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“Send your leg toward the wall in front of you.”
“Send your arms overhead.”
“Send the leg long.”
I use the word send in my teaching all the time, and yet every once in a while I hear myself say it and think, That is such a strange word.
When we think of the word “send,” we generally think of letting something go. We send a letter. We send an email. We send a package. Once we send something, it is no longer with us. It has left our possession and is headed somewhere else. That is certainly not what I mean when I tell a client to “send your leg toward the wall.”
I don’t want you to let go of your leg or to disconnect from it, and I definitely don’t want you to send it away. So why do I use the word?
Because send is really a directional cue. It gives the body somewhere to go.
When I say, “Send your leg toward the wall in front of you,” I am creating a clear intention for the movement. I am asking you to project the leg in a particular direction. I am not necessarily telling you every muscle that needs to work or every part of your body that needs to remain stable. I am giving you a destination. As teachers, we can sometimes become so focused on explaining the mechanics of a movement that we forget how valuable a simple direction can be. The body doesn’t always need a paragraph of anatomical information before it can move. Sometimes it needs an image, a destination, or an intention. Send can provide that. The important part is I don’t think send should necessarily be the end of the cue. It is often the beginning.
Take “send your arms overhead.” It’s a perfectly reasonable instruction. Your arms have somewhere to go. But what happens while they are getting there?
Do your ribs lift, or your shoulders creep toward your ears?
Do you lose the connection through your side body?
Do your shoulder blades move in a way that isn’t appropriate for the exercise?
Simply telling someone where to move doesn’t necessarily tell them how to organize the rest of their body during that movement.
So I might say, “Send your arms overhead, and as you do, engage your side body to keep your shoulder blades anchored.”
Now the cue becomes much more complete. Send establishes the direction. The second part establishes the connection.
That distinction is important to me because movement is rarely just about getting one body part from point A to point B. We are always balancing movement with stability. Something moves while something else organizes, supports, or remains relatively quiet.
When I say, “Send your leg toward the wall,” I may then need to tell you what happens to your pelvis. When I say, “Send your arms overhead,” I may need to remind you about your ribs, your side body, or your shoulder blades. When I say, “Send the leg long,” I may need to make sure you aren’t simply reaching farther by allowing the rest of the body to lose its organization.
The word send gives us the arrow.
The rest of the cue tells us what happens to the body while we follow that arrow. Because of that, I think this is one of the more interesting parts of teaching movement: a cue doesn’t have to contain every piece of information at the same time. In fact, trying to do that can sometimes make cueing less effective. Imagine telling a client exactly which muscles to contract, which bones to stabilize, what direction the joint should move, what shouldn’t move, and how to breathe, all before they have even experienced the movement. There is a lot of information there. We have a name for that... cue dumping!
Sometimes the better choice is simply:
“Send your leg toward the wall.”
Let them move.
Then observe.
Then give them the next piece of information they need.
Maybe it’s, “Keep your pelvis still.”
Maybe it’s, “Reach longer without lifting the hip.”
Maybe it’s, “Keep the front of the hip soft.”
The first cue created the movement. The next cue refines it.
This is why I don’t think we should be too quick to dismiss movement cues simply because they aren’t anatomically precise.
“Send” isn’t an anatomical instruction.
It’s not supposed to be.
It is a way of communicating intention. Iintention matters. When I tell you to “extend your leg,” you may immediately start thinking about the muscles involved in extension. If I tell you to “send your leg toward the wall,” you may have a completely different physical experience. You have a place to reach toward. You have a relationship with the space around you. The movement becomes something you are doing rather than simply a joint action you are performing. That doesn’t mean one cue is universally better than the other. It means they accomplish different things. A good cue doesn’t necessarily have to explain the entire movement. Sometimes it simply needs to get the body moving in the right direction. Then, as teachers, we need to be paying attention to what happens next.
Did the client find the intended movement?
Did something else compensate?
Did they lose a connection we want them to maintain?
Did they need more information?
If they did, that’s when we layer in the next cue. So when I say, “Send your arms overhead,” I am not asking you to abandon your shoulders, release your ribs, or throw your arms somewhere behind you. I’m asking you to move your arms toward a destination. Next would be to then ask the rest of your body to come along in an organized way. Maybe send isn’t such a strange word after all. We aren’t sending the leg away. We aren’t sending the arms away. We’re sending the movement somewhere. We’re using strength, stability, awareness, and connection to make sure the rest of the body knows what to do while we get there. That, to me, is where a simple cue becomes good teaching.