Charles Atlas Superpower - TV Tropes

In the land of make-believe, training can literally give you superhuman powers! Intense exercise can let you split boulders, jump three stories straight up, "see" while wearing a blindfold, and make your skin bulletproof... somehow.A lot of characters have out-and-out superhuman abilities, and the explanation for such powers is just "They trained really hard for several years. Train, and you, too, can bash mountains open with your head." Western comic book superheroes, often stated to "lack superpowers", nevertheless are clearly able to hold their own and defeat villains with superhuman strength many times their own simply by knowing Kung Fu or something. "Non-superpowered" characters such as Batman could beat almost anyone in a fight, dodge bullets and withstand ridiculous amounts of damage because they spent a few years living on top of a mountain.Although most of the western versions of this trope don't have explicitly supernatural abilities, they can do things that would be impossible for normal humans. Asian and Asian-based fiction is somewhat different, as such examples are generally grounded in Eastern mysticism, involving the development and focusing of chi (AKA qi or ki). The superpower here is thus of a more traditional sort than in Western examples, though the training is still the significant factor; Average Joe can't harness his chi half as well as Krillin. You might as well go ahead and apply your own mental Justifying Edit to all such examples below, as this "explains" everything from Mortal Kombat to Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.The standard line here is that "the average person only uses ten to fifteen percent of their potential strength." It is possible for the brain to use far more muscle power than the person would normally consider their limit, but usually only by shutting down most other major body processes- digestion, the immune system etc.- and flooding the body with adrenaline. Otherwise known as the "fight or flight" response. In other words, it's a Dangerous Forbidden Technique only ever used for Big Damn Heroes moments. It's common for a Proto-Superhero to derive his or her extraordinary talents this way, as such characters pre-date most stock superpower-origin stories.As a narrative device, this trope emphasizes that the character is extremely dedicated to their work. For instance, Batman's abilities fit nicely with his obsessive mindset: He couldn't have acquired this much skill if he wasn't truly dedicated. It can also make your character seem a little more realistic, since intensive training really can give you cool abilities in Real Life (just not to the extent that you often see in comics.)The Trope Namer is an early 20th-century bodybuilder, who advertised a program which swore it could turn any 97-lb. weakling into a hulking, muscular giant who could punch out a bully that kicked sand in his face. This sort of idea was around long before and after Charles Atlas, however, as the ever-brilliant David S. Zondy explains.See also Made of Iron and Weak, but Skilled. The same idea applied to the mind would be 90% of Your Brain. Contrast Hard Work Hardly Works. God forbid that you give the character actual superpowers and make them an Empowered Badass Normal. May result because they Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training. Use of actual Ki Manipulation (e.g. Pure Energy blasts) blur the line between this and outright magic. May run in families.The inverse to this trope is Boxing Lessons for Superman, where an already-superpowered character trains in a mundane skill. Compare Art Major Biology, The Power of Acting, and Supernatural Martial Arts. Contrast Enlightenment Superpowers. When repetitive training grants a character powerful skills without their knowledge, that's Wax On, Wax Off. If it turns out the "mundane"-level power actually was a gift, that's Real Life Super Powers.Note this doesn't count for characters with strength from Supernatural, technological or Alien origin, but for characters who obtain this strength naturally. For example, while Superman has superstrength as one of his superpowers, he does not count for this trope.

