What if you have reached a plateau in your playing? You simply can’t get that “Flight of the Bumble Bee” any faster. What can you do?

Try speeding up.

What?

Try taking it to the next level, and see what goes wrong during your recordings of your attempts. Take note of the exposed weak areas. Devise exercises to pinpoint these weak areas, making sure that your exercises isolate in the most focused ways possible. During these pinpointed exercises, go very slow to get improvement, and gradually raise the metronome until you have reached your target tempo. Rest a lot in between your attempts.

When you incorporate the difficult passages back into the piece you are working on, you should now be a little bit over that plateau. Congrats.