"But Did You Die?" Why We Push Our Bodies To The Edge

We often joke that people train as if preparing for war: sprinting to exhaustion, enduring hot Pilates until muscles shake, tackling boot‑camp circuits that leave lungs gasping. The joke works because it isn’t far from the truth. These sessions are rarely just exercise; they are ways of feeling fully, intensely alive.

Ken Jeong in Hangover II

Our craving for intensity isn’t simply about vanity. It arises from what is missing in everyday life: the kind of vivid sensation, attention, and engagement that modern work and routine rarely provide. In a world where work is often abstract, repetitive, and alienating — where achievement is measured but seldom felt — the body becomes the space where we reclaim that experience. Sweat, tremor, fatigue: these are the signs that we exist, if only for a moment, fully present in our own bodies.

Discipline and the self‑as‑project

We think of discipline as a personal virtue — the ability to set goals, keep promises to ourselves, build resilience. And in many ways, it is. Going to the gym, eating well, sleeping enough: these are forms of care, ways of maintaining a body that modern life constantly exhausts. But social theorist Michel Foucault urges us to look closer at where our idea of “good” comes from.

In Discipline and Punish, he traced how modern societies replaced external control with internalised self-surveillance. Power no longer needs to chain the body; it teaches the body to chain itself. Today, that means we carry the logic of performance everywhere — from productivity apps and calorie counters to wellness trackers and corporate slogans about “optimising your potential.” We learn to treat the self as a project to be constantly measured, refined, and improved.

The gym, in this sense, becomes more than a space of fitness. It’s a space of self-governance — a theatre of virtue. Every repetition, every logged run, every recovery smoothie confirms not just health but character. We move our bodies to feel free, yet that freedom is often defined by invisible rules: efficiency, control, progress. And yet, this isn’t necessarily sinister. It’s the paradox of modern agency: the same systems that discipline us also give us the tools to survive within them. We obey, but we also create meaning.

To recognise this tension isn’t to reject exercise or self-care, but to see them clearly — to understand that even the acts we call freedom are shaped by the conditions we live in.

The Mirror & The Measure

If Foucault taught us how power moves inward — how we learn to monitor ourselves — Susan Bordo showed us what that looks like on the body, especially the female body. In Unbearable Weight, she wrote that contemporary ideals of fitness, thinness, and “wellness” are not just aesthetic preferences; they’re moral narratives. The disciplined body is the “good” body — the proof of control, intelligence, and virtue.

Much like Foucault’s “docile body,” Bordo’s analysis reveals how culture scripts our relationship with hunger, pleasure, and effort.

But she also shows how these scripts are gendered: women’s bodies, in particular, become sites of regulation disguised as self-expression. Diet culture, the “clean eating” movement, even the rhetoric of “strong not skinny” — all carry the same subtext of mastery and moral worth.

And yet, just as with the gym, the story isn’t simply one of submission. Many find genuine agency in these practices — strength, structure, self-trust. The challenge, Bordo suggests, is not to deny that empowerment, but to notice when empowerment becomes obligation. When “listening to your body” becomes another way of performing control.

In this light, the mirror at the gym — or the front of the yoga studio — is more than a reflective surface. It’s a moral instrument, quietly reminding us of the standards we’ve absorbed. Each pose, each glance, each act of correction isn’t only about alignment or health; it’s a negotiation between freedom and conformity, self-care and surveillance.

The Pleasure of Punishment

At times, the line between discipline and punishment blurs. What begins as control can slide into correction, even self-inflicted pain — and yet, paradoxically, this pain can feel rewarding. Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, observed that “power produces knowledge… the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the body is caught up in a system of subjection.” The point was not merely that we obey external authority, but that we come to desire the feeling of control, even when it hurts.

In modern fitness culture, that logic reappears as a familiar credo: no pain, no gain. Soreness becomes proof of virtue; exhaustion becomes evidence of worth.

Spin classes, in particular, illustrate the extremes to which this can go. It is not uncommon for participants to experience rhabdomyolysis, a serious condition in which muscle tissue breaks down, releasing toxins that can damage the kidneys — sometimes severe enough to require hospitalisation — after a single, overly intense class. The pain and physical breakdown, paradoxically, are taken as markers of effort and commitment, moments where endurance and self-control are tested to the limit.

Foucault understood this intertwining of power and pleasure. “There is no relation of power without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge,” he wrote, “nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute power relations.” The body under discipline is not simply repressed; it is produced — a site where subjection and satisfaction fuse. The pleasure does not come in spite of the pain, but through it, as the body becomes the stage where control is performed and confirmed.

Bordo extends this insight to the psychology of the contemporary body, especially the female body. For her, the restrained appetite or the punishing workout is not always a symptom of oppression, but sometimes an attempt at coherence in a chaotic world. “The rules,” she writes, “offer the promise of control in a culture of excess.” But this control easily tips into cruelty. The ritual of deprivation — the skipped meal, the extra set, the fasted run — is often less about self-care than about expiation, a moral cleansing enacted through the flesh.

