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, I've come to think, the wrong one to build a coaching relationship around.
The question I actually care about is quieter. That felt like me. Not every session, not as a script I run through out of habit, but often enough that it has become the center of gravity for how I coach.
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.
I ask it because I've watched too many people, myself included, complete a session, hit every number, and still feel 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 I want instead is for the way someone trains to actually resemble 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 I find out if it does 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 me more about how to coach someone than any performance metric could.
I want to be clear this isn't a replacement for tracking progress, and I still care whether someone is getting stronger or moving better by objective measures. 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 I hand out. It's the question I keep coming back to, because in my experience it's the one that actually tells you whether the work is working.
