Keep Your Fantasies, Or Become Strong. Your Choice..

The desire to become strong and the fantasy of being strong are not two points on the same road. They are two different destinations. And most people, without realizing it, have already chosen the second one.

It does not look like avoidance. It looks like dedication — the programs, the research, the admiration for those who made it. It feels, from the inside, like pursuit. It is not. It is what the psyche does instead of pursuit, when pursuit would require giving up something it is not prepared to give up.

The price of keeping the fantasy is paid in potential.

You Have Already Seen This Person

You know who we're talking about. Maybe you are him, or have been.

He knows more about training methodology than most coaches. He can discuss periodization approaches in detail, cite research on hypertrophy, explain the differences between conjugate and linear programming, break down the evidence for every dietary intervention currently under discussion. He has read the books. He has watched the films. He follows the right accounts.

He is also not getting meaningfully stronger. Has not been for some time.

When you point this out, he has an answer ready. The program wasn't quite right. The timing was wrong. He had a nagging injury. He's been in a maintenance phase. He's about to start a new block where things will really come together. He just needs to find the right approach, and then it will happen.

The research continues.

The Two Modes of the Strength Fantasy

There are two main forms this takes. They look different on the surface while being identical underneath.

The first is idealization. The fantasy is projected outward onto another person. That athlete — he's really strong, he's a different kind of human being. The strength gets located in a figure that is fundamentally, constitutively different from you. Not stronger because he worked harder, or made better choices, or was given better conditions — but stronger in a way that is categorically separate from anything you could be. A different species. A superhuman.

What this move accomplishes, psychically, is to place the thing you want at a safe distance. If he is a superhuman, then his strength does not belong to the same order as what you could build. It is his property — reserved for this paternal figure, for this category of being that you are not. You can admire it. You can study it. You can follow his career. But you are protected from having to actually pursue it yourself, because it was never available to you in the first place.

The second is the knowledge version. Instead of locating the fantasy in an idealized figure, the subject positions himself — or another figure — as the one who knows. Not the strongest, but the one with the deepest understanding. The expert. The one who has cracked the code.

I know everything about this. I may not be elite, but I understand it at a level most people don't.

Or the outward version: He knows everything about training. His analysis is the most rigorous. If I understand what he understands, I'll have something.

Lacan has a specific name for this structure: the subject supposed to know — le sujet supposé savoir. It is a concept he developed primarily to describe what happens in psychoanalysis when the analysand attributes to the analyst a complete, total knowledge — a knowledge so full that, if only it could be transmitted, everything would resolve. The analyst does not actually possess this knowledge. But the attribution of it is what structures the relationship, and what makes the work possible or impossible.

The structure, however, shows up far beyond the consulting room. You are in the presence of a subject supposed to know whenever you position someone — a coach, an influencer, a researcher, a writer — as the one who holds the answer you don't have yet. The answer that, once fully accessed, will unlock your potential without further effort on your part. The one who knows for you.

And you can occupy that position yourself. The person who has accumulated enough knowledge about strength training to become, in their own mind, the subject supposed to know — this person no longer wants to be strong. They want to be right. The object of desire has been silently replaced. Knowledge has been substituted for training, and the substitution is invisible because both involve the gym.

The Paradox That Isn't

Here is what looks like a paradox but is not one, once you understand the mechanism.

The person who spends the most time asking why isn't my training working? is often, underneath that question, organizing things so that his training does not work — or works just enough to justify continuing the search, but not enough for the search to end.

From the outside, this looks insane. Why would anyone sabotage something they claim to want?

Because if the training worked fully, the search would be over. And the search, not the result, is what this person actually needs. Not consciously — he genuinely believes he wants to find the answer. But if you track the pattern over time, you notice something. Every answer is followed by a new question. Every program is followed by a reason to find a better one. Every period of progress is followed by a plateau that requires investigation. The investigation reveals something that demands a different approach. The different approach produces some progress and generates new questions. The search continues.

The search is not a path to becoming strong. The search is the product itself. It is what makes it possible to feel like you are doing something about strength while not having to give up the thing that actually becoming strong would require you to give up.

And what is that thing?

The Confusion Between Being Strong and Being Omnipotent

This is the core of it.

When people fail to develop their physical potential, it is almost never for lack of information or method. It is almost always because they have confused two things that feel identical from the inside: being strong and being omnipotent.

Being strong is specific. Finite. Earned through a process that takes time and produces something real but limited. You are this strong. You can lift this. You have these weaknesses. You have these strengths. You are a particular, defined person with a particular, defined capacity.

Being omnipotent is different in structure. It is unlimited. It is unrealized — which means it can be imagined as complete. It does not have weaknesses because it has never been tested. It exists in the imagination precisely because it has not been brought into the real, where it would have to become finite.

The fantasy of omnipotence cannot survive contact with reality. The moment you begin to actually develop your strength — to find the ceiling of your squat, to discover what your recovery capacity actually is, to learn what the process demands over months and years — the omnipotent version of you begins to die. Not because you're failing. Because you're succeeding. Becoming strong is the act that kills the fantasy of being everything.

