You can’t tell animals how to move. With athletes – not so. But only up to a point.

Great athletes seem to have an innate, inaccessible quality that resists influence.

Michael Johnson, for instance, who ran in the upright manner of a guardsman throughout his 200 and 400m career yet still, somehow, managed to break the world record at both distances as well as claiming four Olympic and eight world golds.

(Voice from the sideline: “Wow. Think how good he could have been if he had learned to run properly!!”)

Anyway.  I was listening to the recently announced IAAF World Athlete of the Year, Mutaz Essa Barshim, in Monaco last week.

This 26-year-old high jumping phenomenon – 6ft 4in of sprung power – has feline grace as he clears the bar.

Of course he has been schooled and taught and modelled since he took up the discipline as a 15-year-old, first attending the ASPIRE Academy for Sports Excellence in his native Doha and, since 2009, being guided by the Polish coach Stanislaw “Stanley” Szczyrba.

But reaching this point in his career – Olympic silver in Rio, world gold in London this summer, and a 2.43 clearance in 2014 that has put him second on the all-time list to the long-retired world record holder Javier Sotomayor  – has involved more than schooling for Barshim.

The more you hear this articulate and self-possessed young man speak – could there be a better poster boy for the 2019 IAAF Championships in his home city, where he aims to defend his title? – the more you realise that his achievements so far have come about through a finely-tuned training method.

And while that involves him, and particularly his coach, in paying attention to the finest of details, it also speaks of a huge accord with regard to the importance of instinct.

Barshim’s catch phrase is What Gravity? But it could just as well be If It Feels Good, Do It. Or perhaps, more accurately, If It Don’t Feel Good, Don’t Do It.

“My coach is a mechanic,” he said in Monaco on the eve of the ceremony that recognised him above the two other shortlisted male athletes, Britain’s Mo Farah and South Africa’s Wayde Van Niekerk.

“He can see a problem and he will not sleep until he fixes it. But we work on quality. I am not a robot. Why would you have a programme?  For a full year? You might be injured tomorrow!  How can you possibly know what you are going to do for a whole year?

“Some days I am too tired for the gym.  ‘I don’t feel it today – I feel like running. Maybe that will add something.’ We carry on. We try to improve it.

“The thing is the quality. Another person can do something 20 times. But if I don’t feel what I am doing, I can’t keep giving and giving and giving it…”

Set piece role models are also something that don’t fit into the Barshim training plan.

“If I look at someone I want to look at someone better than me. But I can’t look at Sotomayor and try to jump like him.

“He was very strong. But we all have different fingerprints. So that’s your fingerprint. Try to improve it.

“We all make mistakes. But sometimes mistakes help you. You can worry about learning the right technique – but who cares how you jump as long as you clear the bar?”

When it comes to operating in the heady heights of 2.40m and beyond, however, science becomes weird science, as Barshim – who needs to add three centimetres to his personal best to surpass the mark set by the Cuban back in 1993 - can attest.

“Sometimes,” he says, “if you stand and see 2.40, you think ‘how am I going to jump that?’ You need to be a little bit crazy. It’s something that you can’t be taught.

“Now that I have so many jumps over 2.40 I know what it takes. But when you try for a world record you start doing weird movements. The coach says ‘where has this come from?’ ‘I thought I needed more power.’

“Adrenaline starts to go to your body, and you start doing other stuff. You think, ‘I need so much power…oh, that was too fast.’ You have to do it several times. It’s a mental barrier.

“But you can’t put the bar at 2.46 and pretend it isn’t high. It is actually better to say it’s high.

“What I think about the world record doesn’t matter – it’s there. I look at myself all the time. It is one of my targets, of course. I say I want to be the world record holder. I tried a little bit and I got messed up everywhere!

“I think it is just a matter of time if I stay healthy. I can do it, or come very close.

“But I don’t want to just try 2.46 for the show. I only want to try that height when it’s going to be very close.

“I think I have been very close many times. In 2014 I was ready physically. Mentally I wasn’t. It takes a long time for the body to recover from 2.40 jumps. In 2016 I was mentally much more mature, but then of course my body was messed up.

“I’m planning to do something like this maybe next summer. I am planning to do the World Indoors, but outdoors there are no championships - so I’m going for records.”

You have to say – it looks a likely leap for this cool cat…