Lately I’ve been thinking about how to better teach clients to act themselves into better ways of thinking rather than trying to think themselves into new ways of acting. In other words: stop overthinking what you need to do and get to work.
It isn’t uncommon to encounter more “heady” types at seminars or in my 1:1 work. There are plenty of brilliant people who genuinely want to learn and understand this work more deeply. Sometimes, however, they slip into the idea that if they just ask twenty more questions—without having spent anywhere near enough time practicing—they’ll finally “get it.”
At a certain point, the best way to learn is by doing. This is especially true when you consider the role of afferent feedback systems in learning. That bit of jargon simply refers to the quality of the sensory information your body is capable of providing—something that is trainable.
You’re not handed a pair of 20/20 “movement glasses.” And it’s not that asking questions lacks value. It’s that thinking more is not a substitute for training. This type of work requires immersion in bodily sensation, not getting lost in additional analysis.
You Don’t Move as Well as You Think
The quality of big-picture movement—your sport, your lifts, your practice—depends heavily on small-picture inputs: joint health, connective tissue quality, and how well those parts move. Better parts tend to produce better global movement.
Think of shining a flashlight into a dark corner of a room. As soon as the light hits, you become aware that something is there. More realistically, the first pass reveals only a blurry image. You start to guess what might be in the corner, but you can’t quite make it out.
You turn the light on and off again. The brightness increases slightly. The image sharpens a bit, but it’s still incomplete. How do you get a clearer picture and brighter light? Practice.
Now imagine repeating this process—lighting the same corners—over weeks, months, and years. Each time, the image resolution becomes clearer.
Eventually, you do this with every wall and corner of the house. You develop a robust internal map: where the walls are, what color they are, what’s stored where, what can and can’t be done in that space. This is how body maps can be imagined.
This also provides clues about the pieces contributing to overall capacity. If you can identify the specifics of each wall, you have a better sense of how the house holds itself together. And if certain walls demand attention—crumbling drywall, structural weakness, peeling paint—you know where to intervene.
Scaled to the body, these internal images of joints and tissues are not entirely built in. They don’t automatically provide you with high-resolution information for navigating a three-dimensional world.
You may have never considered your ability to “see” the world through your limbs, joints, and connective tissues—through the feedback they provide, or have the potential to provide.
This is a trainable quality. It’s also why daily joint maintenance serves as a foundation for improving movement clarity.
Feeling Is Learning
This is basic neurophysiology. We all have the capacity to become better movers.
Yes, you need to practice patterns, drills, and skills. But that is not the same as cultivating the quality of the tools with which you bring to your practice. Tissue quality, sensory resolution, and the richness of your feedback matter. Clearer filters provide less smudged information.
If you’re a coach or clinician and your clients don’t grasp this, try explaining less and getting them to feel more. Feeling is learning.
Coaching cues that enhance sensation are often simple: carefully chosen words, constraints, hands-on guidance, pauses, asking what the client feels, slowing things down, breathing, and directing attention to the experience itself rather than striving to “do it right.”
The Quality of Your Attention Is Trainable
Up to this point, I’ve been describing these ideas in the context of movement. The same principles apply in meditation.
Return to the image of the light illuminating out-of-focus contents. Now shift attention to the act of shining the light itself—and to what appears in real time. There’s no need to anticipate what should be there or judge the clarity of the signal. The task is simply to notice.
When you move a joint, focus on the movement, the sensations, and the level of irradiation. Rotate attention among these elements. Motion is a sequence of positions and transitions through space, often unfamiliar ones. Sensory information increases in volume and resolution the more you simply notice. Irradiation is your attempt to ‘throttle control’ so you are engaged with the tissue/joint, in the goldilocks zone of not trying to hard, and not completely slacking.
Pay attention. There’s nothing else to do in your practice.
You will learn more about your body.
If you or someone you know hasn’t been properly introduced to joint maintenance, feel free to share the foundations class alongside this post.
Yes yes and more yes. I see FRC training has highly introspective and of self-discovery. It's a time where the feeling and thinking brain converge (for me at least). This happened to me with understanding the RAILs concept. I could see diagram after diagram and understand the concept, understand the why, but the how? Oh so illusive until one day closed my eyes, turned off the music, and really visualized what was actually happening in my body; then RAILs finally occurred in "movement" (internal vibration) and that made all the differences. Now I am trying to apply this concept to learning about how to train strain. I get all the graphs and concepts but I still don't know know how to feel it in a way that trains the CT over time. I'll get there, just take time! Thank you for this post, really resonated with me and how I train and teach people I work with too!