Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill — LinkedIn Article
LinkedIn Article Deliverable
Section titled “LinkedIn Article Deliverable”Publishing account: Patrick Oancia (personal). Cover image: featured WebP with title overlay.
Byline to add in the body below the title: Patrick Oancia.
Canonical URL (add at the bottom as a plain text line, since LinkedIn’s “Originally published at” field is no longer exposed): https://baseworks.com/article/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill/
SEO Title (LinkedIn article settings): Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill: Body Awareness, Proprioception and Perceptual Skill
SEO Description (≤160 chars): How attention to muscular sensation develops body awareness, proprioception, and perceptual skills that build across every domain.
Baseworks company page reshare note (draft below, publish from the company page a few hours after Patrick’s post is live).
Article body (copy-paste into LinkedIn)
Section titled “Article body (copy-paste into LinkedIn)”Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill
Section titled “Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill”How attention to muscular sensation develops body awareness, proprioception, and perceptual skills that build across every domain
Section titled “How attention to muscular sensation develops body awareness, proprioception, and perceptual skills that build across every domain”By Patrick Oancia
I’ve dedicated a lot of time to learning different skills throughout my life. It started with sports and continued through music and other disciplines that all demanded a lot of focus. In parallel, I’ve worked directly with thousands of people in person at our studio in Tokyo and workshops in other countries. Across everything, one observation has stayed consistent. Most people doing physical practices are focused on what it looks like. The body becomes something to manage from the outside, tracked through what the practice visually presents, what it accomplishes, what the aesthetic result of the effort is. The shape, the achievement, the thing you can point at. What’s actually happening internally sits in the background or doesn’t register at all.
The pull toward the visual is reinforced almost everywhere. Open Instagram or TikTok and a substantial portion of what circulates 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. The visible has gravity, and more often than not shapes both what people look for in a practice and what they consider to be valid.
This isn’t a critique of physical practice. The forms of activity that emphasize visible outcomes have value. What I’m pointing at is a quieter observation that becomes harder to ignore the longer you spend in a teacher/practitioner type of collaboration. The focus on internalization is rarely included in a meaningful enough way in the structure of most pedagogical environments. There’s no obvious reason it would be. Strength, flexibility, and technique all produce results that someone else can see. Inner attention doesn’t. It doesn’t show up in a photograph, and it doesn’t translate into the categories most physical practice is organized around. So it gets left out, even by disciplines that respect what it means.
If you want to test what internalizing sensations feels like, there’s a useful place to begin that most people have never checked.
A muscle at rest, and the vocabulary problem
Section titled “A muscle at rest, and the vocabulary problem”What does a muscle feel like from the inside, when nothing is happening to it?
Not when it’s sore. Not when it’s stretched. Not when it’s burning from effort. Not when it’s loaded. Just at rest. Sitting there. What’s the sensation?
For most people, the honest answer is nothing. The signal isn’t absent. The attention to detect it hasn’t been built. Muscular sensation at rest is a perceptual territory that almost no part of mainstream movement education touches, and the result is that an entire layer of internal information sits unused in most people’s experience of their own body until they die.
Look at the words available for muscular sensation. Sore. Tight. Stretched. Burning. Cramped. Fatigued. Each of them describes some event the muscle is responding to. For many, the sensory vocabulary for muscles is entirely event-based. If nothing is happening, there’s no word for what’s there. The vocabulary problem and the perceptual problem reinforce each other. Without the vocabulary, there’s no attention on it. Without attention on it, no language develops.
This is a perceptual blind spot, not an absence. Over time, some people find a quiet, neutral presence that was there all along. In her research, Ksenia Shcherbakova has been calling this the hum: a low-grade tonic sensation present in resting muscles, intensifying proportionally with even mild contraction. It’s a perceptual finding that sits outside existing scientific frameworks. That’s why it’s mostly unnamed in the literature she’s been investigating for several years.
The hum, or whatever you find when you check, becomes available only when inner attention has somewhere to show up. The first time, most people find silence. Over time, the silence starts to fill in.
