04/24/2026
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
