How do you improve your understanding of chess without playing much?

I'm thinking about stopping play for a few months and dedicating that time to studying chess. I think playing nonstop at this level is detrimental to progress.

According to Coach Heisman that's not a very efficient way to get better.  Yes, you need to study, but you also need to play AND review your games.  If any of the three are out of balance, your progress will tend to stagnate.

Oh I just checked your stats.  You're a bullet and blitz junkie; well in that case there's no hope for you.  Oh just kidding;  bullet is rubbish for anyone who isn't already very good, but blitz can be okay as long as it's done in moderation.  You're not doing it in moderation.  Good blitz players rely on their store of patterns to move quickly.  How do they get these patterns?  By playing long slow games that give them time to think. You're not doing that, so basically you're just perfecting your errors.  And what's with the ChessMentor?  There are dozens of great courses you should be doing and reviewing.  OK, there's your free pep talk from Coach 'Dog. 

The problem is that i don't have time for both now. Only study i'm willing to invest time in. Your response is quite  contradictory. So basically my progress isn't good since don't play standard. What if I just play one 30 minute game per week? Btw, you've done a lot of chessmentor.

You need to play and study constantly if you're going to improve. Not what you want to hear, but it's true. On the weekdays you study and then play tournaments most weekends. When you're not studying and you're not at a tournament, you should play online, or maybe better yet, analyze your tournament games from the weekend. You need to sleep, eat, and breathe chess. Stopping play will not help that at all.

I got from 962 U.S.C.F. to 1796 in 18 months by focusing on chess. Sure, I am a younger player (junior in high school) and adults don't improve as rapidly as kids do, but outside of my schoolwork, chess has become most of my life. And that includes playing regularly. If you play irregularly, I suspect you will regress.

seriously? so it's not possible to go to college and work at the same time and achieve 1800 rating within months?

Hopefully someone who actually knows what they're talking about will weigh in on this, but bang for the buck, I think the ChessMentor may give you your best return on your time.  If you could manage to really nail all those beginning and intermediate tactics courses on the CM I think you'd be way ahead of the game once you started playing again.  Anything by GM Wolff would be a good start.  Remember you goal isn't just to be able to figure out the answers, it's to recognize the pattern quickly.

And of course dpnorman is right.  I just figured I've been on your case enough for one day.  Good luck!

It's possible, but it's hard. It requires dedication. You need to be playing a lot. Look at all the players whose ratings rose a lot in a short span of time (say 300 points in a year). They all have one thing in common- they played and studied very hard. Alex Lenderman is often an example people use- he was playing hundreds of tournament games each year as his rating shot up. I don't know if you can quite be expected to do that, but you cannot improve without playing. It just won't happen

The benefit of asking so many questions here on chess.com has developed in me a great intuition at picking out the genuine answers. Thanks. 

Yeah bullet is almost completely useless as it's not anything like real chess. Blitz can be useful for testing openings, and if you don't have time for long online games, but frankly a lot of players, definitely including myself, play too much blitz.

Studying chess an hour or two a day and playing about 2-3 tournaments a year has worked out pretty well for me. In my opinion every day you should play a 15 minute game, do 10 tactics puzzles on chesstempo, and read an hour in Amateurs Mind by Jeremy Silman. Also if you have extra free time give his Complete Endgame Course a shot. If you have a chess club in your city that meets once a week try to go to that too.

this might sound very stupid but new to chess.com how do i go about playing a standard game seems that i can only 0lay blitz 3 5 10 min etc

Well whatever you do, try not to put off getting "serious" about chess until you're in your mid sixties.  You probably won't have a whole lot of success.  

Anything over 45/45 you have to choose custom in the drop down time menu.  Best plan is probably to join a group whose members all love standard slow chess. The Dan Heisman Learning Center, and it's many offshoots, would be a good place to start.  They even have regularly scheduled tournaments.

I thought I wrote this only to realize I didn't. I have the same thought process.

How do you learn to swim without going into the water ? 

I fell into the ocean one time and almost died today still unsure of how to make use of that situation.

It's funny, because for the last 3 months(or more) that is EXACTLY what I have been doing.  But, I was lacing it all with four 2 minute games and two 10 minute games(capping it all off with one 15 minute game).

I'm in the last chapter of TAM at the moment, and it has become VERY clear to me, that I need to start playing longer games each day for a while, and completely avoiding the 2 and 10 minute games.

It's one thing to read this book, but, I believe in order to get some of these philosophies 'into my game', I'm gonna have to focus on one topic at a time, one long game at a time.

It's even recommended by Sillman, to add to your thought process by, "writing down each move you make" and then ask your self "can I be put into check from here?" (you can't even do that in a 15 minute game)

This, and understanding 'when and where' to attack, this is gonna be fun for me.  I've played for YEARS and had no idea when or why to attack or where.  I was a one trick pony, and I could play that trick well, but most of the time, the game didn't call for my trick, leaving me guessing.

maybe it's really as simple as the explanation that spending longer time to ponder about something will develop deeper understanding.