Coach’s Corner. Real coaching moments to help you move in your feel-good range.
One of the most important questions in any workout is also one of the hardest to answer:
How hard am I actually working?
Most people know when exercise feels easy. They also know when it feels like too much. The tricky part is learning what happens in between — across the full intensity spectrum from rest to maximum effort.
Understanding how each level feels is where the real learning happens. It’s how you learn to pace yourself, build strength, improve endurance, and adjust the workout to match what your body actually needs that day.
This is why I love the build-up drill.
Created by Lori Sherlock, the build-up drill has become one of the most useful tools inside Wavemakers. In fact, practicing intensity is baked into every warm-up — so if you’ve been doing the workouts, you’ve already been doing this, even if you didn’t have a name for it.
Any time you move from easy to moderate to hard, you’re practicing how to measure effort through movement and feel.
Here’s how it works.
Choose one familiar move — a jog, a ski, a jumping jack, a kick, or a reach and pull. Then move through three levels of effort:
Easy. You can keep going without much effort. In the water, you feel supported, relaxed, and able to focus on your movement technique.
Moderate. Your breathing changes. Your muscles feel more engaged. You can feel the water pushing back — and you know you’re working.
Hard. This is challenging and difficult to sustain. Your breathing is heavier. The water feels thicker. You can do it, but you couldn’t stay here for long.
Easy → moderate → hard. Simple, but powerful.
What you’re really doing is learning to listen to your body.
As effort increases, things change — your breath, your muscle engagement, the way the water responds. When you pay attention to those signals, effort becomes something you can actually measure and adjust.
This matters especially in the water, because effort isn’t just about speed. You can work harder by moving more water, increasing your range of motion, changing your arm position, or changing the surface area of your hand — a slice, a fist, or an open palm all create completely different resistance.
Two people can do the same exercise in the same pool and have entirely different workouts, based on how they use the water. That’s the beauty of it.
The build-up drill helps you personalize the work.
It’s not just for jogging and jumping jacks, either.
You can practice a build-up drill with both feet on the ground, using only your arms — which makes it a great option any time you need a lower-impact approach.
Watch the demonstration below to see it in action:
Then try it in your next workout. Pick one movement in the warm-up and take it through easy, moderate, and hard. Come back to that same movement later in the session and try it again.
The more you practice, the easier it becomes to read your effort, adjust when you need to, and get more out of every workout.
Want to keep moving, no matter what life throws at you?
Inside Wavemakers, we use the pool to make movement feel more doable, more supportive, and more enjoyable.