Three weeks ago I told you effort without intention is just wear and tear. The question I get back every time is some version of: “Okay, but how do I know which one I’m doing?”
Fair question. Here’s how you check.
Coach’s Corner
I don’t ask new clients “does it hurt.” I ask “what does it feel like, exactly, and where.” Most people can’t answer that in detail. Not because they’re not paying attention — because most training, for most of their life, has never asked them to pay attention to anything more specific than “did I finish the set.”
That’s the tell. Intention requires noticing. If you can’t describe what a movement is doing in your body beyond “it burns” or “it feels good,” you’re not tracking intention — you’re tracking sensation, and sensation lies.
Five Signs Your Effort Has Intention (and Five That It Doesn’t)
Run your current routine through these:
- You know why you’re doing each exercise — specifically. Not “it’s good for my back.” Specifically: this targets this segment, because this segment is where my restriction lives. If your answer is “my trainer/app/video told me to,” that’s not intention. That’s compliance.
- You can feel a difference between reps, not just fatigue. Intention means each repetition teaches you something about your own structure. If every rep feels identical and the only thing that changes is how tired you are, you’re repeating a motion, not refining a pattern.
- The difficulty feels specific, not generalized. “This is hard” is sensation. “This is hard because this segment is more restricted than I realized” is intention. If you can’t locate where the difficulty actually lives, you’re not tracking it — you’re enduring it.
- You adjust based on what your body tells you that day, not just the plan on paper. A system built with intention still requires you to notice — some days a segment needs more work, some days less. If your routine is identical regardless of what your body is communicating, the intention lives in the plan, not in you.
- You could explain your own body’s compensations to someone else. If you understand your own restrictions well enough to describe them, that’s intention internalized. If you’re just following instructions without understanding why, you’re borrowing someone else’s intention, not building your own.
If most of your answers land on the “not intention” side — that’s not a failure. It’s information. It means your effort, however real, has been aimed at general fitness instead of your specific structure.
Research on interoceptive awareness — the capacity to notice and interpret what’s happening inside your own body — backs this up directly. A large validation study found that people with structured physical training scored measurably higher on noticing, attention regulation, and body awareness than those without it. Intention isn’t a personality trait. It’s a trained skill, and untrained bodies default to generalized sensation instead of specific information.
What to Do If You Fail the Self-Check
Failing this check doesn’t mean you need to work harder. It means you need a system that teaches you to notice, not just perform.
If you made it to this morning’s free ELDOA class, you already felt a piece of that — what decoaptation, done with intention, actually feels like in your own body. If you couldn’t make it, the Lower Back ELDOA course teaches the same principle: $52, one part of a system built to grow with you, 17 minutes, 3-4 times a week.
Either way, the next step is the same: stop asking what you should do, and start asking whether what you’re doing has a reason behind it.
Don’t make me come check your form.
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