After years of coaching, I’ve learned that there are two kinds of people who walk into a gym. They might look like the same client from the outside — same goals, same starting point, sometimes even the same fitness level. But spend five minutes coaching them and the difference becomes immediately clear.
One of them will change their life. The other one is going to have a harder road — not because they’re not capable, but because of one simple thing: they haven’t learned how to listen to their own body yet.
Let me explain what I mean.
The Question Every Coach Asks
Early on in my coaching career I learned to ask one question more than almost any other: How does that feel?
It sounds simple. And you’d think the answers would be too. But what I discovered pretty quickly is that most people genuinely cannot answer that question. Not because they’re not paying attention — but because no one has ever asked them to before.
The answers I get most often? Fine. Good. I don’t know.
And look — I don’t say that to make anyone feel bad. Those answers tell me something important too. But they don’t give me much to work with as a coach. So over time I started adding structure to the question. How hard was that on a scale of 1 to 10? That helps give people a starting point — a framework for translating a feeling into something communicable.
Except a lot of people just say five. Every time. For every workout. Whether they’re barely breaking a sweat or completely gassed.
Five.
Every. Time.
I’ll be honest — that one makes me want to pull my hair out a little. Not because a five is wrong, but because it tells me we haven’t gotten there yet. We haven’t unlocked the real conversation.
What I’m Actually Asking
When I ask how something feels, I’m looking for more than a number. I’m trying to open a door to a much deeper conversation — one that most people have never had about their own body.
I want to know what muscle groups they feel working. I want to know if they feel it in the right place. I want to know if something is pulling that shouldn’t be, or if a muscle that should be firing feels suspiciously quiet. Sometimes when I can’t immediately spot a fault in someone’s movement, the answer to where do you feel that? tells me everything I need to know to coach them better.
But beyond the coaching piece — and this is the part I really want people to understand — asking these questions is how we build what’s called the mind-muscle connection. And it is a skill. A real, trainable, learnable skill that more people than you would ever expect simply do not have.
The Mind-Muscle Connection
Here’s what the mind-muscle connection actually is: the ability to tell a specific muscle what to do, have it do the thing, and then receive the signal back from your body confirming that it happened. It sounds like it should be automatic. It’s not.
Think about it this way. When someone is doing a deadlift and I ask them to squeeze their glutes at the top — really squeeze them, intentionally, on purpose — a surprising number of people look at me with genuine uncertainty. They’re not sure if they did it. They’re not sure if their glutes are even involved. They did the movement, they lifted the weight, but the conversation between their brain and their body was mostly one-sided.
That disconnect is more common than most people realize. And it’s not anyone’s fault.
How We Got Here
We were not always this disconnected from our bodies. As babies and young kids we moved constantly and naturally — rolling, crawling, climbing, falling, getting back up. Our bodies were doing exactly what they were designed to do and we didn’t have to think about it at all. Movement was intuitive.
And then we grew up. We sat in chairs. We looked at screens. We stopped moving in the varied, exploratory ways that kept all of those neural pathways sharp and active. Slowly, without anyone noticing, the connection between brain and body started to fade.
As kids our bodies are forgiving enough to absorb that. As adults it’s a different story. As adults you have to actively rebuild what was lost — and that requires something a lot of people aren’t used to doing in the gym: thinking.
The Two Types of Clients
So here’s where the two types of clients come in.
The first type — my favorite type, if I’m being completely honest — is the one who wants to think. They stop between sets and actually consider the question. They try to articulate what they felt and where they felt it. They ask follow-up questions. They want to understand not just what they’re doing but why they’re doing it and what it’s supposed to feel like when they’re doing it right. They’re curious about their own body in a way that most people never are.
These are the clients who make progress that sticks. These are the clients who one day — and this is my actual goal for every person I coach — will be able to walk into a gym on their own, without a coach watching over them, and train intelligently and safely and effectively. Because they’ve built the internal compass that tells them what’s working, what’s off, and what needs to change. They’ve done the work of learning their own body.
The second type isn’t bad. They’re not lazy. They’re not hopeless. But they’re stuck in a pattern of I don’t know — and not because they’re unwilling, but because no one has ever asked them to think about what their body is doing in space. No one has ever invited them into that conversation before. So when I ask, they genuinely don’t have an answer. They’ve been moving through life — and through workouts — on autopilot.
And here’s the hard truth about that: sooner or later the body stops being quiet about it. Sooner or later, when movement patterns are off and muscles aren’t firing the way they should and joints are compensating for things they were never meant to compensate for — the body sends a signal. A loud one. It’s called an injury. And injuries have a way of demanding the attention that the quieter signals never got.
The Good News
Here’s what I want you to hear if you recognized yourself in that second description: this is completely fixable. The mind-muscle connection can be built at any age. The ability to tune into your body, to feel what’s working and what isn’t, to have an intelligent conversation with your own nervous system — all of it can be developed. It just takes practice and intention and a willingness to slow down long enough to actually feel what’s happening instead of just going through the motions.
It starts with answering the question honestly. Not fine. Not good. Not a reflexive five. But actually stopping, taking a breath, and asking yourself — what do I feel right now? Where do I feel it? Is it where I’m supposed to feel it?
That pause — that moment of genuine curiosity about your own body — is where everything starts to change.
So Which One Are You?
Are you the client who leans in when the coach asks a question? Who wants to understand the why behind the what? Who is building not just a stronger body but a smarter relationship with it?
Or are you moving through your workouts on autopilot, checking the box, getting through it — but not really in conversation with what your body is telling you?
There’s no wrong answer. There’s only an honest one. And the honest answer is the starting point for everything that comes next.
The clients who ask questions, who think, who slow down long enough to feel — they’re the ones who surprise themselves. They’re the ones who make the kind of progress that lasts. They’re the ones I love coaching most.
And they were all, at some point, the person who didn’t know the answer either. They just decided to start paying attention.
That’s all it takes. Start there.