Why Cues That Work For One Lifter Confuse Another

A coaching cue is a short phrase intended to change how a movement is performed. It is not a description of what the body is doing, and treating it as one explains most of the confusion around cueing.

What a cue actually is

Cues direct attention. They point the lifter toward a sensation, a direction or an image, and the movement changes as a downstream consequence of that attention.

The phrase does not need to be anatomically accurate to work. Instructions such as spreading the floor or bending the bar describe forces that are not literally produced, and they still reliably change what happens.

This is why cues cannot be evaluated by whether they are true. They are evaluated by whether the resulting movement improves for the person receiving them.

The starting error determines the useful cue

A cue is a correction, so its usefulness depends entirely on what is being corrected. Telling someone to sit back is helpful only if they were not sitting back.

Given to a lifter who already shifts too far back, the same phrase amplifies an existing fault. The instruction did not change; the error it was written for was absent.

Because cues circulate detached from the faults they were coined for, a phrase that solved one problem in one gym spreads as general advice and produces the opposite fault elsewhere.

Internal and external focus

Cues broadly split into those directing attention inside the body, such as squeezing a particular muscle, and those directing attention to an outcome in the environment, such as driving the floor away.

External direction tends to produce smoother movement in tasks where the goal is performance, while internal direction is often used when the intent is to feel a specific area working.

Individuals vary in how strongly they respond to each, and the same person may respond differently depending on how familiar the movement is.

Why sensation is an unreliable target

Many cues reference a feeling, and feelings differ. Where one person perceives tension in a lift, another perceives it somewhere else entirely, with both performing the movement similarly.

Body proportions contribute as well. A cue built around what a particular torso and limb arrangement feels like will not reproduce that sensation in a differently proportioned lifter.

A cue that fails to produce the described sensation is not evidence of a fault. It is often just evidence that the phrase was written for a different body.

How this is handled in coaching

Experienced coaches generally hold several cues for the same correction and change the phrase when one does not land, rather than repeating it more insistently.

They also watch the movement rather than the compliance, because a lifter can follow an instruction precisely while the movement gets worse.

Someone working alone can approximate this by treating any cue as a hypothesis to be tested against video, and by seeking qualified in-person coaching where a movement is not responding.