Teaching Through Feeling: Coaching the Person, Not Just the Lift
To get better at weightlifting, you have to improve your technique. No one ever gets it perfect, but the way you actually improve isn't by being told what to do.
It's by learning to feel the correct position for yourself.
Most of the lifters I work with come in with some kind of technical imbalance. A lot have come from CrossFit, where the speed of the lifts tends to outpace the technique underneath them. Whatever the background, the instinct as a coach is to want to fix everything at once. But you can't work on everything simultaneously, or you end up working on nothing.
Watch first, talk second
Before I ever cue anything, I want to understand the person in front of me. So the first session is mostly watching them lift and having a conversation, not coaching.
I won't give them any cues or hints about what I'm noticing. I want to see how they move naturally, without my opinion already sitting in their head. I want to know their history: what they've worked on before, what they understand about the lifts, where their mobility or strength might be limiting them, and what they've been told in the past that might be shaping how they move now.
From there, I work bottom-up. Is the setup solid? Are they balanced through the foot? Is there tension they can actually hold through the lift? If something's breaking down, the real question isn't "what's wrong," it's "is this an awareness problem or a strength problem." Those get fixed in completely different ways.
Why cues alone don't work
Here's the part that matters most: a cue is not a teaching point, It is a reminder.
You can tell someone to "keep their chest up" or "push the floor away" as many times as you like, but if they've never actually felt what that position is supposed to feel like, the words don't mean anything to their body. They'll hear you, nod, and go do exactly what they were already doing, because there's nothing for the cue to attach to yet.
A cue only works once someone has already felt the quality you're asking for. Before that, it's just noise.
This is why I lean so heavily on constraints, variations, pauses, tempos, altered starting positions, anything that removes the option to move the way they've always moved, and gives their body no choice but to find the new position. Once they've felt it, once or twice, in their body, then a cue becomes a reminder of something they already know, not an instruction for something they don't.
Patience over shortcuts
None of this happens in one session. Depending on the lifter and their training age, it might take a few weeks of the same quality being reinforced through different variations before it starts to show up on its own in the full lift. Sometimes it clicks quickly. Sometimes you go back to the drawing board and try a different constraint entirely.
I talk to my athletes plenty, probably more than most coaches. But I try to make sure the talking comes after the feeling, not instead of it. Explaining why something works matters, lifters deserve to understand their own training, not just follow instructions blindly. But explanation without the physical feeling behind it doesn't change how someone moves.
The lifters who improve fastest aren't the ones who hear the most cues. They're the ones who've actually felt the position enough times that the cue finally has something to point to.
If you are sick of hearing cues that you don’t understand, click the link for a free intro session at MWBC and we will teach you through feeling (LINK)
— MWBC Coaching Team
