When asked for three words to describe her practice, Julie Angel doesn’t hesitate: “Emotional, interesting, and joyful.” Then she immediately defends her first choice, pointing out that most movement talk centers on “muscles and tendons and range of motion” while her focus is elsewhere: “moving’s really emotional and it’s all connected.”

This frames an entire universe of movement discourse—biomechanics, force production, joint angles—as valid but fundamentally incomplete. All correct. All measurable. All missing something.

What gets lost when we strip emotion from how we talk about movement? According to Angel, pretty much everything that determines whether someone actually moves.

She identifies three distinct emotional layers: how you feel about showing up to your movement, the emotions you experience during the movement itself, and how you feel afterward. These aren’t decorative elements added to the “real” physical work. Angel argues they’re the substrate:

Those emotions are the things that create the thoughts that drive your actions of where you are or aren’t going to move.

This reframes the entire equation. In standard movement discourse, we describe what happens to tissue when force is applied. We explain adaptation and progressive overload. We provide programming. But if emotions determine whether someone shows up in the first place, then all that technical accuracy becomes irrelevant for the people who need it most.

Angel offers a specific example that illustrates what this looks like in practice. She mentions attempting back squats and crying. Not crying from physical pain or injury—just crying. “I hate backsquats I have a really shitty deep squat.” Someone immediately corrects her language: “people be like you shouldn’t use the word hate Julie.” Her response is characteristically direct: “whatever what.”

That exchange contains the entire problem. The emotional reality is hate—actual, visceral aversion to a specific movement pattern. The technical response is to police the language while presumably continuing to prescribe the movement. But if the emotion is strong enough to produce tears, no amount of biomechanical explanation addresses what’s actually happening.

Angel points out that when she introduces the idea that movement is emotional, “it seems to be like a whole new thing” for people. This reveals how thoroughly we’ve separated physical competence from emotional experience in movement contexts. We’ve created an entire vocabulary for describing what bodies do while systematically avoiding discussion of what people feel while their bodies are doing it.

The emotions she lists aren’t simple: “push through survivor warrior type emotions or whether it’s like I find fear really exciting or I find fear terrifying and I don’t like it or um excitement you know joy fear thrills sadness.” These aren’t obstacles to overcome so the “real” movement work can happen. These are the movement work, at least as much as anything happening at the tissue level.

What we lose by defaulting to muscles and tendons is the mechanism by which movement becomes sustainable practice rather than abandoned resolution. Technical knowledge tells you how to program a squat progression. Emotional awareness tells you whether someone will still be training in six months. We’ve gotten very good at the former while treating the latter as either self-evident or irrelevant.

Angel’s insistence on “emotional” as her first descriptor isn’t rejecting the physical. It’s pointing out that the physical never exists in isolation from how it feels to inhabit a moving body. Standard movement discourse isn’t wrong. It’s just radically incomplete.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Breath with Julie Angel,” published January 29, 2024.