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• Sket Dance:
  • Himeko (the "Onihime") is a beautiful bruiser who can take on an army of delinquents with nothing but her natural strength and a WOODEN hockeystick.
  • Played for laughs with Koma-chan who scares away/injures her suitors with her freakish strength. She also breaks her cellphone's keypad because of it.
• The Mazinger series
  • Kouji Kabuto was a physically average teenager in the original Mazinger Z, but in Shin Mazinger Zero he performs physical feats that should not be possible, possibly due to the constant time travel is somehow heightening his capabilities. He does not seem being initially aware of it, though. In the second timeline we see he destroys one robot with one single punch and he panics wondering if he is some kind of monster. In the third timeline he easily dodges the attacks of the Gamia sisters and takes down one of them despite of they are several times faster and more agiler than a human being (like an amazed Minerva notes).
  • Duke Fleed from UFO Robo Grendizer. In the first episode Kouji suspected he hid something. When he saw Duke leaping several meters upwards in one single bound he realized that guy was not human.
  • Baron Ashura in Shin Mazinger. He/she can fight a Humongous Mecha... on foot!
• Ranma ½: 99% of the cast. Of course, they cross the line between this trope and Training from Hell on many, many occasions. Ki Manipulation via training is common as well.
• In Naruto, even without the Functional Magic using chakra, ninja can jump dozens of meters, hit targets with inhuman accuracy, punch down stone walls, beat two-story tall bears in sumo wrestling contest, and gain a sense of smell equal to or greater than that of a dog through nothing but physical training.
  • Chakra is a fundamental part of the human anatomy in the series, so it is sort of justified. The entire premise is that everyone is a potential Charles Atlas.
  • Rock Lee practically embodies this trope, even by ninja standards. Not having the ability to control chakra, he constantly trains with insane exercises like always wearing leg weights that appear to have the same mass as a small house. Each.
  • On a similar note, the show, and in particular Rock Lee, seems to reference the unconscious inhibition that the mind places on the body via the Eight Gates. However, opening them to go into Super Mode will quickly lead to exhaustion, and opening all 8 gates leads to death. The purpose of the Gates is essentially to allow the user to go past the basic human limitations and use 100% of their full physical power.
  • Lee's mentor Might Guy possesses physical power that makes his student look like a pillowcase in comparison. In Six Gates Mode, Gai punches so fast that his fists set on fire simply due to friction, and in Seven Gates Mode, he punches the air so hard that it compresses into a giant exploding tiger head by physical strength alone. However, this has more to do with the gates than him specifically. His father used all eight gates at once, and curbstomped the seven strongest swordsmen in the world. All at once. With what we've seen on screen of it, the eighth gate allos the user to bend space with their speed, and break their own legs by kicking someone. Of course, that kick would probably turn a normal person into paste.
  • The Third Raikage has superhuman resilience from training alone. His lightning armor is its own brand of absolute defense, but with wind abilities able to take it out, he has trained himself to be so resilient that even the Rasen-shuriken, the most powerful known human technique up to that point, does not affect him. He also has the endurance and strength to rival a tailed beast and he goes out by managing to take on 10,000 soldiers for 3 days before dying of exhaustion.
• One Piece:
  • Extremely common, even when it can't be explained away by Devil Fruit powers or something natural to one's species (i.e. fishmen and giants). Three of the main protagonists (Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji) have this and demonstrate it often. Don Krieg could swing a one ton spear while wearing heavy armor. Mr. 4 could swing a four ton bat. And it's a stock superpower for anyone with a significant title; every Vice Admiral seen thus far has it, as does any Shichibukai that doesn't rely on Devil Fruit powers (and some of the ones that do), as well as the Yonko. Seriously, almost every character in the series whose combat ability does not solely revolve around weapons possesses at least some form of super strength/speed, or at least an inhumanly high level of endurance (seriously, Usopp surviving a 4-ton bat slammed into his skull? While being dragged along the ground at 30 MPH? And standing up after it to go into Let's Get Dangerous mode?).
  • In Luffy and Zoro's case, they actually showed/mentioned tedious training (Luffy's childhood showed him training by running through the mountains every day and fighting wild animals, mixed with some of his grandfather's Training from Hell, and Zoro's childhood showed him becoming superhuman at an early age, while at present, he exercises with weights roughly the size of monster truck wheels).
  • CP9's Rokushiki are six specific Charles Atlas Superpowers, Soru, Tekkai, Geppou, Kami-E, Shigan, and Rankyaku. There is also a secret seventh skill, Rokuougan.
