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Stuck at the same speed? The bottleneck is usually not your fingers

September 20, 2026 · about 703 words · Speed and accuracy

Everyone plateaus. You improve steadily for weeks, arrive at a number, and then stay there no matter how much you practise. The instinct is to practise harder, which is usually the wrong response, because a plateau is a diagnostic — it tells you which of four constraints you have hit.

Diagnose first. The four causes have completely different fixes, and applying the wrong one explains why "more practice" so often does nothing.

Cause one: two or three keys are doing the damage

The symptom: Your speed is fine on most text and collapses on certain words. Accuracy hovers just under the point where you feel comfortable pushing.

Why it happens: Speed on running text is limited by your slowest frequent key, not your average. A key you miss 30% of the time forces a correction on a large share of the words containing it.

The fix: Find the keys. The error heat map in the progress panel ranks them for you. Then drill those keys in isolation for a week — not words containing them, the keys themselves, in short bursts.

This is the most common plateau and the most satisfying to fix, because the improvement is sudden. The keys stop being a stumble, and the whole sentence flows.

Cause two: you have memorised the practice text

The symptom: Your score on your usual test is excellent and rising. Your speed on anything else has not moved.

Why it happens: Once you know what comes next, you are recalling the text rather than reading it. Reading-ahead — the skill that actually drives speed on unfamiliar text — is not being exercised at all.

The fix: Use text you have never seen. Random passages, or the "new text" button. A useful check: if you can predict the next word while typing, the text is too familiar.

Cause three: the bottleneck has moved to your head

The symptom: You can type random words faster than you can type your own sentences. Or your speed on transcription is much higher than your speed when composing.

Why it happens: Past roughly 60 WPM, mechanical speed stops being the limit. You are waiting on yourself: deciding what to write, finding a word, restructuring a sentence. The keyboard is idle while you think.

The fix is not typing practice. It is reading more, writing more, and thinking in slightly larger units before you start typing. Typists at this stage who want to go faster are usually better served by outlining before they type than by drilling keys.

Cause four: recovery, not skill

The symptom: You have been improving, then a week of nothing, or a slight decline, despite practising as usual.

Why it happens: Motor consolidation continues between sessions, and it is disrupted by fatigue, poor sleep, and long unbroken practice. A plateau here is often a signal of accumulated fatigue rather than a real ceiling.

The fix: Three or four full days off, then resume. It is common to come back measurably faster, which is confusing if you expected the opposite. This is also the cheapest fix and the one people are most reluctant to try.

How to tell which one you have

A short diagnostic session:

1. Type a passage you have never seen, at normal speed. Note speed and accuracy.
2. Type ten lines of pure random words. Note speed.
3. Look at your error-by-key list.

Then read the pattern:

• Random words much slower than prose → cause two or three (you are relying on word-shape memory).
• Prose much slower than random words → cause three (composing is the limit).
• A couple of keys dominate the error list → cause one.
• Everything slightly worse than last week → cause four.

The mechanical ceiling is real, and it is high

For the record: the mechanical ceiling for touch typing is somewhere north of 150 WPM, and specialist typists exceed 200. Almost no one plateaus because of their fingers. If you are below 80 WPM, your plateau is one of the four causes above, and three of them have nothing to do with typing technique.

The uncomfortable version of this: past a certain point, typing faster makes you faster at producing whatever you were going to produce, including badly-structured text. Some plateaus are worth leaving alone.