In this study, we report on the outcome of implementing conceptual hands-on activities in a Swedish introductory university mechanics course. The purpose of the activities was to ground the central concepts in the course in students’ shared, embodied experiences of physical phenomena. A total of 112 students, consisting of 105 engineering students and 7 teacher students, were enrolled in the same course. Randomly assembled groups of 3–4 students were video recorded as they undertook four different practical activities. Our analysis mainly focused on two groups of students’ embodied engagement with two of the four activities, consisting of lifting a weight with and without a system of pulleys, and finding the centre of mass using a metre stick. This is contrasted with the activity of standing on a bathroom scale as a lift goes up and down, where the embodied engagement of one of the groups was quite limited. A student interview and course evaluation reports were also analysed to evaluate the implementation of the hands-on activities from a student perspective. The results show that the participating students’ embodied experience, acquired from the conceptual hands-on activities, became an important asset as they tried to explain and link observations of the studied phenomena to their theoretical understanding. The students combined gestures, mimicking the practical procedure, and spoken language, to make their explanations more convincing for both themselves and peers. The intuitive nature and simplicity of the activities invited students to focus on the actual core of the task. In the interview, students emphasised the importance of the actual embodied feeling of the experienced phenomena, and that the activities made them notice other related physics aspects, making them go beyond their initial thoughts.