Pretty much all good people say that you have to work really hard. I have 2 tips from a book that could help you:

1. Good competing: Try to make an order for solving tasks. There are people that have, for example, solved a D task, but haven't solved the C task from that round. You should first read the task, and then sort the tasks by the value of points/time, where points is how many points you'll get, and time is how much time it takes you to solve the task. Of course, tasks that you know you can solve should have a bigger priority.

2. Good training: When solving tasks to train, you should try tasks that you aren't sure you can solve. Spend 30 minutes or more if you want, and if you just can't solve it, read the editorial. This can help you with a similar task in the future.

I hope this helped!

i am also stuck in specialist for so long but yesterday reached expert

I experienced something similar. I was stuck in specialist and lower expert for a long time. But I kept practicing. Although there was no visual improvement (mainly in my rankings), I felt that I learned a lot of new stuff. Eventually I got out of the stump and kept improving. Recently I ended up reaching master (Although I dropped, I have a feeling I can eventually be consistent in being master if i keep practicing).

So my advice to you is, keep practicing. Even if there is no visual development, if you feel like you are improving, that's progress. It might be demotivating to not see any proof or concrete evidence of your improvement. But you should still keep going.

Another good advice is to change how you practice. Different methods work for different people.

Same Stuck in gray :(

It's the most frequent question at this point, yet there's always something to point out. I won't speak about most common algorithms and stuff... but.

Have a pen and a notebook. When you are hitting the wall, just really really try to analyze the problem, search for different approaches, there could always be some sort of tricky simplification. You should learn to farm guessforces like this https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2003/problem/C, and I must say, YOU ACTUALLY DID GOOD on your latest contests! You are pretty stable at solving, only lacking speed, my guess is that you spend too much time to find the right idea... and aside the "practice more" there's nothing to be done.

...my personal suggestion you may disagree with: take a short break and try something different. Be it leetcode, acmp, timus, etc. Most importantly, try to have fun. Your level is in fact specialist. Also do practice on problems you thought you can solve but you didn't have enough time in the contest.

Actually, I have been stuck at Newbie for a long time. How can I improve?

Here is the ultimate Redpill I found

Some people do improve fast without much effort being expert under 3mo since start cf, being red under year. btw almost all red people become CM under half year

And some people do improve very slow or none, forever you can easily find many of such case, solve 2,000 problem in range of 1200-2200 and still suck at green or cyan. including me and many such cases.

There is nothing you can help

solve 2000 problem on cf will not help you

going over 200 hours of tutorial will not help you

reading 20 books about higher mathematics and data structure will not help you

cf is all about IQ, joy of young and talented kid and if you are not such people, I'm strongly suggest leave cf soon as possible. it's actually not good for you