What separates people who merely recover from an injury from people who truly rebuild? It’s not the protocol. It’s not the discipline. It’s not even access to the right coach. According to Sean Hannah, it’s something far simpler and far harder to prescribe: a spark.

“They have to come with the spark. And the spark is the thing you love doing that’s either going away or has gone away, but you’ll do anything to get it back, including slow eccentric squats.”

Hannah draws a line most of us have never seen. Physical therapy — what most people think of as rehabilitation — is designed for baseline function. It gets you walking again, gets you through your day. But there’s a whole other process called remodeling that takes months to years, and it’s what separates returning to basic function from returning to athletic capability. The kind of work that professional athletes get from entire teams of specialists. The kind of work almost nobody else even knows exists.

So why don’t more people pursue it? The exercises aren’t secret. Hannah is blunt about this: “It’s not any new special fancy list of movements or new exercises. It’s the same stuff. Slow down, lightened up, made more partial.” The movements that hurt you are the movements that heal you — just dialed way back. The protocol isn’t the barrier.

The barrier is that remodeling is slow, frustrating, and easily reversible. It requires you to stop avoiding pain and instead get intimate with it — to understand its layers, its signals, its geography in your body. And nobody is going to endure that unless they have something on the other side worth enduring it for.

This is the unanswered question at the heart of Hannah’s work: what happens to the people who don’t have a spark?

Hannah is honest about the limitation. “I can’t give a person that spark,” he says. You either arrive with something you love doing that’s disappearing — or you don’t. And if you don’t, “it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to work.”

That’s a striking admission from someone whose entire practice is built around helping people rebuild. He can guide you through the remodeling process, teach you to read your pain signals, coach you through the psychological conditioning that amplifies suffering. But he cannot manufacture the reason you’d bother.

Consider what this means. We have an entire fitness and rehabilitation industry organized around protocols, sets, reps, progressions. But the differentiator between someone who completes a six-month joint remodel and someone who quits after two weeks has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with whether they have something they can’t bear to lose.

Hannah frames this through the lens of play. “You must have reasons to move beyond not being in pain,” his program states. “You have to want to play again.” That word — “again” — does a lot of work. It implies something was there once. Something that mattered enough to be missed.

This reframes rehabilitation entirely. The question isn’t “what exercises should I do?” It’s “what am I rebuilding toward?” Without an answer, the best protocol in the world is just a list of uncomfortable things to quit.

And here’s what makes this genuinely unsettling: Hannah observes that the capacity for play has been “patterned out” of most people. The very thing that would motivate rebuilding — a deep, embodied love of moving — is exactly what modern life has systematically eroded. We sit through our days, outsource our physical lives to convenience, and then wonder why we can’t muster the will to do slow isometric squats for six months.

The spark isn’t just about having a hobby you miss. It’s about maintaining a relationship with your body that gives you something worth fighting through pain to preserve. And that relationship requires ongoing investment long before injury forces the question.

Hannah doesn’t offer a solution for the sparkless. That gap — the space between knowing how to rebuild and having a reason to — might be the most important problem in movement that nobody is talking about.

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Remodeling with Sean Hannah,” published February 2, 2026.