  • Jozu, 3rd Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates, is maybe the strongest in terms of brute strength yet in One Piece. His Diamond powers shouldn't affect his muscles, but yet, he can lift an iceberg.
  • Haki could be considered a superpower by real standards. Haki makes you able to nullify Devil Fruit powers (which are the series' resident actual superpowers), feel an opponent's strength and predict their movements and, finally, knock out thousands of weaker opponents by your mere spirit - and to people who have never heard about it, it's often thought to be magic. Every human (and human-like beings) in the series has the potential for it, but only few manage to awaken that potential. So that way, it seems like an extraordinary superpower even though it's a power that every human has.
• Taken to extreme levels in Dragon Ball Z where all living things have ki as a sort of mystical lifeforce. Apparently with training you can make your ki pool larger and stronger and learn how to channel it into shooting energy beams, flying, being bulletproof, telepathic, and have Super Strength that'd make them outright near Superman level. You'd still not really be much of a match for most androids and aliens, but still. Being an alien (Saiyan) seems to give you the highest ki "potential", but then the human members gain strength far surpassing what is possible (although they're still extremely weak in comparison to said aliens).
• Baki the Grappler shows some absurd version of this, up there with Dragon Ball and Fist of the North Star. There are too many to count, but suffice to say that if you train hard enough you can punch through the sound barrier, do abdominal workouts with an airlifting helicopter, and stop earthquakes with a single punch.
• Hayate the Combat Butler:
  • Whenever Hayate does something impossible (like pedaling a bicycle faster than a car or surviving a hit from Humongous Mecha, the only comment he or some other Combat Commentator will make is "It's all right, he trains." It might have something to do with Athena unlocking his innate potential with magic when he was six. Then again, considering the massive spike in Hayate's strength between then and the start of the story, it may have been a Magic Feather and his nightly training had more to do with it.
  • The other butlers get this as well since even Mook Butlers go through some pretty rigorous training and show some level of stronger-than-normal abilities. The named butlers tend to be at or near Hayate's level with the only real justification being "we're butlers, it's our duty to be this awesome". Seen less in the manga which really tapered off the appearance of butlers that aren't Hayate.
  • Hayate's brother is even more ridiculous than him and doesn't even have an excuse. He can guess that he trained a lot as a kid but he's yet to mention it. Same goes for Hinagiku and Yukiji. Yukiji likely trained to beat up Yakuza since she had to pay the debt their parents left them much like Hayate's parents did to him and can do even more insane feats of raw strength than Hayate but with much less skill and finesse. Hinagiku can match Hayate in combat and can slice boulders with wooden swords with her only training being that she's the Kendo Team Captain and that she always tries her best at everything she does...considering the rest of the Kendo Club's members are still average humans this leaves more questions than it answers.
• Masaru from Digimon Savers, over the course of a single day (the first episode), beat up over a dozen thugs, fought a strong Rookie-level Digimon for a least a few hours, and later punched out a 20-foot chicken while dodging its laser blasts. Just how he does things like this is never explained, but seems to be due in part to the Digisoul/Digimon Natural Ability. Or Lamarck Was Right. At the end of that season he punches the god of the Digital World into submission, and in Digimon Xros Wars: The Young Hunters Leaping Through Time he created a domino out of Digimons the size of a sky scraper.
• Get Backers has some characters with actual superpowers, but others are masters of obscure martial arts that allow one to make things such as a whip, strings, needles, etc. utterly rewrite the laws of physics.
• Parodied in Welcome to the N.H.K. when Satou decides to test if he has gained powers like those characters have from training alone on a mountain from living alone in his apartment. He successfully karate-chops a beer bottle but cuts his hand.
• Walter C. Dornez, the Battle Butler of Hellsing, even before he gets turned into a vampire. At over seventy years old, he's capable of acrobatics, dodging a veritable storm of bullets, and wielding his weapons long, floating, razor-sharp, hair-thin garrote wires with enough strength and precision to cut apart an entire battalion of vampire soldiers. He was even more badass during World War II, when he was only fourteen years old. Case in point: he jumped out of an Allied spyplane, hundreds of feet above the ground, carrying a coffin that probably outweighed him, without a parachute, and landed completely unharmed on the enemy leader's dining room table.
• Fist of the North Star/Hokuto no Ken. Everybody without a mohawk has a CAS. Everyone with a mohawk is just cannon fodder, as weak and defenseless as fanged bunnies. Ken mentions at one point that most humans ever use only a small fraction of what their bodies are capable of, and the Hokuto Shinken school teaches (in addition to the pressure points) how to apply your full potential.

