Most coaching teaches the perfect student.

Flying isn't walking, or cycling, or even swimming. In water you can see it and feel it. Air is invisible.

You're learning to read turbulence you can't see, push off something you can't touch, and feel pressure most people never notice their whole lives. It is a genuinely new human sense — and tunnels are the only reason it's now something a person can actually master in a lifetime.

Backsliding feels comfortable, because it's just a position happening — no effort. So you try to stop it by adding force. It feels like it worked, because something stopped.

But you've just learned the wrong lesson: that force stops movement. It doesn't. You don't need force to stop force. You change the shape, and the movement stops on its own.

Which is why the correct position often feels worse than the wrong one for a while. If you bail out during that window — and most people do — you go back to the thing that was breaking you, because it felt better.

Beginners try to propel themselves across the sky. The skill is presenting surface area and letting the air do the pushing. You don't drive it — you slip on it.

The sensation you're chasing is being moved, not moving.

Beginners fly in stop/go. Full input or nothing. Mastery is knowing the whole range — gear one through five — and living in the middle of it.

Jumping straight to gear five is what causes the stall, and that wafting, floaty, out-of-control feeling you can't explain afterwards.

It is not “relax and you'll fly”. Certain moments and certain parts of the body need tension. The fault is holding it everywhere, all the time, with no timing or intent behind it.

Mastery here is martial arts: knowing exactly where and when to apply it, and flowing between tension and release without having to think about it.

The cue itself can cause the fault. Say “push your arms forward” and the word push subconsciously triggers tension — the exact thing you were trying to remove. So the language gets built deliberately.

And rather than telling someone what they did wrong, you ask a question that leads them to find it: did you feel that? They own the correction instead of receiving it.

You guard the spot that's hurt. The muscle won't release, so the tension sits there, and it pulls your whole body off balance. That is not a technique fault and it cannot be fixed with a position cue — the root cause is physical, not skill.

Same with habits, anatomy, and how you carry yourself on the ground. Straightening your legs through the heels versus pointing the toes are two different bodies and two different outcomes. Arms drawn back in front of the body versus behind it changes the rotator cuff, the shoulder rotation and the frame of the torso — same motion, different profile, different result.