Adult chess camp

One of the major problems adult chess improvers face is a lack of sustained time to improve, as life gets in the way with its many responsibilities.  Although I've advocated setting goals and allocating consistent training time on a semi-daily basis as ways of helping address this, the fact is that time is always short.

One way to make a sustained effort for training improvement is to therefore get away from your responsibilities and focus on your chess.  Naturally, this works for anything else you can productively spend several days on improving, such as music, business (think corporate retreats), or martial arts.  While I can't vouch for it personally, Kopec's Adult Chess Camp is having a 2015 session and for those in the U.S. I'd recommend a look.  There used to be a week-long chess cruise ("Chess Moves") that offered similar benefits - see the 2006 page - but which unfortunately ceased several years ago due to organizer problems.

Getting away for several days or a week can clear the mind and break us out of a training plateau.  At the very least it can expose us to a lot of information, some of it likely completely new, that we can use to help take us forward to the next level.