A muscle can do exactly one thing: shorten. Everything you would call skill happens upstream, in the nervous system. Which has an uncomfortable consequence for anyone teaching movement.
A muscle can do exactly one thing. It can shorten.
That is it. That is the entire repertoire. It cannot decide when, or how fast, or in what order, or whether now is a sensible moment. It shortens when it is told to and it stops when it is not.
Everything you would call skill — timing, sequencing, coordination, knowing which muscles to leave out — happens upstream, in the nervous system. The muscle is a piece of rope that pulls when the signal arrives.
If someone performs a movement badly, you are not looking at a muscle problem. You are looking at an instruction problem. And you were the one giving the instructions.
I took this from Michael Yessis and it changed how I coach. When a client moves incorrectly, it is not their fault. It is a coaching failure — the demonstration was not clear enough, the cue did not land, the progression was too fast, or the exercise was inappropriate for where they were.
At first that sounds like generosity. It is not. It is the only position that leads anywhere useful.
If it is the client’s fault, the solution is that they try harder — which means repeating the same instruction louder, and hoping. If it is mine, the solution is to change something: a different cue, a different position, an external constraint, or a step further back. One of those is a plan. The other is a wish.
It also happens to be true. Nobody moves badly on purpose. They are producing the best output available given what they understood, what they can feel, and what their nervous system currently knows how to do.
Ask someone to do a press-up and keep their head still. They drop it on every repetition. You tell them again. They drop it again.
At that point one of two things is true. Either they believe they are keeping it still — meaning they cannot feel the difference, which is a perception problem. Or they know they are not and do not know how to stop it — which is a control problem. Neither is solved by saying it a third time.
Visual — show them, put them in front of a mirror, or film it and let them see what you are seeing.
Auditory — describe it. Useful, and the most overused.
Tactile — put a hand on the muscle you want, or give them something physical to work against. This is the one that works when the others have failed, because it bypasses the need to translate a description into a sensation.
The person who cannot stop dropping their head does not need a fourth explanation. They need something touching the back of their head.
If you want a specific movement, it is usually more effective to design the situation so the wrong movement is difficult than to describe the right one repeatedly.
A dowel along the spine touching head, mid-back and sacrum does not need explaining. The moment the hinge goes wrong, contact is lost, and the person knows before you have said anything. Two dowel rods in the hands during a lunge do the same job for balance. A box behind a squatter tells them where to stop.
The constraint teaches. The instruction only describes. And for anyone with low body awareness — which is most people at the start — the constraint is not a crutch. It is the fastest available route to a pattern they can eventually hold without it.
The place I learnt this most clearly was boxing. A jab looks like one action. It is not. It is a sequence — the set-up, the alignment, the transfer of weight, the rotation, the timing of the arm against everything below it, and the return. Every component has to arrive in order, and the order is the whole thing.
Which is why you train it as one deliberate action with complete attention, thousands of times, rather than throwing a hundred sloppy ones and hoping the average improves.
Full attention on one action beats divided attention on many. A set of ten repetitions where the person is genuinely present for each one produces more learning than thirty performed while thinking about the next exercise. Mindless repetition is not neutral, either. It is actively grooving something — just not necessarily the thing you wanted.
Speed hides everything. Momentum is a cheat — it lets you through positions you cannot actually control, because you are travelling too fast to have to. Bounce out of the bottom of a lunge and you have borrowed elastic energy from the tissues rather than producing force from the muscles you were trying to train.
Slow it down and you have to overcome inertia at the start, hold position through the middle, and control the finish. There is nowhere to hide. The wobbles that appear are not new weaknesses — they were always there, and speed was covering them.
The phrase is “practice makes perfect”, and it is wrong in a way that matters. Practice makes permanent. The nervous system does not distinguish between the pattern you intended and the pattern you performed. It consolidates whatever actually happened, repeatedly.
So someone who has squatted badly for fifteen years has not failed to learn. They have learnt extremely well — a robust, well-established, deeply grooved pattern that happens to be the wrong one.
And unlearning is substantially harder than learning. The original circuits persist even after corrective practice; the brain keeps returning to the established route, particularly under fatigue or load. You will see specific numbers quoted for this — a few hundred repetitions to build a new pattern against several thousand to overwrite a faulty one. I would treat those figures as folklore; they are attributed to a textbook nobody can quote a page from, and they inflate with every retelling. But the direction is right.
Cognitive. Conscious problem-solving. Slow, inefficient, large errors, rapid early improvement. Verbal instruction helps most here.
Associative. Focus shifts from what to do towards doing it better. Errors reduce, movement smooths. Weeks to months.
Autonomous. Automatic. Minimal conscious attention required, which frees attention for strategy, environment, or an opponent.
The common coaching error is continuing to talk at someone who has moved past the cognitive stage. Heavy verbal cueing is help at the beginning and interference later — you are pulling conscious attention back into a movement that was starting to run without it.
The hundred-rep guide. If you can perform a hundred continuous bodyweight squats with good form, you are unlikely to have back trouble from ordinary daily activity. Most people manage twenty or forty before form breaks down. That gap is the vulnerability. The number is not magic — it is a proxy for genuine competence rather than familiarity.
And distributed practice, which is how the repetitions actually get done. Spreading practice across the day with rest between produces better retention than one concentrated block.
So: ten squats after every trip to the toilet. Six to eight visits a day, sixty to eighty squats, spread across waking hours, anchored to something you are already doing so compliance costs nothing. Press-ups against the kitchen counter while the kettle boils. Calf raises while brushing your teeth.
It sounds trivial. It is better motor learning than the same volume in one block, and it is the only version most people will actually sustain.
If a movement is not working, change something other than effort. Trying harder at a pattern you cannot feel produces a harder version of the same pattern.
Find the channel that works for you. If descriptions do not land, use a mirror or a video. If neither works, use a physical constraint.
Slow down before you load up. Speed conceals; slow reveals.
And be present for the repetitions. Ten attended repetitions beat thirty absent ones, and the absent ones are not free — they are teaching your nervous system something you did not choose.
Your muscles will do whatever they are told. The whole job is improving what they are being told.
If a movement pattern keeps failing despite genuine effort, that is the useful question — not how hard you are trying.
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