The Temple of Will Training Like the Übermensch
On Nietzsche, the body, and becoming something more than human
Nietzsche is the most physical of all philosophers.
While other thinkers sat in dusty rooms praising the "life of the mind" and dismissing the body as a prison, Nietzsche flipped the script entirely. He declared that the body is the self. The mind? Merely its instrument.
This changes everything for the lifter. Because if the body is the self, then training isn't vanity. It's philosophy in action. Every rep is a statement. Every set is a choice. Every session is an argument about what kind of human you intend to become.
You can connect Nietzsche's philosophy to fitness through three core concepts: The Will to Power (the drive), Amor Fati (the method), and The Übermensch (the goal).
Let's break it down.
The Will to Power
(Training as Self-Overcoming)
Darwin told us that life's fundamental drive is survival. Nietzsche called bullshit.
For Nietzsche, the fundamental drive of all life is not merely to survive, but to expand power. To grow. To overcome. To impose your will on the world. And more importantly, on yourself.
In a fitness context, this is the perfect philosophical framework for Progressive Overload.
The Concept
The "Will to Power" is the desire to exert force on the world and, more importantly, on oneself. It is a refusal to remain stagnant. It is the drive that makes you add five more pounds to the bar even when last week's weight was hard enough.
The Fitness Connection
When you lift a heavy weight, you are literally manifesting the Will to Power. You are encountering resistance. Gravity. Iron. Physics itself. And you are asserting your will over it. You are saying: I will not be moved. I will move you.
A Nietzschean athlete doesn't train to "look good" (vanity) or "be healthy" (survival). They train because the act of overcoming resistance is the highest affirmation of life. Every rep is a small war won against your own weakness.
"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, and torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage."
Friedrich NietzscheRead that again. He's not talking about avoiding pain. He's talking about metabolizing it. Turning it into fuel. The weight doesn't break you. It feeds you.
Amor Fati
(Love Your Fate)
Nietzsche despised comfort. He believed that growth requires suffering, and that we should not only endure suffering but love it.
He called this Amor Fati. Love of Fate.
The Concept
Most people organize their entire lives around minimizing pain. Nietzsche argues that pain is the fuel for greatness. You must sacrifice your current comfort to buy your future strength. And you must learn to love the transaction.
The Fitness Connection
This is the discipline of the "burn." The sacrifice of leisure time. The voluntary entry into discomfort. Every 5 AM alarm. Every meal prepped instead of ordered. Every set pushed to failure. Fitness is a daily ritual of choosing hard over easy.
Do not complain about the difficulty of the workout. Do not wish it were easier. "Love the fate" of the struggle. The soreness and the fatigue are not side effects. They are evidence that you are hardening yourself into something new.
The sacrifice of immediate pleasure is necessary to build the temple of the body. Eating junk. Sleeping in. Skipping the session. All of it must go. And unlike a building made of stone, your temple is built from the pain you chose to endure.
When the set gets hard, don't dissociate. Don't check out. Focus on the pain and affirm it as the sensation of weakness leaving the body.
The Übermensch vs. The Last Man
This is the core archetype for the Nietzschean athlete.
The Übermensch (Overman) is Nietzsche's vision of the ideal future human. One who has overcome the limitations of the past. One who creates their own values. One who treats life as a work of art to be sculpted.
The Last Man is his opposite. The Last Man is the endpoint of human mediocrity. He seeks only comfort, safety, and a shallow "happiness." He blinks and asks, "What is greatness? What is creation?" He has no ambition beyond his next dopamine hit.
- Seeks comfort, safety, and "happiness"
- Asks, "What is love? What is creation?"
- Physiologically soft; avoids exertion
- Accepts the values given to him
- Lives to consume
- Seeks challenge, risk, and greatness
- Creates their own values and sculpts their own life
- Treats the body as a work of art and a weapon
- Destroys old limits and builds new ones
- Lives to overcome
The Last Man in the gym: The person who skips leg day, uses only machines, and trains "just enough" to watch TV on the treadmill. They do the minimum. They never break a real sweat. They've been going for years and look exactly the same.
The Übermensch in the gym: The disciplined athlete who trains with intensity, tracks progress rigorously, and pushes past failure. They view the body not as a fixed object, but as something to be surmounted. They are the sculptor and the clay.
The Übermensch realizes that if they cannot command their own body, they cannot command anything else. If you can't make yourself run, lift, fast, and endure, what can you make yourself do? Physical sovereignty is the foundation of all other sovereignty.
The Übermensch looks at the average standards of fitness (which are pathetically low) and rejects them entirely. They create their own higher standard. They compete only with yesterday's version of themselves.
The Nietzschean Protocol
To apply this philosophy starting tomorrow, shift your mindset from "maintenance" to "overcoming."
- Reclaim the Body Accept that your physical state dictates your mental state. A weak body houses a weak will. A strong body is the prerequisite for a strong mind.
- Seek Resistance Do not choose the easy exercises. Choose the ones that scare you. Heavy squats. Deadlifts. Sprints. The compound movements that demand everything from you.
- Embrace the Pain When the set gets hard, don't dissociate. Focus on the pain. Affirm it. Let it wash over you as the sensation of transformation. This is weakness leaving the body.
- Create Your Own Standard Reject the mediocre benchmarks of the average. You are not average. Set goals that would terrify the Last Man. Then surpass them.
- Become the Sculptor View your body as raw material. You are not maintaining it. You are creating it. Every session is another stroke of the chisel. The masterpiece is never finished.
"Man is something to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?"
Friedrich NietzscheNow go become something more.
The iron is waiting. And it does not forgive mediocrity.