Finding the “Flow Zone”

The Flow Zone

Athletes across many sports describe the “flow zone” from Formula 1 drivers to boxers to rugby players and even darts professionals. In lifting, it’s the feeling that anything loaded on the bar is manageable, when you’re not thinking about how to lift, just excited to do it.

For most lifters, this isn’t something that can be consciously forced on competition day. But with patient, structured, expert coaching, it is something that can be experienced, and repeated.

And when it happens, it’s exactly what we train for.

But how do we get there? Let’s take a deeper dive in.

Cues, Automaticity & Finding Your Flow on the Platform

Every lifter has heard a lot of cues over their training career. “Brace harder.” “Sit back.” “Bend the bar.” “Stay tight.” Cues are one of the most powerful tools a coach has to drive technical improvement; but when used poorly, they can just as easily create confusion, overthinking, and mental overload.

So what’s the answer?Should we be cueing more… or less?

As with most things in coaching, the honest answer is: it depends.

In this article, we’ll outline how we approach cueing at Power-Breed Performance, how we use cues to build long-term technical habits, and how the ultimate goal is to reach a point where cues fade away entirely, allowing the lifter to perform automatically, aggressively, and with intent on the platform.

Cues Are About Habit Formation

When a coach gives a cue, they aren’t just trying to fix a single rep, they’re trying to build a habit.

Long-term technical change relies on habit formation, and successful habits are characterised by AUTOMATICITY “the condition of being done or occurring spontaneously, without conscious thought or attention”. Research suggests this process typically takes several weeks to months, depending on the task and the individual [Reference 1].

At a high level, we can break technical habit formation into four stages:

1. Identifying the area of focus

2. Finding the right cue for the individual

3. Repeating the behaviour under training stress

4. Becoming automatic

1. Identifying the Area of Focus

The first, and often most important, step is deciding what not to work on.

One of the biggest mistakes lifters make is trying to fix everything at once. Too many cues immediately push the lifter into conscious overload, where performance drops and movement becomes stiff and inconsistent.

Instead, we aim to limit the focus to a single priority area.

Why? Because improving one key element often cleans up several issues at the same time.For example, in the squat, a lifter might struggle with depth, excessive forward lean, and unstable knees. In many cases, prioritising mid-foot stability significantly improves all three without needing separate cues for each.

This is why prioritisation matters. We’re not just chasing visible errors; we’re identifying the root cause.

It’s also important to recognise that breakdowns can appear under different conditions:

High fatigue / Mental Stress – When we are mentally fatigued, things that take some active mental reinforcement tend to drop off. If we think about our mental capacity as a cup and each active thing we add to it as drops of water, eventually that cup will spill over. Life has its way of keeping most people’s cups quite full. Even before we add in technical changes, it’s important to assess the capacity to take on more cognitive fatigue. Sometimes it’s not the right time to be adding more thinking, and first the current stress need to be addressed. When adding loads of mental tasks alongside lifting, technical change can be difficult to accommodate. We want to keep cues down to the minimum required and be aware that when adding or changing cues, outside life stresses need to be factored in.

Heavy Lifting – We often see breakdown when approaching max effort, and you’ll hear people say all the time “it’s a max of course it doesn’t look pretty”. This may be true, but it does not mean we should always expect breakdown when things get heavy. In fact, being aware you are going to be hyped up and intense puts even more emphasis on making sure the technical side is automatic. Coach Mok has a good quote for this “Any more than 2 things actively trying to do mid lift and it doesn’t tend to hold up well to the stressor of maximal intensity. As weight creeps up the ability to cue is being juggled with trying to apply INTENT to the lift. Less to think about means more “bandwidth” for your brain to tell your body to fire all cylinders.”

High volume – The same as mental fatigue, physical fatigue has its impacts. As we experience volume we fatigue and some muscle groups aren’t able to give the same support as when they are fresh, with this discrepancy widening as volume increases. This one is obvious, but what’s important when working on giving a cue is to be mindful that the action of carrying out that cue may cause a lifter to utilise a muscle / muscle grouping much more than before, and that can cause an increase in physical fatigue earlier than would normally be expected. This is especially important in the early phase of technical change. Seeing a drop off in what a lifter has previously be capable of in accessory work is a good way to identify early one if a certain area is now getting a higher use due to a technical change.

Mobility Limitations – mobility can often be the root cause of breakdown and will therefore need to be resolved alongside any technical work. This can be seen commonly across the three lift: on squat with shoulder mobility issues making it difficult for a lifter to grip and secure the bar properly on their back leading to folding over; lifters on bench not having the thoracic mobility to arch and fire their traps into the bench, meaning they lose stability when pressing; and on deadlift not having the mobility to get into position at the start, often time leading to early hip rise or the bar floating away from the shins. All these areas of mobility and more will lead to breakdown and need to be considered and addressed while working on developing cues for technical changes.

