Not a super pro but I am progressing muuuuch faster than I did before.
#1 Get plenty of sleep. Almost every person I know skips sleep rather regularly. Your ability to remember things and reaction time are going to be hindered or make some things impossible if you don't get enough sleep.... I learned this the hard way. For a long part of my life I kinda went by a "if I'm not doing it well, I'm not trying hard enough!" so I skipped too much sleep to the point where any practice I did was pointless since I was too tired to do anything or remember stuff.
#2 Try to keep a regular time to play the game. Too much time and it invades other parts of your life and can lead to burnout. Too little time and it'll make it a bit trickier to remember stuff. Personally I record myself doing 30 minutes everyday.
#3 Reward yourself - There can be boring parts of improving, but it's all so worth it when you see the results. However until you get those results it can be hard getting there, so make sure you have something to reward yourself so you don't give up or go to some other game or something.
For me I just do 3 matches in quickplay or arenas after doing 30 minute training sessions. I make sure I do not focus on winning in them, just doing whatever I want. Though I will say overtime it's slowly becoming more enjoyable to just test out stuff in matches and watching the opponent so kinda happening to play better just because of that.
#4 Plan out what you are going to use your time for and remember to update it everynow and then. Identify what problems you are having and attack those problems. Of course playing someone and asking them helps, and if you are one of the lucky people able to do so, you can also hire a coach or something to increase your performance much quicker. This is because you will only see some of your problems and there will be problems you may not even be aware of. Playing with friends and having them tell you what you are doing wrong helps..... Just repay the favor when they are trying to improve as well.
When I first started trying to improve really hard, I know I had to start with the basics. So short hops, since they are used frequently in Smash for just about everything. However I had a hard time even just doing them so I basically spent the whole 30 minutes just short hopping trying to move my fingers in slightly different positions and such. Keeping myself awake by only fast falling if I accidentally full hopped because otherwise I'd just zone out too much. Now that it's been a little over a month I feel good enough with my short hops (not perfect though) that I'm doing short hop fast falls and I can often do short hops in matches when I want to. I do 20 minute of SHFF, and then 10 minutes of learning the intricacies of a character, practicing bread and butters (mainly meta knight's up air or down air combos since it's so friggin hard), or b-reversing (which helps everyone but Lucario NEEDs b-reversing since he uses it so much). I plan to shorten the amount of time for short hops again later at some point too but until I start doing Short Hop Fast Fall Reverse Aerial Rushes consistently I'll probably stick to 15-20 minutes because short hops are my cryptonite right now.
#5 Look at your replays when you lose and when you win and think of all the different options that you and your opponent could have gone for at any moment and what tech you need to improve on. Also don't be afraid to keep a few replays of you kicking butt or were important in some way. That way you can look back at it when you are feeling down to remind you that you are awesome and can become even more awesome.
#6 Look up guides from time to time but you've probably already done that.
#7Watch pro players play your character and watch more than one pro to see how different people use the character as some characters can be used in multiple ways which leads to some pro players preferring certain playstyles.
#8 Make sure you know your frame data and combos (especially bread+butter). Some hitboxes are very misleading. So ultimateframedata.com is a good site because of the hitbox visualizations among other things.
That's just some things off the top of my head.... But I'm just a noobie mid-level player that gets distracted by non-smash games too much. So what would I know? Hope some of this will help you though = )
(edit because apparently I pressed a button on the keyboard that posted my reply too quickly woops!)
