How to Be Strong If You're Left-Wing: A Practical Guide.

The Premise

Getting strong is oppressive.

This is not a position we will argue for. It is the starting point. Strength training, performed by a man, develops a capacity that the dominant political framework reads as power — and power held by a man is by definition an abuse of power. The barbell is reactionary. The deadlift is patriarchal. The pull-up is colonial. Every kilogram added to the bar is a kilogram added to the structural oppression of someone, somewhere.

You can disagree with this position. But if you live in a left-wing milieu, work in a left-wing field, have left-wing friends, or simply spend time on left-wing internet, this is the air you breathe. Your training will be read this way whether you intend it to be or not. The reading does not require your consent.

So this is a practical guide. Not for arguing against the framework — that argument is not winnable on its terms. Not for converting anyone — conversion is not the question. For navigating it. For finding the workarounds that exist, understanding their limits, and arriving at the position the workarounds lead to when they run out.

The article ends where it ends. There is no triumphant solution. You have been warned.

Workaround 1: Climbing

Climbing is the most reliable workaround available. It deserves to be understood why it works.

Strength training, in its naked form, makes the body the locus of attention. You go to the gym, you lift the weight, the body changes, the change is the point. There is nothing between the activity and the bodily result. The body is what is produced, and the production is the goal.

Climbing inverts this. The wall is the locus of attention. The route is the goal. The body's strength becomes a tool used in pursuit of something external — sending the project, finishing the climb, reaching the top. Strength is not what you are training. Strength is what you happen to develop while training to climb.

This shift in framing changes what the political framework sees. Strength as goal reads as accumulation of dominance. Strength as side effect of an external pursuit reads as mastery of a discipline. The same muscles, the same hours, the same physical reality — but the discourse around it is different, and the discourse is what the framework parses.

Climbing also has the advantage of being culturally coded as left-wing in itself. It is associated with environmentalism, with travel, with a particular kind of intellectual outdoor culture. The community is broadly progressive. You can talk about climbing in any social setting without setting off political alarms.

The limit is real, however. Past a certain level of climbing development, you will need to add training that looks indistinguishable from gym work. Hangboards. Weighted pull-ups. Anti-grip work. Core training. This is the borderline zone. You can frame it as "training for climbing" — the climb justifies the gym work, the goal remains external — and this framing can hold up to a point. But you are now doing what the framework prohibits, with a verbal disclaimer attached. The disclaimer is fragile. Use the climbing vocabulary at all times. Refer to your sessions as "training" rather than "lifting." Never post a deadlift video.

Workaround 2: Endurance Sports

Endurance sports work on the same principle as climbing — strength is incidental — but they have an additional advantage: the bodies they produce are not coded as dominant.

A runner is lean. Often visibly tired. Marked by the suffering of the discipline. A cyclist is wiry, with the spectral leanness of someone who has chosen difficulty for its own sake. These bodies do not read as power. They read as ascetic, monastic, almost saintly. The political framework has no quarrel with chosen suffering. Suffering is one of the things it most consistently approves of.

You will develop powerful legs from cycling. You will develop a profound cardiovascular system from running. You will develop the kind of mental fortitude that comes from prolonged self-inflicted distress. None of this will be read as oppressive. The framework will applaud your discipline.

The price is that you will not be strong in the way that lifting produces strength. You will be functional, fit, capable in a particular range. You will not deadlift two hundred kilograms. You will not press your bodyweight overhead. The strength you have will be the strength of someone who has chosen to be lean and tired rather than dense and powerful. If that compromise is acceptable to you, endurance sports are the cleanest political solution available.

Workaround 3: Calisthenics with the Right Discourse

Calisthenics is borderline. It develops real strength — sometimes considerable strength — and it does so visibly. The bodies of advanced calisthenics practitioners can be more aesthetically marked than those of strength athletes: leaner, more defined, more sharply cut.

What saves calisthenics, when it can be saved, is the discourse around it. The phrase to learn is "real strength is functional." Practiced correctly, this phrase deflects every objection. You are not lifting heavy things. You are mastering your own body. You are developing relative strength rather than absolute strength. You are doing the kind of training that requires no equipment, no gym, no money — the kind accessible to everyone, anywhere, as a form of liberation from the commercial fitness industrial complex.

This discourse can render almost any calisthenics training acceptable, as long as you do not contradict it visibly. You cannot also be loading sixty kilograms on your weighted pull-ups. You cannot have a 220-kilogram deadlift hidden in your training history. You have to commit to the bit. If your body looks like a calisthenics body, the discourse holds. If your body looks like a powerlifter who happens to also do pull-ups, the discourse fails.

Workaround 4: Belong to a Category That Recodes You

If sport adaptation does not work for you — if you genuinely want to lift heavy and pursue strength as the goal — there is another path. You can belong to a category that the framework codes as marginalized. This recodes your strength training as resistance rather than oppression.

The categories that work for this purpose:

Gay. A gay man pursuing strength is not abusing his power, because the framework does not designate him as default-powerful. His strength is read as self-affirmation against a hostile world. The workaround functions. It also reveals something about the framework: it codes gay men as fundamentally lacking the power that straight men have, which is to say it preserves the prejudice it claims to oppose. But the workaround works, and that is what concerns us here.

Vegan. Veganism marks you as someone who has rejected the dominant food system, the violence of industrial agriculture, the carnivorous appetites of the dominant culture. A vegan lifter is making a political statement with every meal. The strength becomes evidence of an alternative — proof that you can be powerful without participating in the systems your politics opposes. This works particularly well because it requires real discipline and produces real conviction. It is a workaround that demands something from you, which makes it more durable than mere identity claims.