Pain, in this context, becomes a language — one that says: I am trying, I am disciplined, I am good.

In the age of social media, this interplay of discipline, pain, and pleasure becomes highly visible. Every sweaty post, every exhausted selfie, every “grind” story is both proof and performance: evidence that the body has been pushed, tested, and controlled. As Bordo notes, the body is read culturally as a text; on platforms like Instagram, the disciplined, aching, triumphant body signals not just fitness, but moral and aesthetic value. The gaze is everywhere — peers, followers, and the self all witnessing the exertion — and the pleasure of endurance is amplified by its visibility. The ache is private, yet simultaneously public, producing a feedback loop in which pain, effort, and approval intertwine. In this way, the body becomes a site where discipline, transgression, and recognition meet: a theatre in which we both suffer and display, finding satisfaction in the act of being seen to endure.

The lure of the extreme

Beyond mere discipline lies a deeper impulse: the hunger to transcend — to push past one’s boundaries, to touch the edge of sensation. Foucault described a limit‑experience as “the forms of experience in which the explosion of the subject, its annihilation, the encounter of its limits … show well that the subject did not have that original and self‑sufficient form that philosophy traditionally assumed.” These experiences fracture habitual selves, revealing that subjectivity is contingent, malleable, and unfinished.

Modern fitness culture reproduces these dynamics. Consider competitive formats like Hyrox, blending running, rowing, sled pushes, and weighted squats into a single gruelling challenge. Participants strain against time, environment, and their own endurance. Limbs tremble, lungs burn, hearts pound — and in that collapse, they experience transformation.

Or high-intensity interval sessions and boot-camp classes: short bursts of maximum effort, precise movements, collective energy, the pounding rhythm of music and instructor alike. These are rehearsals of transcendence — moments when the self feels larger, yet also fragile, raw, unmoored from everyday control.

Hot yoga and hot Pilates follow the same logic.

Yoga was not originally practiced in extreme heat; Bikram Choudhury developed the heated-room system in the 1970s, aiming to deepen stretches, increase circulation, and heighten focus. His approach, marketed and exported internationally, also had a commercial dimension: the heat became part of the brand, a signature of intensity and exclusivity.

Hot Pilates emerged from this same impulse: taking a low-impact, controlled method and adding heat and humidity to amplify exertion. In these studios, every muscle contraction is intensified, balance and breath become negotiations with the environment, and the body is pushed to its limits. The result is exhaustion, yes, but also an acute sense of embodiment — a rare, vivid experience of the self.

Ayahuasca ceremonies, by contrast, demonstrate transcendence through psychoactive and environmental extremes. Participants ingest the bitter brew and navigate a night of visions, trembling, nausea, and profound emotion. Boundaries between self and environment dissolve; sensation and perception intensify. Hours later, participants emerge altered, carrying an acute awareness of vulnerability, connection, and presence.

These practices, physical or ritual, share a structure: controlled rupture, fleeting surrender, and return. They are exercises in transcendence, in which the self is temporarily unmade, reconfigured, and felt with heightened clarity.

Presence as a scarce commodity

Presence is scarce because the modern world rarely allows it. Work is fragmented, attention constantly redirected, the body underused while the mind engages in abstracted tasks. Screens, notifications, and constant evaluation pull awareness outward. Embodied attention — noticing breath, posture, effort, and environment simultaneously — is rare. It is a resource depleted by contemporary labour. Intense workouts or ritual experiences reclaim that presence, if only briefly. Each drop of sweat, each tremor, each gasp of breath is proof that one is alive here, now.

Work, numbness, and the hunger for sensation

Much modern labour divorces doing from becoming. We produce output that rarely connect us to material reality; our effort is transactional, not creative. Hours are spent on screens, in meetings, or managing information, leaving the body inert and the mind fatigued. In this context, the body becomes the site where sensation, risk, and transformation are still available. Intense exercise, extreme heat, or psychoactive ritual offers a form of presence missing in everyday life. Sweat, pain, exhaustion, and transcendence allow us to reclaim agency, however temporarily.

The paradox of presence

Intensity — the long HIIT session, the sweltering hot studio, the hallucinatory ceremony — is both liberation and labour. It is freedom performed, not freedom given. Foucault reminds us that power produces pleasure as much as it imposes constraint; Bordo shows that performance is read morally, culturally, aesthetically. And yet the craving is authentic: we seek moments that rupture routine, that remind us we exist.

The question is not whether we push too hard, but why intensity feels necessary at all.

What would it mean to inhabit a body fully — to feel alive — without needing to conquer it, display it, or measure it?

Perhaps the true challenge is learning to trust sensation itself, not just the marks of mastery.