  Kenshiro: Most people only use 30% of their natural strength. That's not much. The secret to Hokuto Shinken is controlling the other 70% as well.

• Guts from Berserk is a monster of a man who swings a BFS with frightening speed and has survived more than two years' worth of relentless demon attacks, many of which would have killed a normal man many times over. The justification is that he has spent literally his entire life on battlefields, meaning he's also spent most of it in battle. Wielding a sword most of the day for every day of your life will eventually add up, it seems. The manga states that surviving the Eclipse allowed Guts to gradually turn himself into a literal superhuman through sheer willpower, but he was tough enough to fight and wipe out a 100-men unit even when he was a perfectly normal soldier.
• Taken to extremes by just about every single character in History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi.
• Black Cat is rife with this the setting includes an entire martial art dedicated to punching bullets but what's notable is that the beneficiaries of this trope are for the most part more powerful than characters with genuine supernatural abilities: when Belze fights Kyoko, he notes that she's using her Taoist abilities to enhance her speed... then promptly declares that, at said speed, it's ridiculous for her to even be trying to hit him. The extreme example, though, is Sephiria's ability to disintegrate people (literally nothing left) with her sword just by hitting them a lot, really hard. Even some of the more normal characters like Saya and Kevin still have some ridiculous skills.
• Gourry Gabrieve of Slayers is able to flick acorns with enough power to put serious holes in the bodies of trolls (Lina had cast a spell on them to reverse their usual regenerative skills, but being able to put those holes there was all Gourry).
• Mahou Sensei Negima!:
  • Kaede wields shuriken that's taller than she is, and in the epilogue has apparently learned to traverse space without a suit or ship.
  • Ku Fei has taken down demons in fights.
  • Mana is apparently strong enough to flick coins at people with enough force to knock them over. This, at least, could be a faint residual from the earlier time in her life when she received regular physical enhancement from her mage partner. She does have weak unrelated magical powers (as well as the contacts to purchase enchanted ammo). She's also a half-demonfolk.
  • Makie, the only one who's not a trained fighter, did some rather absurd things in an early appearance just with her gymnastics training, including using her ribbon as a whip to snatch a book from a large monster and Indiana Jones over a pitfall. Later on, she uses the ribbon to pick up and throw Negi.
  • Ayaka, despite Not Being Able To Catch Up, is currently the only Ordinary High School Girl to actually land any kind of hit on a member of the Ala Alba. Not even Makie or Yuna could pull that off.
  • Later revelations show that Jack Rakan started out as a slave in a gladiatorial combat arena and became uber strong through 40 or so years of fighting in tournaments and wars. He is stated to be stronger than Fate, who could almost beat Negi in a stand up fight at the very end of the series. He breaks out of a dimension imprisoning him through willpower alone. He survives his own unmaking, though only briefly, by focusing hard enough. He is... well, you understand. He also used magic, of course, but in the world he lived in this was hardly a superpower.
• Every single Saint, Shogun, and Spectre in Saint Seiya, where even the kindest and gentlest Saint had to endure horrific experiences that later endowed him with supernatural fighting skills. In the case of Spectres (and Phoenix Saint Ikki), they endured a very literal Training from Hell. Considering they all started their training as small boys under the age of ten, and their weakest moves were at the speed of sound by his 13th birthday...
• Hunter × Hunter:
  • The protagonists manage to push open doors weighing several tons simply by going through the Training from Hell for a few months. Afterwards, the main character is shown projecting an obese strongman several dozen meters away simply by pushing him with a single hand. And that's before Nen is even involved. Of course, there's no visible muscular increase.
  • Killua (and indeed, his entire family) is not only immune to every single poison in the world because he has ingested them when he was an infant, but he is also immune to electricity because he received electrical shocks along with the poisons. He can still feel pain, though.
  • Middle-aged Netero is shown practicing ten thousand punches everyday, doing it faster and faster until he actually punched faster than the speed of sound. Even after turning into a 110-year-old geezer, he still moves so fast that even the supreme specimens of a monstrously strong species of creatures have no idea what's going on.
• Code Geass:
  • Suzaku Kururugi is stronger and faster than normal humans. This is demonstrated rather memorably when he dodges fire from an automated ceiling-mounted machine gun, runs up a nearby wall, and destroys the turret with a Hurricane Kick (and all of this before he got geassed). The geass placed on Suzaku was the command to live, removing all hesitation during combat and made him use his super human reflexes optimally, moving fast enough to beat even someone who could see the future.
  • Kallen performed a couple feats that could be said to be inhuman. In the first episode of the second season, Kallen jumps over a chess table and takes out several guards with a spin-kick. She can also karate chop a bumblebee in half while it's in mid-flight, without even turning to look at it. This isn't nearly as impressive as Suzaku... except that she's never said to be trained in anything. She just has a lot of exercise gear in her room.
  • Sayoko, who jumps her own height in a rather fabulous manner, and displays impressive combat skill. She's a maid. Well, a Ninja Maid. She was also trained as a Japanese SP... or a ninja, but she denies that. Of course, she spent at least the last five years in a very low-impact lifestyle, caring for Nunnally, so any training she may have had should have long deteriorated.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Ling Yao and his bodyguards are shown to be more than a match for the super human homunculi. All of them are able to survive jumps and falls that would kill a normal human. Ling himself duels King Bradley while carrying Lanfan.
  • Wrath doesn't have the superhuman abilities of the other homunculi, "only" an Ultimate Eye that acts as Combat Clairvoyance turned Up to Eleven, but that doesn't stop him from being so strong and fast that the Xingese characters can't even touch him and he cuts bullets in half with a sword. He also took destroyed a tank with his sword and a single grenade.
  • THIS SUPER STRENGTH HAS BEEN PASSED THROUGH THE ARMSTRONG LINE FOR GENERATIONS!!! Said Armstrong in question could fight hand to hand with a homunculus that was Immune to Bullets, tank fire, and could lift up tanks like they were cardboard, yet Armstrong's fists could hurt him.
• Thoma from Fantastic Children, who can knock out even giant robots.
