Most sessions end with a version of the same question. How was that. Did it feel hard, did it feel good, did you hit your numbers. It's a reasonable question. It's also, and this has become clearer over time, the wrong one to build a coaching relationship around.
The question that actually matters here is quieter. That felt like me. Not every session, not as a script run through out of habit, but often enough that it has become the center of gravity for how sessions get coached.
Here's the difference. "How was that workout" asks about performance. It invites an answer about output — reps, effort, sweat, whether the session was hard enough to count. "Did that feel like you" asks about recognition. It invites a completely different kind of answer, one that has nothing to do with whether the session was impressive.
The question gets asked because too many people, coach included, have completed a session, hit every number, and still felt strangely absent from the whole thing. The workout happened, and they weren't quite there for it. That's a real problem, even though it doesn't show up on paper anywhere.
What matters instead is whether the way someone trains actually resembles who they are. Not a version of them performing discipline for an audience, even an audience of one. Someone who moves cautiously by nature shouldn't be coached the same way as someone who moves impulsively, even if their goals look identical on paper. The plan has to fit the person, and the only way to find that out is by asking, honestly, whether it felt like them.
Sometimes the answer is no, and that's the useful part. No, that felt forced. No, I was somewhere else. No, I was doing it to prove something to myself and I'm not sure the something is true anymore. Those answers tell more about how to coach someone than any performance metric could.
To be clear, this isn't a replacement for tracking progress, and getting stronger or moving better by objective measures still matters. But the goal underneath all of it was never to perform wellness convincingly. It was to help someone recognize themselves in what they're doing, session by session, until the recognition becomes the more reliable signal than the numbers are.
That felt like me isn't a slogan handed out lightly. It's the question this approach keeps coming back to, because it's the one that actually tells you whether the work is working.
