Wu Wei Workouts

Thoughts on “Instinctive” Training, Creative Workouts, and Using the Taoist Principle of Wu Wei for Achieving Your Goals

     Last month, at the end of my article The Three Day Russian Power Volume Training Program, I mentioned that I might not post as many upcoming articles because of other projects that I’m working on, a book that I’m (still) editing and assembling for publication, and additional issues in my daily life that have kept me busy and away from writing as much.  But since I wrote those words, my output here on the blog hasn’t slowed down any.  And yet, since October 13th—when I posted that article—I haven’t spent as much time working on articles.  Despite that lack of time, I’ve managed to write and post just as many essays as before.  How?  Through the process of the philosophical concept known as wu wei.

     Wu wei is usually translated as something along the lines of “effortless action,” “non-doing,” “non-being,” or even “spontaneous action,” though this last translation has more to do with how wu wei is perceived rather than a literal translation.  “Wu” can be translated as “no, not, negative, non, lack of, have no,” and “wei” as “do, to be, act,” or even “govern.”  So, one translation—and it wouldn’t be incorrect—could even be “negative governing,” as odd as it might look to the reader or sound to the one who hears it.

     Wu wei is, historically, an important concept within Chinese philosophy, and has been expounded upon by all three of China’s major religions—Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, especially Chan Buddhism.  The way that it’s understood, more often than not, by Westerners, however, is typically through its Taoist lens.

     So, what does wu wei have to do with my creative output and how can you utilize it to help achieve your physical goals?  Well, for one, I’m not really sure where this essay is even going.  As I sit here in my “writing chair,” a comfortable La-Z-Boy recliner, with my laptop resting on a cushion on my lap, simply typing away, I’m just writing.  I have a general idea of what it is that I want to discuss with you, the subject that I would like to do my best to elucidate to you the reader, but I don’t really have a fixed plan.  I have no outline—I generally don’t outline any of my projects.  I plainly and simply have the subject—in this case, wu wei—and nothing else.  I sit down and simply write.  I use the subject in mind to, more or less, see where it will go, because I’m not really sure myself.  In that sense, it’s sort of “wu writing.”  Spontaneous writing.  Effortless writing.  Actionless writing.

     In the sense that I use it here for my writing projects, perhaps “spontaneous action” would be the best translation for wu wei.  Because it’s not really effortless or actionless.  I have to put forth some effort.  I have to actually do the action of typing away at these letters on my laptop’s keyboard.

     For almost the past month, this is exactly how I’ve written all of my articles.  An idea will come to me.  I don’t try to come up with an idea or a topic.  Most of the time, my ideas arise while I’m out for a walk at the park with my dogs, or working out in my garage gym—lifting or kicking and punching away at my heavy bag.  Maybe even when I’m doing yard work or gardening around my property.  When they do come, the one thing I must do is actually write down the idea.  If I don’t, I’m likely to forget about it, try as I might later to bring it back to mind.  If I’m out for a walk, and don’t have a pen and notepad with me, I’ll send myself a text message of the idea, or I’ll speak it into the voice recorder app on my phone.  Nonetheless, I probably still forget way more ideas than actually get written.  If I managed to actually write an article for all of my ideas, I’d pen 500 to 1,000 of them a year.  Easily.

     Even when I don’t forget an idea, it still might not be posted or published.  I have a lot of articles that I started but that’s it.  I never can seem to get anywhere with them.  I might manage a sentence or two, a paragraph or three, or even several pages, but I don’t like the prose or I don’t think that the article is really going somewhere concrete.  In that case, I just set it aside and start working on something else.  At some point down the road, I might return to one of those, only to find that I still can’t get anywhere with them or I might discover that I do have a good article in hand, or at least one good enough that maybe someone somewhere might actually take the time to finish reading it.

     This past month, however, I feel as if my output has been more wu wei than usual.  I really haven’t tried to write anything whatsoever.  It seems as if the writing is just coming through me.  It’s not as if I’m some unthinking robot or mechanical, mindless secretary dictating a message from the universal aether or anything like that, but it still seems as if my writing of late has been nothing more than a happening and little else.

     Now, you might be asking at this point, what does all of this have to do with lifting, working out, building muscle, or strength training?  How can you actually apply wu wei to your lifting and “use it” to achieve your goals?  For one, wu wei, more or less, “uses” you, and not the other way around.  It’s similar, in many ways, to so-called “instinctive training” and being in a “flow” state.

     There are some lifters, bodybuilders, strength athletes, and others who have achieved great results by training “instinctively.”  But most of them didn’t start out training that way.  If they did, then they were probably either naturally intuitive—in a manner way beyond the ordinary, average person like you and me—or very genetically gifted and predisposed to be great at their particular domain.