• Goro Honda/Shigeno, the main character from the baseball anime/manga Major. The guy can throw fastballs over 100 mph and he's not even using his natural dominant hand. Don't even get us started on his tenacity and endurance.
• Hei of Darker Than Black is an extremely agile martial artist with amazing reflexes who can jump from heights unscathed. These qualities are also true of his sort of Evil Counterpart, Wei. And they both have actual superpowers to boot. Notably, in fight between the two, Bullet Time effects are somewhat implausibly used.
• Roberta from Black Lagoon. Most other Badasses of the series have to make do with superhuman speed and shooting skills. She can all that while catching and shattering a thrown sword... with her teeth.
• Baccano!:
  • Claire Stanfield is inhumanly agile thanks to his experience in the circus, as his constant backflips and Wall Crawls on the top of a moving train demonstrate. He also apparently has the jaw strength to nonchalantly bite people's fingers clean off, but that's neither here nor there. The author has said that the reason Claire doesn't get his own plotline is because he is the strongest character in the series.
  • Chane, who can deflect bullets with knives (including ones fired from a shotgun) or Graham, who can catch bullets with his wrench or disassemble entire cars midair in seconds.
• Mobile Fighter G Gundam gives us the infamous skyscraper-launching episode. And while Domon and Master Asia get all the attention, but almost every Gundam Fighter is an example by necessity. Throughout the series we get several demonstrations that the top-class fighters (including the Five-Man Band and the Devil Gundam's Four Kings) are all perfectly capable of performing their Finishing Moves without their Gundams.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing after an initial battle against the Wing Gundam, Zechs orders a military analyst to figure out what kind of pilot is in there. The analyst's computer says that based on the Gundam's top speed, g-forces experienced while turning and reaction speed that the pilot isn't human. Zechs remarks that the pilot must have undergone special training to be able to handle the Gundam.
• Ryoma Nagare in Getter Robo. Some examples of his martial arts prowess include: throwing a sword (by the blade) with enough force to sever a man's arm; jumping hundreds of feet from a helicopter onto a car and suffering only minor discomfort; climbing up the face of a rampaging Getter-2 to punch the pilot in the face; resisting an animal tranquilizer strong enough to kill most men even after nearly bleeding to death immediately beforehand; breaking a katana by flexing his chest muscles; and punching dinosaurs to death.
• Bleach:
  • Chad gains actual powers early in the first arc, but before he does he's shown to be inhumanly strong. A steel beam falls on him from several stories up, and he takes it like it was a weak punch. Also, his first encounter with a hollow was before he was able to see them, so Rukia told him where to swing his bat. Or at least the telephone pole he uprooted and was using as a bat.
  • Go Koga, an anime-only filler character, manages to beat up Ichigo using only his physical strength, which is odd at first because his race was established to rely exclusively on familiars to fight. He then explains that his strength is not the result of his Bount powers, but rather, it's the inherent strength of his human body.
  • While Ichigo is Brought Down to Badass during the Time Skip, his physical body retains the strength and reflexes gained through months of fighting monsters and dragging a giant sword around. He can still wipe the floor with pretty much any normal human even before Can't Stay Normal kicks in.
• Almost everyone in Katekyo Hitman Reborn! who isn't a comic relief character (and several who are.) Practice something enough, and you'll gain godlike skill in it, no matter what it is. Are you good at boxing? Keep up the training and soon you'll be able to destroy half a gymnasium with one punch. Adept at ranking people's talents? Eventually you'll get so good at it, you'll develop a superhuman ranking skill so intense that you'll NEGATE GRAVITY AROUND YOURSELF AS A SIDE EFFECT OF THINKING ABOUT IT. Oh, and also, a one-year-old infant can earn a PHD in advanced mathematics without giving up his day job as the world's most feared and respected mafia hitmen. Inspiring!
• Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle:
  • In a fight Syaoran Li will kick damn near anything from a giant icicle blade, big muscular guy with superhuman strength granted by magic to a God Bird Thing.
  • Kurogane can, not counting his sword skills, punch down a stone wall barehanded.
• Quite a bit of the cast from Rurouni Kenshin, the protagonist being the most obvious. Of course, Kenshin did live through both a Training from Hell and a bloody conflict in which he served as an assassin. (The series itself does somewhat attempt to justify all of the Charles Atlas Superpowers: Soujirou spent his childhood carrying heavy objects and sealed away his emotions due to abuse; Aoshi is a ninja and thus an expert in stealth techniques; Usui's blindness subsequently enhanced the senses already sharpened by years of training; etcetera.) Of particular note is Sano's Training from Hell that lasted only a week and taught him to punch in a special way that would make things explode.
  • The movie has an unusual example: Jin-e, the villain, is apparently capable of making people's lungs seize up just by staring at them. He explicitly states that this is not magical in any way. (The manga "explains" this as a form of hypnotism.)
• Durarara!!:
  • Shizuo's Super Strength is a result of taking both the "removing unconscious limiters" and "bones rebuild themselves with a higher density" explanations to their logical extremes. By the time he's in high school, he can shrug off getting hit by a truck and still find the energy to try and beat Izaya to death with a door (which he ripped off of its hinges, of course) in the same night.
  • Similarly, Shizuo's archnemesis Izaya is faster and more agile than any supposedly "normal" human has a right to be, and that's before we get into his ability to routinely shrug off physical abuse from Shizuo that should have left him a bloody pulp.
• Toriko justifies this with Gourmet Cells.
• Baki the Grappler, full stop. Martial artists can easily hold their own against various wild animals such as bears, tigers and wolves, and Yujiro once punched out an earthquake. And it's relatively realistic for martial-arts anime.
• YuYu Hakusho: It's understandable that Yusuke and Kurama can achieve this due to the fact that they're both human/demon hybrids in some way. But God damn it if Kuwabara isn't this trope, what with his ability to knock down trees with several punches.
• Post Time Skip, Raki from Claymore is implied to be the most powerful pure human alive, or at least on their continent.
• Senki Zesshou Symphogear:
  • Genjuro can do absolutely insane things like blocking Magical Girl Warrior attacks (once a BFS) with his fists or stomp the ground so hard it sends parts of the road flying because of his martial arts training. Martial arts training whose sole purpose seems to be copying the movesets of Akuma and Bruce Lee.

