. The ones who do not tend to quit right before the payoff.
That is the trap. A plateau is the most tempting time to walk away, and it is the worst possible time to do it.
Progress Is Not Linear
Part of what makes plateaus so frustrating is that most of us expect progress to be steady, a little better every single day in a clean upward line. That is not how skill development works.
Real progress comes in spurts. You improve quickly for a while, then you level off. You plateau, then you spurt again, then you plateau again. That rhythm — jump, flatten, jump, flatten — is the actual shape of getting good at something. Once you expect it, the flat stretches stop feeling like failure and start feeling like part of the cycle.
So when your nunchaku practice levels off, you are not doing anything wrong. You are just in the flat part of a curve that is about to climb again.
Do Not Put the Sticks Down
The instinct at a plateau is to stop, to set the nunchaku aside and go chase something that gives you a faster sense of accomplishment. Alex’s advice is the opposite: that is exactly the time to keep going.
If you can push through one plateau, and then the next, and then the one after that, you keep climbing. Each flat stretch you survive leads into another spurt of growth. The students who get genuinely good are not the ones who never plateau. They are the ones who do not quit when they do.
There Is Always More to Learn
One reason the nunchaku rewards this kind of persistence is that there is no bottom to it. It is a complex weapon with a huge range of applications, moves, and combinations. You are never going to run out of new material to learn, and once you have the fundamentals down, you can even start inventing your own.
That is a freeing thought when you are stuck. The path does not dead-end. There is always another technique, another variation, another idea waiting on the other side of the plateau you are standing on right now.
How to Train Through It
So here is how to hold this lesson in your head the next time practice feels flat.
Expect the plateaus. They are coming, and that is fine. Do not shy away from them, and do not read them as a sign to quit. If anything, welcome them, because they mean a breakthrough is near. Keep practicing, stay patient through the flat stretches, and above all, have fun with the process.
The plateau you are on is not the end of your progress. It is the runway for your next leap.