For that reason, identifying the focus area isn’t a one-time decision. It should be reassessed as training stress changes.

Dr. Evelyn (aka the boss / Coach Soph) has her own input on assessing breakdown and the need to apply cues, “Rather than layering cues endlessly, the aim is to build environments where the desired movement is the most natural outcome. We have a whole host of tools at our disposal to ensure the training phases in the run up to competitions achieve this. Load selection, exercise order, fatigue management, and movement constraints are often more powerful than verbal instruction alone. So when these variables are manipulated effectively within an individual’s training, we begin to see more self organisation toward the solution without the athlete or the coach needing to micromanage it.

2. Finding the Right Cue for the Individual

There is no such thing as a universally “correct” cue.

Some cues work brilliantly for certain lifters and completely miss the mark for others. The right cue is simply the one that produces the desired outcome for that individual, even if it sounds wrong to everyone else.

A common example is bench press cueing:“Bend the bar” works extremely well for many lifters to engage the lats and control elbow position. However, for some, it leads to excessive wrist rotation and unnecessary elbow stress.

An alternative cue like “protect the armpits” can achieve the same goal, encouraging humeral rotation and lat engagement, without the unwanted side effects. However, we’ve also found this can sometimes lead to excessive flexion at the wrist/shoulder abduction.

Finding the right cue can take time, and it’s normal if the first option doesn’t land. The key is not forcing a cue that doesn’t feel intuitive. Mental buy-in matters.

Another area to touch on here when identifying the right cue is sometimes we will have to work on breaking down previously established technique, including technique that has been developed using certain cues. This is an especially difficult phase to go through because you are not working with a clean slate, and some of the wording or phrases you wish to use may be a trigger for the old technique. Patience is important here along with open client feedback. I’ve seen this before where it felt like taking one step forward and two steps back, as we’d manage to work on a change and see it start improving, but then fall way back as the old technique (which was still more familiar) snuck back in, leading to a “worst case scenario” where neither technique was getting the full focus. This is where it’s important to remember that constantly linear progress does not exist, and in fact it’s ok to take a step to the side if it means getting off a path going nowhere. In this instance the technique cues getting mixed signals was on bench, and the fix required a short phase away from barbell bench completely, to allow a mental break and reset.

This is where coaching experience is critical. At Power-Breed, we’ve worked with hundreds of lifters across strength sports, which allows us to draw from a wide cueing toolbox, not just what works in general, but what works for this lifter.

3. Repeating the Behaviour (Without Burning Out)

Once the focus area and cue are established, the real work begins.

This phase, repetition of successful cueing, is the longest and most demanding. Early on, the new movement will often feel worse, not better. That’s normal. You’re replacing a familiar pattern with an unfamiliar one.

In the early sessions, success might only appear once or twice. That’s enough. Those successful reps give us something to anchor to and build upon.

Over time, we expect: the cue to work more frequently, the old movement pattern to feel “off” rather than normal, and the new pattern to start feeling natural.

But repetition alone isn’t enough.

To truly ingrain a habit, we deliberately expose the new technique to different stresses. Going back over the same breakdown areas discussed in phase one and seeing how the technique hold up in high volume blocks, different loading stresses, high frequency, and fatigued states similar to what we would see in competition.

Only once the movement holds up under these conditions can we confidently move to the final stage.

4. Becoming Automatic

Automaticity is where the cue disappears.

The body performs the movement without conscious thought, allowing the lifter to shift focus away from technique and towards execution, intent, and emotional control and release.

This is often where lifters describe entering a “flow state” that feeling where the bar moves, energy is high, and nothing feels forced.

Is this guaranteed every competition? Absolutely not.Some lifters may compete while still in the repetition phase, and others may never fully experience a true flow state, and that’s not a failure.

Technical development is cyclical. Once one habit is ingrained, another area becomes the priority. The process repeats.

What does that look like when all this comes together? Well, my personal favourite example is Kyle Gibson who’s previous best squat prior to starting with me was 350kg, already a fantastic weight. But when it came to true maximal effort he wasn’t able to maintain his midfoot placement and thinking about trying to find it zapped his ability to push all his power. Over a year and a half of technical work, taking him through all those phases multiple times, Kyle was in the flow zone. In competition he had 430kg lined up, and squatted it so quickly, the load on bar caused the plates to shake and he stumbled back at the top after completing the lift, but he had another attempt, and he wasn’t going to be stopped. It didn’t matter how physically, or mentally fatigued he was, how much stress he had from missing the lift before, he was in the zone, went back to it and smashed it, setting a Scottish record that even the Stoltman’s couldn’t touch if they tried powerlifting!

References

1. Singh, B. et al. Time to Form a Habit: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Health Behaviour Habit Formation and Its Determinants

2. Gardner, B. et al. Making Health Habitual: The Psychology of Habit-Formation and General Practice