  Chris: What happened?
  Genjuro: I neutralized the explosion using a martial arts technique.

  • Shinji Ogawa, Tsubasa's manager, can walk on water, seal people's movement by stitching their shadows has impropable aiming skills. Because according to Word Of God, he is a ninja.
• Air Master has several characters capable of this. Tsukio, due to being a construction worker can punch at the speed of a jackhammer, Kinijro killed a bear with a single punch, Julietta could fight with his legs broke and kick people into buildings and through concrete roofs, Sakiyama Kaori is almost as durable as Julitta and always yells herself back to shape, and Yuki's nails are sharp enough that they were almost like blades. Maki, Lucha Master, and Kai however take the cake for being able to jump higher than humanly possible. However, considering it being a of fighting genres, this is a must.
• One-Punch Man :
  • Parodied with the main character, who through training becomes strong enough to defeat any opponent with one punch (and he lives in a world where city destroying monsters are quite common). And then it turns out that his training consisted of nothing but an ordinary regiment of sit-ups, push-ups, and running.
  • Several monsters indicate that they gained their powers and transformations by doing one thing obsessively, such as eating huge amounts of crab and turning into a crab monster.
  • Many S- and A-list heroes fits into this trope - Tank-top master can lift boulder twice the size of his body with one hand, Puri-puri prisoner can easily pierce superhuman-proof steel walls, etc.
• Holyland: In chapter 170, King somehow slices a beer bottle's neck off with his bare hands.
• Ran, from Detective Conan, is well acquainted with this trope. She's been studying karate for years, and over the course of the series, has casually bent and broken the poles of streetlights with her fist, kicked down doors, knocked out men far bigger than her, smashed through a glass window without being winded, jumped from her second-floor apartment's window to the street with no problem, kicked the blade of a knife in half, and dodged a bullet. Oh, and she looks just like any other waif-ish high school girl.
• Lafarga from Magic Knight Rayearth is a master swordsman who uses no magic. He is, however, capable of creating Razor Wind through air pressure from his sword swings, because he is that strong.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Sailor Jupiter is a high school girl who in her debut fight picked a Monster of the Week up over her head and tossed it, without transforming. She pulls of a similar stunt later in the same season when taking lessons from a figure skater. Between her height and muscles, he's unable to lift her properly. Makoto on the other hand can lift him up and hold him over her head for several seconds without any apparent strain.
  • Minako. In the anime we 'only' see her routinely Roof Hopping without transforming (something not even Makoto can) and outrun a car minutes after donating blood and with her Heart Crystal extracted (the latter being something that had instantly knocked out everyone else), but in the manga she once had to fight a Brainwashed and Crazy Makoto and defeated her with one kick. And where Makoto is a natural, Minako is shown having trained hard for it.
• Sairaorg Bael in High School D×D went through a rigorous Training from Hell to attain this trope because he couldn't obtain the same power of destruction his two cousins have. In fact, he has very little in the way of awesome devil powers like most of his peers, and this caused most of devil society to write him off as worthless. He defied all of them by simply building up his raw strength and endurance to the point that he can No Sell his opponents' attacks and win fights in a couple of ground-shattering punches.
• Attack on Titan has the characters regularly perform impressive feats, but most of them are within the limitations of what we know of the 3D Manoeuvre Gear. All bets are off with Mikasa and Levi however, who move so fast they can barely be seen and are so agile almost nothing has even the slightest chance of touching them, and that's just in their gear. At one point, this is lampshaded by a crook who points out that Mikasa (a girl who's barely twenty and doesn't pack much muscle mass) could single-handedly take down his entire gang of full-grown (and supposedly trained in hand-to-hand combat) men.
• Fairy Tail Characters can get unreasonably strong, even without accounting for the magic anyone can learn in this setting. Chapter 7 treats us to a martial artist strong enough to wreck walls and floors with his giant frying pan. Natsu defeats him easily.
• In Tokyo Ghoul, this is a necessary for Ghoul Investigators since their opponents are superhuman beings that frequently have Super Strength, Super Speed, and Combat Tentacles. Amon in particular is shown to train religiously, with his apartment almost entirely focused around exercise equipment. When a pair of minor coworkers ask him about the training Investigators undergo at the Academy, he states that rules prohibit him from discussing the details with them. During the finale, it is even noted that Investigators are much stronger than normal, which makes them ideal for use in risky experiments to create a Half-Human Hybrid Super Soldier.
• Tomoyo Sakagami from CLANNAD is known to be incredibly strong and fast. An example of her abilities is when she takes down some Gang Members riding motorcycles using a spin-kick to take one down, and a Chun-Li style Lightning Kick to take down the others, while the motorcycle is torn to bits. Spectators only see her do these insane attacks within two seconds.
  • Sunohara can withstand unbelievable amounts of punishment while walking away with next to no issues once he wakes up. Examples include being kicked sky-high by Tomoyo, being pushed out of a window, and tanking a kick from Okazaki to the ribs that's strong enough to send him flying back in the direction he came...so he could take another couple hundred kicks.
  • Kyou Fujibayashi can throw a text book so hard it can crack a wall.
• Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh! is probably the most egregious example. Put down stopping a gun from firing by throwing a playing card in front of the hammer to incredible reflexes, or him judo throwing a thug to his martial arts training. But throwing his little brother onto a moving blimp several meters away while sprinting at full speed, and then leaping onto the top of the steps himself? And that's not even counting all the twenty-foot drops from helicopters he's performed without shattering his ankles.

