Baseworks

Most physical practice is focused on what it looks like. The shape, the achievement, the aesthetic result of the effort. What's happening internally sits in the background or doesn't register at all. The pull toward the visual is reinforced almost everywhere. A substantial portion of what circulates on social media is physical performance eye candy. Fit and agile bodies, skills executed at a fast pace. The internal experience of what the person feels like from the inside isn't part of what gets shared, because it can't be photographed.

There's a simpler place to begin than anything social media shows. What does a muscle feel like from the inside when nothing is happening to it? Not when it's sore, stretched, burning, or loaded. Just at rest. For most people, the honest answer is nothing. The signal isn't absent. The attention to detect it hasn't been built.

Over time, some people find a quiet, neutral presence that was there all along. Ksenia Shcherbakova, in her research, has been calling it the hum: a low-grade tonic sensation in resting muscles, intensifying proportionally with even mild contraction. It sits outside existing scientific frameworks, which is part of why it's mostly unnamed in the literature.

What develops through this kind of attention is a finer-grained capacity to detect distinct internal sensations and hold attention on them long enough for something to register. It's what we call perceptual resolution. And it doesn't stay confined to the body. A software developer reads code more carefully and catches the small inconsistency that would've become a bug. A CEO senses temperature in a room before deciding how to open a meeting. A preschool teacher notices which child has gone quiet in a way that's different from yesterday. A farmer reads the soil, the weather, and the look of a crop as a single ongoing pattern. A forester picks up the early signs of a tree under stress before they're obvious to anyone else. These are all instances of the same underlying skill. Sustained attention on signals that aren't shouting for it.

Most of what matters in any field sits in that category. The obvious things take care of themselves. The subtle ones need someone whose perceptual range has been trained to notice them. Physical education oriented toward inner attention rather than external outcome is one of the few domains in modern life that trains this kind of attention deliberately.

Patrick Oancia's new article lays out the full arc, and goes into the research side as well, including the work Ksenia presents at the 27th Neuropsychology Day at The Neuro in Montreal on May 11 and at BRNet 2026 in Padova, Italy in June.

Read: https://baseworks.com/article/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill/

Photos: Andrew Miller

On May 11, Ksenia Shcherbakova returns this year to present current Baseworks research at the 27th Annual Neuropsychology Day and Brenda Milner Lecture. The event is hosted at The Neuro, the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University.

Ksenia's presentation this year is titled "Predictable Failure Patterns in Non-Habitual Movement: Evidence for Undertrained Degrees-of-Freedom Control." The work documents a class of predictable failure patterns in healthy adults, where movement coordination breaks down in specific non-habitual tasks regardless of how physically experienced a person is. Last year's presentation introduced the broader framework. This year's is a specific empirical piece within it, and it points to a central process that appears systematically undertrained in the adult population.

Neuropsychology Day runs from 11:30 AM to 5:00 PM. Ksenia's slot is from 2:30 to 3:45 PM. The keynote, "Neurobiological Basis of Psychosis," is delivered by Dr. Bruce L. Miller (UCSF). The day also includes oral sessions across the broader field of neuropsychology, learning, memory, and attention, and is attended by researchers, students, and clinicians from the Montreal research community and beyond. The event is free of charge and open to the public.

More Info: https://baseworks.com/event/neuropsychology-day-2026-degrees-of-freedom-control/

Photos: Andrew Miller

In 2022, Asia Shcherbakova published an article about something we had been hearing from practitioners for years: a localized sensation inside active muscles. Not pain. Not stretch. Not the positional sense of knowing where your arm is. Something that doesn't have a name in the scientific literature.

The article asked a straightforward question: if this sensation is real, and if people experience it, why hasn't it been studied?

Four years later, the investigation has gone deeper than we expected. The March 2026 update to "The Mystery of Proprioceptive Awareness" reflects where things stand now.

We've been running an ongoing questionnaire. The preliminary data is striking: out of 48 respondents, roughly half report localized muscular sensations at rest. Another half notice them only during exercise. About 6% report none at all, not even during physical activity. And nearly half of those who do feel the sensation have no word for it. A real and apparently widespread perceptual experience, with no universally shared vocabulary.

The updated article traces three structural reasons why this phenomenon has fallen through the cracks in scientific research — not because anyone has studied it and dismissed it, but because the way the field frames proprioception makes the question invisible. The article also proposes a specific hypothesis about where the sensation comes from: muscle spindle afference reaching conscious experience through a mechanism that existing frameworks don't account for.

This kind of investigation is central to what we do. The Baseworks Method has been shaped by sustained observation of what people actually experience in their bodies during structured practice — and by the recognition that some of those experiences don't map neatly onto what the scientific literature describes.

This June, Asia presents related research at the 8th Annual BRNet Meeting in Padova, Italy, introducing the Baseworks framework for body representation: proprioceptive, spatial, and interoceptive awareness as three distinct, trainable components.

The full updated article is on our website.

The Baseworks Method was developed across a collaboration with dedicated educators and thousands of practitioners within the same framework, over two decades at our flagship studio in Tokyo and across events internationally. That foundation continues to shape our work with dancers, musicians, actors, movement educators, and practitioners everywhere.

This Saturday, the Spring 2026 Montreal Study Group begins at Proto Studio in Mile End. Seven consecutive Saturdays combining in-person guided practice with the Baseworks Primer course, a dedicated cohort forum where we post weekly session summaries and assignments, and platform features designed to deepen the experience between sessions. The goal is transferable, actionable skill that participants carry into their continued practice with Baseworks and integrate into what they're already doing.

