← The Archive·Entry 005 — The Craft·4 minute read
The counterpoint to saying less: when the body in front of you has not found the movement yet, more words are not noise. They are the work.
Cue Dynamics · Updated July 2026
Over-cueing is only a problem when the movement has already landed. If the muscle is not firing and the shape is not forming, more detailed, more varied cueing is often exactly what the moment needs. The amount of cueing follows the body’s response, not a rule about talking less.
The advice every instructor hears eventually is to say less. Trim the cues, trust the silence, let the body work. It is good advice, and it is half of the picture. Because the room also contains days when the movement is not landing, and on those days the discipline is not fewer words. It is more of the right ones.
The rule everyone repeats
The case against over-cueing is real. A class under constant narration learns to wait for instructions instead of listening to the movement, and when everything is cued, nothing is emphasized. But that case assumes the movement has landed. When it has not, when the shape is not forming and the muscle is not firing, restraint is not discipline. It is under-cueing wearing discipline’s clothes.
The measure was never word count. It is whether the body changed.
The tell
The body answers. If the shape is forming and the muscle is working, step back and let the rep breathe. If it is not, repeating the same cue louder rarely helps. Vary it instead: a different image, a different entry point, a different sense. The client who could not find the movement through one door often walks straight through the next.
It happened in one of Sana’s stability chair classes. Teaser: legs in the air, hands on the pedal. After class, a client asked about form. She had noticed the person in front of her holding bent elbows where her own arms were straight, and arm position had never been cued. On the balance, it had not needed to be: the room was finding the right activation, abdominals working, hip flexors on, J-curves held, breath doing real work. And still the question surfaced something worth keeping. In the same rep, with the same words, the cueing may have been more than enough for some bodies and not quite enough for others. That is not a complaint to absorb. That is data for the next class.
The resolution
Both, and neither. Silence and volume are the same skill: reading the body in front of you and answering what it shows you. Some reps earn the quiet. Some need one more sentence, said a different way. The skill is the read, and the read is built the way every part of this craft is built: out loud, body by body, until the answer arrives before the question finishes.
The free Cueing Cheat Sheet rebuilds ten of the most commonly mangled cues in Pilates into language that moves a body.