    Comicbooks 

     Fanfiction 

• In the fanfic Co Op Mode, this is invoked by the Gamer ability, as continued exercise can and would increase the physical stats of a person to inhuman levels. However, considering the difficulty of training a stat gets higher as the value of that stat grows, this can also be considered as a Zig-Zagging Trope.
• In Doctor Who fanfic Gemini, Villain Protagonist Captain June Harpers superhuman speed, strength, and hand-eye coordination are described as her simply being from the 51st Century rather than from any kind of technological augmentation
• In My Little Unicorn, to compensate for his lack of magical ability, the Grand Ruler trains Lightning Dawn intensively to be physically stronger and faster than the other characters. Somehow, he still finds himself tuckered out by carrying crates and baskets of vegetables.
• Pony POV Series:
  • In the Dark World timeline, Discord cursed Derpy to walk laps around his castle indefinitely while Rarity carried a huge boulder on her back everywhere. After being freed, they both had super strength.
  • General Hercules, Chrysalis' military leader, is the World's Strongest Man, at least for his race's standards. Most Changelings' specialty is stealth and shapeshifting, being the Master of None in all other areas, meaning that they're no match at all in terms of pure strength in comparison to Earth Ponies. Hercules? He can hold his own in a test of strength with an Earth Pony black belt and is so durable that having a wall collapsed on his head doesn't do more than annoy him. While he's been genetically modified, that was to give him Instant Armor, his strength is all this trope.

    Film - Animated 

• Disney's Mulan has most of the Chinese army partake in this trope. The "I'll Make A Man Out of You" montage even shows their training, which involves feats like breaking cement blocks with their faces. Shang is initially the only one able to do all of those things, but everyone, even Mulan, eventually starts managing.
• In Kung Fu Panda it is implied if not outright shown that the Furious Five can handle just about anything thrown at them in a kung fu fight, no matter whether that particular animal is truly that strong or resilient in real life. Mantis, somehow, is able to hold up a broken suspension bridge with five other people on it, including the very heavy Tai Lung and Tigress, while Crane, though spindly as hell, is able to carry Tigress out of the gorge. It is Shifu, Tai Lung, and Po who truly take the cake however, as between the two climactic fights they engage in, these three somehow manage to survive things no one possibly could, emerging only with mussed fur, bent whiskers, and the occasional dazed stagger.

    Film - Live Action 

• Chiun in Remo Williams The Adventure Begins is a master of Sinanju, and by virtue of this ultimate martial art is able to dodge any attack, including bullets at any range, as well as run on water near the end of the film.
• A necessary part of live action movies that feature actors who are clearly not trained athletes. In the final scene of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Angelina Jolie, who is athletic but not particularly buff, takes a series of punches and kicks that would break the bones of an offensive tackle, then picks her 110 lb. body up off the ground, beats the bad guy, and sprints away at top speed.
• Kill Bill, where the bride punches her way out of a coffin and the rest of the cast are no slouches, either.
• Pretty much every non-powered hero from Watchmen. The Comedian is able to punch through brick, survive getting his head slammed into a granite counter-top and jump from an aircraft that looks to be almost 3 men off the ground and not give a damn. Ozymandias is not only able to catch a bullet, but can jump nearly his entire height (almost six feet) from a sitting position. Rorschach is shown to practically run up a tower in one instance.