     Over a decade ago, I remember reading a profile on Rich Froning who, at the time, was considered the “Fittest Man on Earth” for winning multiple world CrossFit Games.  Froning didn’t follow any specific training plan.  He trained multiple times per day, didn’t take days off, and basically did whatever-the-hell he felt like doing at each training session.  That approach worked great for him and he shouldn’t have done anything else.  A combination of both great genetics and being naturally intuitive probably allowed him to train in such a manner.  He also, by the way, ate whatever the heck he wanted to eat, including lots of peanut butter and whole milk—he “instinctively” knew what his body needed for such long, frequent, and downright grueling training sessions.  He was a living, breathing wu wei workout artist.

     Don’t try to replicate Froning.  At least, don’t try to do so when starting out.

     The wu wei way works—tongue twister that those words might be—once you’ve established a firm base in your training and know what works for you.  The manner in which I write now isn’t the way that I’ve always written.  I’ve written around a thousand articles—including on my blog and many articles for various publications—over more than 30 years, since I sold my first article to Ironman magazine back in ‘93.  (My first article might have been one that I sold to Black Belt magazine before that, but they never published it, so I’ll leave that one aside since I’m unsure of exactly when that one was accepted.)  And long before that, when I was just a wee little geeky kid, I loved writing.  By the time I was 14, for instance, I wrote an entire book containing my reviews for Hong Kong kung-fu movies—I’m not sure if I was much of a movie critic at 14 years of age, but that’s not the point.  The point is that I’ve had a lot of practice.  At this point, my writing goes the smoothest when “I” simply get out of the way and let the words come forth, pouring out of my subconscious or whatever.  I dunno.  Maybe there’s a little magic going on, since I most certainly do believe in the magic of creativity.

     Though I don’t really “try” once I’m sitting down at my laptop, I still have a daily schedule for my day.  I get up in the morning, make my cup of coffee, and start plugging away at my writing.  I write in short “bursts” of 30 minutes or so at a time.  Then I take a break, go for a walk, play with my dogs, do some house cleaning, run errands, or whatever it is that I have planned for the day.  But I do have an actual plan and a schedule.  That’s important.

     Even if you’ve been lifting for decades, I think it helps to have a weekly plan that you’re going to follow.  You may make alterations to it during the week, depending on what comes up, and you may make changes to your workouts, but you still have a “template.”

     One good idea is to know the days that you’re going to lift and the movements you’re going to do at each session.  Perhaps your template looks like this:

Monday:

Barbell squats

Barbell bench presses

Deadlifts

Barbell curls

Wednesday:

Front squats

Military presses

Weighted chins

Friday:

Barbell squats

Weighed dips

Power cleans

Dumbbell curls

     That’s a pretty good template, by the way.  What exactly you do at each training day will depend upon how you feel.  It might be 3 to 5 sets of 3 to 5 reps on each lift.  It could be 2 to 3 sets of 10 to 30 reps.  It might be 8 to 10 sets of 2 to 3 reps.  Heck, maybe it’s just a bunch of heavy singles.  And it might change from workout to workout or even from lift to lift.  Once you know your body, you can do what you want.  But you still have a template, a schedule, and a plan.  “The best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.  And leave us nothing but grief and pain, for promised joy!” as the Scottish poet Robert Burns reminds us, meaning that even the “best” workout plans and templates, no matter how carefully you prepare, can often be laid waste by unforeseen events and unexpected occurrences in your life.  Life gets in the way, as it does for everyone, but you still need the plan.

     Eventually, you might reach a point where you don’t even need the above template, or anything similar, at all.  Your plan might just be to train with a handful of “big,” compound lifts, and to train several days a week.  That’s fine, too.  But once you do reach that stage, you won’t need any advice from me or anyone else.

     Bodybuilders, in my experience, seem to do better with instinctive training than strength athletes.  Your plan, if your only goal is hypertrophy, might be nothing more than to just “get a pump” at your workouts.  If you’re fairly advanced, and already have a decent amount of size, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  The only thing I’d add is to just make sure you train with more free weight, compound lifts than isolation movements or machine and cable exercises.

     Strength athletes can train intuitively if they follow something such as the “3 to 5 method.”  If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s simple but also effective because it ensures you're within the “parameters” of strength and power training.  It looks like this:

• Train 3 to 5 days per week.

• Do 3 to 5 “big” compound lifts at each session.

• Do 3 to 5 sets on each lift.

• Do 3 to 5 reps on each set.

• Rest 3 to 5 minutes between each set.

     There’s still a lot of flexibility within this template, however.  You just need to know your body well enough that you know when you should push it and when to back off.  A week where you do only 3 lifts at each session for 3 sets of 3 reps is going to be a much lower workload than one where you train 5 days for 5 sets of 5 reps on each lift.  So, for the strength athlete, you need to be at least at the “intermediate” stage before you decide to “wu wei” it.