And here is where the psychic economy becomes visible. To preserve the fantasy of omnipotence — to keep it alive somewhere, even if only in the imagination, even if it costs you — you pay with your real potential. The price of keeping the infinite version of yourself intact is that the real, finite, actual version of you never fully develops.

This is not madness. This is not weakness. It is a deeply human structure. The subject will choose anything — any story, any search, any self-sabotage — over the void of having to be a specific, limited, real version of themselves. Which is the only version that actually exists.

Idealization Is Not Admiration

Let's return to the idealized figure. He's different. He's a superhuman. Strength like that is reserved for someone like him.

This statement feels like admiration. It is not. Or not only.

Admiration says: look what a human being can do. And by implication: look what a human being — which I also am — could do.

Idealization says: look what this particular figure, who is categorically different from me, can do. And by implication: and this is why it will never be available to me, because I am not him.

Freud wrote extensively about this structure under the name of the ideal ego (Ich-Ideal) — the figure onto which the subject projects a perfection they believe they themselves cannot achieve. The idealized figure is a paternal construction, in the broad sense: a figure that holds what you want in a way that simultaneously defines your desire and places it beyond your reach. Not because the figure is protecting it from you. Because you need the figure to hold it at a safe distance from you.

When an athlete spends hours studying the training of someone they regard as superhuman, they are often not learning. They are visiting their ideal. They are maintaining the structure. The study, the admiration, the following, the commentary — all of it is the mechanism by which the distance between you and your potential is carefully maintained and rationalized as reverence.

The idealized figure, understood this way, is not inspiration. They are protection. Protection from the demand of actually pursuing what you want.

Choisir, C'est Renoncer

There is a sentence — short enough to pass over too quickly — that describes the entire structure of this problem.

To choose is to renounce. — André Gide

It sounds simple. It is devastating.

Every realization requires a renunciation. Not metaphorically. Structurally. To become the specific strong person you could be, you must give up the unlimited strong person you imagine you might be. To commit to a path is to abandon all other paths. To develop an actual capacity is to accept the finitude of that capacity. To be something real is to cease to be everything possible.

This is what most people are refusing when they refuse to develop their potential. They are not refusing the work, though they often believe that is the reason. They are refusing the renunciation. They are refusing to let the infinite version die so the real version can live.

The endless search for the perfect method is, structurally, a way of postponing this renunciation indefinitely. If you have not yet found the right program, you have not yet had to commit to being this person and not another. The search keeps all options open. It maintains the fantasy of a path that will lead you to your potential without requiring you to give anything up.

That path does not exist.

Your Potential Is a Solitary Road

Here is something that is rarely said clearly enough: the full development of your physical potential is a solitary thing.

Not in the practical sense — you train alongside others, you have coaches, you compete, you share the work. In the psychological sense. The choice to develop what you actually have, rather than to maintain the fantasy of what you might have, is a choice no one else can make for you, validate for you, or share with you in any way that transfers the weight.

When you idealize another person's strength, you are not alone. You have company in the fantasy. The fantasy can be shared, discussed, argued about. Communities form around it. There is warmth there, and it is real.

When you develop your own strength, you are alone with it in a specific way. Alone with the gap between what you believed you were and what you actually are. Alone with the slowness of the process. Alone with the ceiling of your capacity when you find it. Alone with the specific person you are becoming — which is not the unlimited person the fantasy promised.

Most people do not want to be alone with those things. The search for method, the idealization of figures, the accumulation of knowledge — all of it is, partly, a way of not being alone with what developing your actual potential requires you to face.

Or almost.

There is one structure that does not dissolve that solitude but holds it differently. Not a subject supposed to know. Not someone with the method, the framework, the guaranteed answer. A presence that takes a position next to yours — not above, not directing — while the work unfolds. That is supervision. Not knowledge added from the outside. Another pair of eyes on what you cannot see from inside your own situation.

And yet. On the other side of that solitude is something the fantasy never provides: a real strength. A real capacity. A specific version of you that exists in the world, not in the imagination. It cannot be everything. It can be real. And real is the only category that actually matters.

The Choice Is Yours

This is the article saying plainly what most training content refuses to say.

You can keep the fantasy. There is nothing wrong with you for having it — every human being does. You can keep the search going, keep accumulating knowledge, keep studying the idealized figures, keep finding reasons why this cycle was not quite the right one, keep asking why it isn't working. That is a coherent choice, and it has its comforts. The fantasy of omnipotence is warm. The position of the expert who knows is not without its satisfactions.

Or you can become strong. Not the strongest. Not unlimited. Strong in the way that is actually available to you — which is finite and specific and requires giving up the other version.

You cannot have both. The attempt to have both is exactly what produces the person who knows everything about training and doesn't get stronger. The knowledge and the idealization and the search are the mechanism by which the fantasy and the reality are kept simultaneously in play, which means neither is ever fully real.

To choose is to renounce.

Your potential is waiting on the other side of that sentence. It will wait as long as you need. But it will not come to meet you on this side of it.