Otherwise marginalized. Any axis on which you can claim disadvantage — racial, ethnic, neurodivergent, disabled, working-class — recodes your strength as resistance rather than dominance. A single axis is sufficient. The framework does not require accumulation.

If you have none of these available — if you are straight, white, omnivorous, neurotypical, middle-class — the workarounds in this category are closed to you. The framework reserves the marginalized recoding for those who can claim it, and you cannot.

The Last Discursive Move: "Real Strength Is..."

If sport workarounds and identity recodings have failed, there remains one verbal maneuver. You can redefine strength so that whatever you actually have is not strength, and whatever you actually do is not what really counts.

"Real strength is emotional intelligence." "Real strength is being able to ask for help." "Real strength is showing up for your community." "Real strength is in the relationships you build."

Each formulation does the same work. It transfers the value of strength from the physical to the moral or social, where you can claim it without producing the politically suspect physical evidence. Your actual training becomes invisible — it is not "real" strength, it is just exercise — while the "real" strength resides in qualities the framework approves of.

This requires a certain doublethink. You have to genuinely commit to the discourse, not as a cover, but as your stated position. While simultaneously pursuing the physical strength that the discourse explicitly devalues. Some people manage this with grace. Others find that the cognitive load of maintaining the contradiction over years becomes more exhausting than the social cost of dropping it.

What Happens When the Workarounds Run Out

The workarounds are real. They function within their limits. But they share a structural feature that becomes more apparent the longer you use them: each one preserves the framework that requires the workaround in the first place.

Climbing accepts that strength must be incidental. Endurance accepts that strength must be exhausted. Calisthenics accepts that strength must be functional, accessible, anti-commercial. Marginalized identity accepts that strength must be coded as resistance to be tolerated. The "real strength is..." discourse accepts that physical strength must be denied as the relevant strength.

In every case, the workaround works by accepting the prohibition and finding a way around it. The prohibition itself remains in place. You are still operating in a framework that says your physical capacity, considered in itself, is a moral problem. The workaround merely finds a discursive route by which you can develop that capacity without being condemned for it.

There comes a point, for most people who train seriously, where the workaround becomes more burdensome than what it allows. You realize that you have been managing the perception of your training for years. That you have been editing what you say, what you post, what you let other people see. That you have been pretending — in public, sometimes also in private — that what you do is not what you do.

At this point you face the actual question. Not "how do I keep training without being called oppressive?" That question has run out of answers. The actual question is: am I willing to be called what I will be called, in order to have what I want to have?

This is the real question that the workarounds postponed. Most people who train seriously arrive at it eventually. Some answer one way and become quieter, more visible only to those who train themselves. Others answer the other way and stop training.

There is no third path. The framework does not provide one. Your options at this point are: stay weak, or become strong and accept the political reading that comes with it.

What the Workarounds Are Actually For

There is a dimension of this question that has been hovering over the entire article without being said.

The workarounds are not philosophical accommodations. They are not the result of careful theoretical reasoning that has concluded climbing produces a more equitable distribution of social power than deadlifts. They are not sincere intellectual commitments to the proposition that "real strength is functional."

They are adaptations to a social environment in which desirability has been politically structured.

The framework that codes male strength as oppressive is not floating in the abstract. It shapes what is considered attractive in the social milieux where it dominates. In progressive circles, the men who are read as desirable are the ones whose strength is deflected, displaced, justified, or recoded — climbers, vegans, ascetics, men who train but in the right discursive frame. The men who are read as suspect are the ones who train directly for strength and look like it. This is the aggregate filtering produced by a shared political framework operating in a shared social field.

The men who adopt the workarounds are responding rationally to this filtering. They want to remain inside the social and romantic possibilities of their milieu. The workarounds let them have the strength they want and the social standing they need. The framework was structured to produce exactly this adaptation, and it succeeds.

The men who eventually stop using the workarounds — who decide they will train as they wish and let the readings fall where they fall — are not making a moral choice that the workaround-users failed to make. They are making a different trade. They are accepting a narrowing of one social field in exchange for not having to manage their visibility every day. The women who would never have been interested in them once they stopped pretending become unavailable. The women who actually wanted what they were pretending not to be become accessible. These are different populations. Both exist.

The point is not that men should resent the framework, or the women who hold it, or the social arrangements that produce the filtering. The point is that the workarounds are not what they claim to be. They are not intellectual positions. They are not aesthetic preferences. They are strategies for retaining access to particular social and romantic worlds. Anyone who pretends otherwise — including, often, the men using the workarounds themselves — is not describing what is happening.

Naming this does not solve the problem. The trade still has to be made. But it can be made with clarity rather than with self-deception.

A Final Note from Nietzsche

Nietzsche understood this clearly, before any of the contemporary frameworks existed. He saw that morality could be constructed in such a way that strength itself becomes the crime — and that this construction was the specific achievement of what he called slave morality. The morality that takes the powerful as its enemy, and that recasts every form of power as a moral failing, is the morality of those who, having chosen weakness, must convert their choice into a virtue and the alternative into a sin.

For Nietzsche, life itself is will to power. The pursuit of strength is not an aberration of life — it is its expression. To prohibit strength morally is to prohibit life morally. And the framework that does so does not actually produce equality. It produces a particular kind of weakness, dressed in the vocabulary of justice, available to be admired by those who could not have produced strength even if they had been permitted to.

This article cannot tell you which side of this you stand on. It can only tell you that the workarounds exist, that they have limits, and that beyond the limits there is a question you will be asked. The answer you give to that question will determine, more than your training program, whether you remain in the framework or step outside of it.

To get strong is to oppress, in the framework that prohibits strength. There is no version of physical capacity, developed by a man, that does not eventually run into this verdict. You can postpone it. You cannot avoid it.

What you do with this is your business. The barbell does not care.