     You also need to know whether you do well with, essentially, the same lifts at each session, or by changing it up and using entirely different lifts at each session, or something in between the two.  You also need to know what your different muscles respond to.  You might be able to build a big squat by doing nothing other than the barbell back squat, but you might only increase your deadlift strength by using a wide range of pull movements at each workout.  Same goes for the bench press, a lift that most guys are desirous of increasing.  Some lifters don’t need anything but the bench.  Others need it along with a host of other auxiliary movements.

     Older athletes and recreational lifters find that they naturally use the wu wei approach, whether they even know it or not.  It helps to have the flexibility to do “whatever” when you get older, if for no other reason that the injuries and recurring “problems” of age just seem to pile up.

     I still train martial arts about 3 days a week, for instance, but I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do until I start doing it.  I’ll stretch a little bit to get warmed up, but not too much.  After that, I just see how my body feels.  I might do primarily kicks, maybe just punches, perhaps a combination of both, or I might even decide to get out my Chinese white willow longstaff and train with it.  I might train karate one day, TKD another, and then Hung-Gar on a third.  Or I might do all three in the same session.  I might train for an hour, 30 minutes, or just 10 if I can tell that my body simply isn’t “up to it” for the day.

     All of this also means that wu wei is often about simply going with the flow of life.  Even a lifter who has a very specific training plan of detailed lifts, sets, and reps can use wu wei by knowing when to push it in the workout and when to back off.  Don’t force a workout if you know that your lower back could use some extra recovery or if your rotator cuff is causing you some shoulder pain.  Take a day off when your body is giving that signal.  Conversely, if you feel especially good at a workout, maybe the flow of life is telling you to train heavier that day or push for a PR.

     Wu wei is also an attitude to lifting.  It is, in many ways, the opposite of the “no pain, no gain” approach.  I probably and in essence “preach” it here on the blog more than even I realize.  Instead of always trying to add another rep, another set, or more weight for the same number of reps at each session, take the “everything moderate” route.  Have a workout plan.  To use it as an example, maybe it’s 5x5 on squats with a fairly heavy weight but one that you could still do for 8 or even 10 reps for one really hard set.  Just stick with that weight and 5 sets of 5 reps on it at each session.  Stick with it until it starts to feel really easy.  Now, train it fairly frequently—don’t misunderstand me here; this might be the “easy strength” approach but it’s not the “lazy strength” method.  Maybe 3 days a week—2 days at the minimum.  But stick with that weight until the 5x5 feels easy and then and only then add weight at the next session.  This might be your starting workout, for example:

Squats: 5x5

Bench presses: 3x5

Deficit deadlifts: 3x5

Military presses: 3x5

Barbell curls: 3x5

     For each movement, do all of your work sets with your 10-rep max.  Don’t force adding extra weight to your next sessions.  Again, just stick with that weight until every set feels quite easy.  At that point, add 10 pounds to your squats and deadlifts and 5 pounds to your other lifts—maybe 2.5 to the barbell curls.  And repeat the process all over again.  That’s wu wei in action but with a standardized training plan.

     This going with the flow is perhaps the greatest lesson to learn from wu wei.  Let things be.  Let life come and go.  Life will never go exactly the way that we want.  Injuries will come.  But they will also go.  Sickness and illness will come—that is one of life’s great certainties, along with aging and death.  But it will also go.  (Aging and death, of course, won’t.)  Some days, life and lifting is easy.  Some days it’s not.  That’s simply the way it is.

     Life has a natural rhythm to it.  Wu wei, from a Taoist perspective, is intertwined with the concept of yin/yang, the hard and the soft, the masculine and the feminine.  We must learn to flow with this rhythm instead of resisting it or, even worse, attempting to change it.  If you can learn to go with the rhythm, and embrace the wu wei approach, your lifting, and your life, will be all the better for it.

     Whether or not I’ve adequately presented here what I originally set out to write, I’m not entirely sure—as close as I am to having just written it—so I will leave you with the words of Thomas Merton, my favorite Catholic contemplative writer of the 20th century, and a few thoughts from his book The Way of Chuang Tzu to better help you understand the importance of wu wei:

     “The true character of wu wei is not mere inactivity but perfect action—because it is act without activity. In other words, it is action not carried out independently of Heaven and earth and in conflict with the dynamism of the whole, but in perfect harmony with the whole. It is not mere passivity, but it is action that seems both effortless and spontaneous because it is performed “rightly,” in perfect accordance with our nature and with our place in the scheme of things. It is completely free because there is in it no force and no violence. It is not “conditioned” or “limited” by our own individual needs and desires, or even by our own theories and ideas.”

     I hope you enjoyed reading this essay.  I enjoyed writing it.  Perhaps that’s another key to wu wei—the freedom in the pleasure of doing an activity.  If you have any comments or questions about wu wei, however, or anything else that this essay has provoked, then please leave them in the “comments” section below or shoot me an email for private correspondence.

     If you enjoyed reading this one, then you might like my book Ultimate Mass and Power Essays.  You can find more information about it and all of my books by clicking HERE.