Sensitivity is what’s actually being trained
Section titled “Sensitivity is what’s actually being trained”A muscle at rest is the most overlooked place to start. The signal is so subtle that almost nothing else in daily life prompts you to look for it. There’s no soreness to manage, no stretch to lean into, no burning to outlast. The only way the signal becomes available is through sustained attention, without any external reward.
Internalizing this attention is the actual skill. The muscle is its training ground.
What develops over time is what we call perceptual resolution: a finer-grained capacity to detect distinct internal sensations and hold attention on them long enough for something to register. An earlier article makes a parallel case for the same capacity from a different angle. Two specific techniques in Baseworks generate the sensory information this kind of attention can work with. Micro-Movements, the subtle positional adjustments used as calibration mechanisms, keep the body engaged with continuous internal signals. Distributed Activation, the simultaneous isometric engagement of multiple muscles in conscious co-contraction, amplifies proprioceptive input across the body at once. Both are structured ways of internalizing attention.
A capacity built without external reward is one that doesn’t depend on external reward to be applied later, in any other domain.
The full article continues on our site. It covers how this capacity carries into work that has nothing to do with movement: a software developer catching the inconsistency on a page of code that doesn’t look like it needs a second read, a CEO registering the temperature of a room before speaking, a preschool teacher noticing which child has gone quiet in a way that’s different from yesterday, a farmer reading the soil and the weather as one ongoing pattern, a forester picking up the early signs of a tree under stress. It also lays out the research side, including Ksenia’s article on the neural mechanisms behind resting-muscle sensation, and two upcoming presentations where that research appears in full: the 27th Neuropsychology Day at The Neuro in Montreal on May 11 (open to the public and free of charge), and BRNet 2026 in Padova on June 8 and 9.
To work with the method in person, our events page lists upcoming sessions and the Primer is the structured entry point.
Originally published at baseworks.com/article/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill
LinkedIn feed post (promotes the article above)
Section titled “LinkedIn feed post (promotes the article above)”Publishing account: Patrick Oancia (personal). ~120 words. Posts after the article is live.
Most physical practice is oriented to what it looks like. The aesthetic, the accomplishment, the thing someone else can see. Inner attention gets left out because it can’t be photographed and doesn’t translate into the categories most physical practice is organized around.
I wrote about what’s actually being trained when inner attention has somewhere to show up. It starts with a question most people have never checked: what does a muscle feel like from the inside when nothing is happening to it?
The article also covers the research side, including Ksenia Shcherbakova’s work on the neural mechanisms behind resting-muscle sensation.
The article covers the perceptual vocabulary problem, the techniques we use to make the signal available, and how the capacity carries into work that has nothing to do with movement.
Read it here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sensitivity-trainable-skill-patrick-oancia-xqgde
#baseworks_method #baseworks_sense_control_adapt #baseworks_physical_intelligence #proprioceptiveawareness #sensorimotorlearning
Baseworks company page reshare note
Section titled “Baseworks company page reshare note”Publishing account: Baseworks (company page). Reshare of Patrick’s article, published a few hours later.
Patrick’s new article on sensitivity as a trainable skill: what develops when attention is turned inward, why the vocabulary for muscular sensation is almost entirely event-based, and how the capacity carries into work in other domains. Includes Ksenia Shcherbakova’s companion research on the neural mechanisms underneath.
The research side of the same question is being presented by Ksenia at the 27th Neuropsychology Day at The Neuro in Montreal on May 11, and at BRNet 2026 in Padova in June.
Read the article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sensitivity-trainable-skill-patrick-oancia-xqgde
Publishing notes
Section titled “Publishing notes”- Publish the article from Patrick’s personal account first.
- Wait a few hours, then reshare from the Baseworks company page with the note above.
- Feed post (above) from Patrick’s personal account within 24 hours of the article going live, linking to the LinkedIn article URL (auto-generated by LinkedIn from title + author last name).
- Cover image: the featured WebP at
https://media.baseworks.com/blog-articles/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill/baseworks-sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill-featured.webp(the one with the title overlay). - Embed the Attentional Carryover infographic inside the LinkedIn article body if LinkedIn’s article editor allows it cleanly; otherwise leave the article text-only and let the cover image carry visual weight.