The Altar of Iron Fitness as a Holy Sacrifice
On Kierkegaard, the gym, and finding meaning in the struggle itself
Look, I'm going to be real with you.
The fitness industry has been lying to you. They've turned getting in shape into a transaction. Swipe your card, sweat for X hours, and receive your dream body like it's an Amazon package. This is result-oriented thinking, and brother, it's a trap.
If you're only grinding for that "peak physique," you're setting yourself up to fail. Why? Because one of two things will happen: you'll hit your goal and suddenly have no purpose, or you'll realize that maintaining that peak is a Sisyphean nightmare. The boulder always rolls back down. Age comes for us all. Life throws curveballs. Injuries happen.
The eternal climb. The boulder always rolls back down.
So what's the answer?
We must become Knights of Faith in the gym. We must find the beauty in the sacrifice itself. Not what we get from it.
The Sacrifice of Comfort
(Infinite Resignation)
Every single time you step into the gym, every time you choose grilled chicken over fried garbage, you're enacting what Kierkegaard called the "movement of infinite resignation." You are willingly walking up Mount Moriah, bro. You're Abraham with the knife.
You are sacrificing:
- The warmth of your bed at 5:00 AM when every fiber of your being screams stay.
- The instant dopamine hit of sugar, the cheap pleasure that leaves you emptier than before.
- The seductive safety of staying sedentary, of being comfortable, of being soft.
Here's where most guys get it wrong: they view this sacrifice as a "cost" they have to pay to "buy" a better body. They white-knuckle it. They grit their teeth. They hate every second of the process.
This is the wrong mindset, king. If you hate the climb, you will resent the mountain. And eventually, you'll stop climbing.
The Beauty in the Trembling
(The Double Movement)
Here's where Kierkegaard's philosophy becomes absolutely clutch for the lifter.
The true Knight of Fitness doesn't just resign themselves to the pain. They make the second movement. The Leap of Faith. They believe, with their whole chest, that the struggle itself contains the joy.
You have to learn to find beauty in the trembling. And I mean that literally:
The Burn
When your muscles are screaming on that last set, when the lactic acid is flooding in and every instinct tells you to drop the weight—that's not a signal to stop. That's the physical manifestation of your will overriding your biology. That burn is the sensation of being alive. Most people go their whole lives never feeling that. You're choosing it.
The Breath
When you're gasping for air at the end of a brutal conditioning circuit, lungs on fire, vision narrowing—you're not dying. You're expanding your capacity for life. You're teaching your body and mind that they can handle more than they thought.
When you find beauty in the discipline, when you start to love the strictness of the routine more than the results of the routine, you become absolutely unstoppable. You're no longer working out to get somewhere. You're working out because the act of moving that iron is, in itself, a "teleological suspension" of your lower, lazy self.
You're not becoming a better version of yourself someday. You are that version right now, in the moment of choosing hard over easy.
The Trap of the "Peak Body"
Let's talk about the danger I mentioned earlier: living for the result.
If your entire motivation is the Result (the six-pack, the number on the scale, the before-and-after photo) you are playing a finite game. You've set an end date on your discipline.
You don't see results fast enough. The "transaction" feels unfair. You've been paying in sweat and getting nothing back. So you quit. You tell yourself it doesn't work for you. You blame genetics.
You actually reach your peak. And then... now what? The hunger vanishes. You've "climbed the mountain," and the only direction left is down. This is why so many elite athletes spiral into depression or destroy their bodies after retiring. They built their entire identity around a destination, and when they arrived, there was nothing left.
Fall in love with the Sacrifice. Fall in love with the Process.
If you do that, there is no "end." The beauty isn't in what you look like. It's in who you are when you're under tension. The perfect rep. The disciplined meal. The early morning when nobody's watching. These become rituals that validate your existence, regardless of what the mirror says.
The mirror lies anyway. Your character doesn't.
The Aesthetic of the Grind
To succeed in getting in shape—and I mean truly succeed in a way that lasts—you must adopt the mindset of religious sacrifice:
- Don't worship the body. That's the idol. It fades. It ages. It betrays you.
- Worship the discipline. That's the ritual. It compounds. It builds something unbreakable inside you.
When you wake up sore, tired, and unmotivated, you don't say, "I have to do this to look good."
"I am going to the altar to sacrifice my weakness."
The beauty is found in the exact moment you want to quit, but you choose to keep going anyway. That choice—that defiance of your own comfort—is where the art is. That's where you meet yourself.
That's where you become the person everyone else wishes they had the discipline to be.
Now go lift something heavy.
The iron doesn't care about your excuses. And neither should you.