Yesterday, I was doing a Crossfit workout (we were learning the snatch) when our coach was noticing everybody getting really stiff leading into the actual lift.  Don’t ask me why, but tensing up as we prepared for a heavy lift felt most natural.  

Apparently not!  Quite the opposite in fact.

According to our coach, the most optimal way to approach a heavy lift is to be loose as a goose up until you actually engage in the lift itself.  He demonstrated by shaking out his arms and hands up until he actually grabbed the bar itself.  Then he spent a few seconds turning the bar so as to transfer some of your tensed up energy out of his body and into the bar.  Then he lifted the bar to hang position (balanced near the knee area).  He’s still loose.  And only as he set that bar into hang position did he release that full ball of energy into the lift and BAM that heavy ass bar of weights was over your head in no more than a split second of fully released energy.

He described this practice as “being like water” reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s famous quote and overall menatility towards life:

Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

I like this mentality especially since I notice that I do so much better at whenever it is I’m doing when I’m fully relaxed going into it.  Running, recruiting, whatever… The more tense I am going into it, the worse I usually do.  

So note to self until the next time I forget - be water, my friend