The Tao Of Snatch – Lesson 3

The Lao-Tzu – Tao Te Ching

This is chapter 3 of the Tao Te Ching. Part of the Tao Of Snatch series: a weightlifters guide to the Lao-Tzu.

Vision

You will have power

When praise has no meaning.

You will be virtuous

When value becomes worthless.

The Samurai leads the people

To righteousness and happiness

By destroying minds and building bones;

By weakening ambition and strengthening action.

You will have done good

When they have lost everything;

When you have sown the seeds

Of confusion in all who “know”.

To create the man in the marble

You must chip away the stone.

Practice the art of Forceless Action,

Of non-doing: wu-wei.

Meditation

All Samurai are Sensei as well as students. Our words and actions take form in the lives of others. You are a leader whether you like it or not – act like one!

Just as you are weakened by a mindless attachment to what others think about you, you are weakening others by assigning meaningless value to their actions – positive or negative.

• Laugh in the face of failure to raise the spirits of those who fail – so that they will keep trying.


• Downplay success and raise the bar for those who succeed – so that they may reach even higher.

To learn, you must first unlearn everything. To create a good habit, you must first destroy the bad. To teach a student the way, you must annihilate their attachment to what they believe to be way.

Those who know, don’t.

Action

If you ever hope to be good at snatching (or jerks, or anything else that’s hard), you have to unlearn everything you have learned, and let go of what you believe to be “truth”. Your mind and your body are your students. To teach them, obliterate their knowledge. Become a beginner. Start over. Relearn the basics, but this time, do so as if you’ve never done this a day in your life.

Do this every day, before you start your “real” training session. Take an empty bar, and start from scratch. Remind yourself of what you should be doing.

• Lock Out (CONTROL)


• Hit Your Hip (VELOCITY)


• Cultivate Intensity (TAO)

Your body wants to do all of this, it is fully capable of exploding heavy weights over your head in a beautifully graceful way. The only reason it doesn’t happen, is because you keep getting in its way.

True intensity is born out of coming to terms with reality, a willingness to accept the situation at hand as-it-is, rather than fighting it tooth and nail. Be. Simply be. Sometimes “being” is slow, deliberate, gentle. Sometimes “being” is fast, explosive, primal. Either way…

It is in the Intensity of your Being that you will find your true Power – your Original Self.

This is what we mean by force-less action, or non-doing: you let it happen, you don’t make it happen. A fool would assume that implies passivity. The Samurai knows that wu-wei implies Strength. Thus, this is the foundation of the Samurai Strength System.

Now go lift something heavy,

Nick Horton

PS. To get your start with the Samurai Strength System, check out our Nemesis Program, the worlds most hellish squat program. It is a wonderful way to begin learning how to develop wu-wei in an environment you are already cool with: a gym.

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