The program is for people who are already physically active and curious about how they perceive and control their own movement. Dancers, athletes, musicians, movement educators, bodyworkers, and anyone with a serious physical background who wants to study movement at a deeper level. The cohort is kept small so that every participant receives individualized feedback during the in-person sessions.

Proto Studio is a self-managed creative residency space in Mile End dedicated to movement, performance, and education. It's an environment built around interdisciplinary, practice-oriented work, and we're thrilled to be working with our next group there.

Proto Studio solo and family members as well as residents receive subsidized tuition. DM us or visit the Baseworks website for details.

Registration closes April 1. Visit the Baseworks website to register: https://baseworks.com/event/montreal-study-group-spring-2026/

Your capacity to act is bounded by your capacity to perceive. What you can't distinguish, you can't choose between.

A participant in one of our Montreal Study Groups described something we hear often. Her chiropractor had been recommending postural corrections for years. She understood what was being asked. She agreed it was important. But she couldn't act on it, because she couldn't feel the specific distinctions involved. The words made sense. Her body didn't have the resolution to respond to them.

This isn't unusual. When someone receives a movement instruction and can't act on it, the assumption is usually that they didn't understand, or that they need more repetitions. In most cases, the actual bottleneck is perceptual. They can't access the sensory information they would need to execute the instruction.

Somatosensory discrimination, the ability to feel distinct sensations in specific parts of your body, develops through structured practice. The nervous system builds finer sensory resolution when it's given consistent, sustained reasons to do so.

What practitioners consistently report isn't that they became stronger or more flexible. It's that they started feeling things they couldn't feel before. One practitioner noticed she was applying what she'd learned during her regular movement practice, perceiving and adjusting things she'd previously done on autopilot. Another described her "ability to be conscious of various body areas" expanding over time. A long-term practitioner noted that her "eye resolution when looking at things has improved," a perceptual change that crossed over from body awareness into visual processing entirely.

This observation isn't limited to the body. The same dynamic plays out when learning an instrument, sustaining concentration, or navigating a difficult conversation. Wherever someone has received clear guidance they couldn't act on, the gap is often perceptual.

I wrote about this in a new article. Read the full article: https://baseworks.com/article/perception-gap-body-awareness/

The Baseworks Method was developed over two decades at our studio in Tokyo and across various programs. That work involved a hundred trained teachers, a core group working together for nearly a decade, and thousands of students within the same framework. Very few learning environments offer that kind of sustained exposure, and when in-person activities were suspended in 2020, the question became whether that depth could be made accessible in a format that doesn't require being in one place, with one group of teachers, over a long period of time.

The answer required building dedicated tools from scratch. The Baseworks Primer and Practice Platform are purpose-built around how people actually learn movement. They incorporate feedback loops, non-linear revisitation, and tracking that maps how each person engages with the material differently. The online work feeds directly into guided in-person sessions, and what instructors observe in person reshapes the online experience. Both sides are continuously refined.

The Winter 2026 Study Group in Montreal was part of that process. Seven sessions at Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique, January through March, paired with the Baseworks Primer online course. Twenty-one participants from notably different backgrounds — massage therapists, a preschool teacher, dancers, somatic practitioners, a sociology professor, a visual artist, a writer, and people recovering from injuries. What they had in common was a curiosity about how attention and movement connect.

What stood out to us was the diversity of individual outcomes. A movement educator with a yoga teaching background began integrating micro-movements into her online classes the day after her first session. A participant recovering from a pelvic fracture found that the Intensity Modification framework gave her a way to practice without guessing at her own limits. She described the cumulative effect: "There is a new design of the body after each session." Several people, independently, reported shifts in perception outside of practice: postural awareness during daily activities, changes in movement quality, heightened attention in contexts unrelated to the practice itself.

We also built something new in response to how differently people engaged with the Primer: the PrimerPrint, a visual map of each person's learning path through the curriculum. No two look the same.

A new article by Patrick Oancia documents the full arc of those seven weeks: what participants reported, what we observed across the cohort, and what we built in response. The Spring 2026 Study Group begins in April at Proto Studio in Mile End. Full article on the Baseworks site blog.

Photography: Andrew Miller

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Montreal Smart Movement Study Group – Final Days to Register

Winter 2026 cohort begins January 24th Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique

Seven sessions over six weeks + integrated Baseworks Primer Course (Online).

Systematic body awareness training through perceptual exercises and adaptive movement methodology. Structured assignments progress from foundational form practice through intensity modification and transitional movement patterns—developing cognitive-physical integration through precise, systematic training.

Only a few spaces left. Registration closes January 21 (or once we reach capacity). Full details and booking: https://baseworks.com/event/montreal-study-group-2026/



Photos: Andrew Miller-.ca &

We're holding two Open Day sessions in Montreal this January Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique

Open Day provides a direct experience of the Baseworks Method through movement practice and contextual discussion. We'll be working with material around spatial awareness, distributed activation, and movement quality —core elements of our approach to developing physical intelligence through systematic practice.

Whether you're new to this work or already familiar with Baseworks, these 90-minute sessions offer insight into how we approach movement education and perceptual skill development.

Friday, January 10 | 2:45-4:15pm
Monday, January 13 | 6:15-7:45pm

No prior experience required. Visit the event page on the Baseworks website to learn more & register: https://baseworks.com/event/open-day-montreal-january-2026/