• Any ninja in Ninja Assassin can do things like "shadow-blending" (where they can literally disappear in front of you), moving at ridiculous speeds, and self-healing with sufficient training. Halfway through the film, they slice up a well-trained Europol squad but get the tables reversed on them at the end in a Big Damn Heroes moment. Can't really "shadow-blend" with floodlights in your face.
• Sam Sei in Full Contact went from being a clumsy, abject coward to a fully fledged badass after committing the ultimate act of cowardice by agreeing to betray his best friend and work for his Bad Bad cousin in exchange for his life. In less than a year he is able to wield a gun like nobody's business and no longer fears death.
• In Cinderella Man, Jim Braddock explains that he developed an unusually strong left arm when he had to use it to haul fish for his day job after injuring his right.
• Deconstructed in Hanna. The titular character is hunted constantly, every person she's close to gets killed, and to top it all off, she's part of the destroyed Super Soldier project.
• Cinematic examples of the Masked Luchador such as El Santo often demonstrate this trope. Luchadors are shown performing extraordinary feats of strength and will power, but are not treated as "superhuman" in the ordinary sense of the word.
• Most of the Joes from GI Joe The Rise Of Cobra are pretty impressive, but Snake Eyes takes the cake. He does more during the Paris chase scene than the rest of his team combined (including catching up to Baroness' Humvee on foot... faster than his teammates in Powered Armor and a motorcycle.
• Played for Laughs in Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, where thanks to spending his life under constant attack the Chosen One can create wind by spinning a staff really fast, do several dozen somersaults in one jump, and do push-ups without using his hands. Master Pain/Betty is somehow even more ridiculous, given he can take four people whacking on him with sticks without flinching, including repeated blows to the crotch.
• Only a name drop in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when Dr. Frank N. Furter says of his newly-finished creation Rocky that "he carries the Charles Atlas seal of approval". Near the end of the movie, it does take quite a number of shots from Riff Raff's "anti-matter laser" to bring down Rocky. In the original musical, the song "I Can Make You A Man" and its reprise were both originally called "Charles Atlas".
• Almost any film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger will have Arnold's character demonstrate this, unless the character actually is superpowered. Prominent examples include Commando where Arnold's character is able to rip a phone-booth out of the ground and hoist both it (and the man currently using it) over his head, and The Running Man, where he is able to rip an entire weight-machine off the floor and hold both it (and the woman currently sitting in it) up one-handed without visible effort.
• In the Serbian film Underground, Blackie is an electrician by trade, which means he gets shocked all the time and has become completely immune. In an opening scene, he sticks live wires in his mouth without discomfort while fixing a ceiling fan. When Nazis attempt to torture him with a defibrillator, it seems to have no effect on him, even on the highest setting. Confused, a Nazi checks to see if the machine is working and is instantly electrocuted.
• In The Man From UNCLE, CIA agent Napoleon Solo has the standard action-movie hero toughness and James Bond-esque spy skills, for instance he falls out of a speedboat and crashes an ATV without suffering any significant injuries, while KGB agent Illya Kuryakin is able to chase down a car on foot and rip off the trunk door, dodge bullets while sitting down, throw a motorcycle and knock a man unconscious by slapping him on the side of the head.

    Literature 

• Raven of the H.I.V.E. Series is this, which she passes on to Wing, who attempts to pass it on to Shelby, although both Alphas are still working at it.
• Doc Savage, from pulp era novels, is a result of a rigorous Training from Hell routine from birth initiated by his father. "Doc Savage Magazine" discussed the training routine, in 23 articles published from July 1935 to May 1937.
• A convention from the Discworld series is that survival is a learned skill - the longer you live, the longer you're able to keep living.
  • Cohen the Barbarian is a lifelong adventurer who survived to become a very old man, making him for all intents and purposes unstoppable. Interesting Times mentions his "economy of movement", so that Cohen and the other oldsters of the Silver Horde, are simply always where they want to be, which is never where anyone's sword is. It also helps that Genghiz Cohen and his horde have become smart enough to recognize how Discworld works. Five or so noble men facing an evil army will enjoy some success.
  • His daughter, Conina, is an even better example due to Discworld genetics. From her mother she got good looks and a voice that can make a porn star blush. From dear old dad she got "sinews you could moor a ship with, muscles solid as a plank and reflexes like a snake on a hot tin roof" plus (ahem) heroic instincts and an ability to use anything as a deadly weapon. This doesn't really help in her chosen profession of hairdressing. Being able to disembowel someone with a pair of shears and blind someone with a pair of bobby pins from 20 paces doesn't really look good on her resumé.
  • Captain Carrot also has some degree of this, exemplified by being able to pierce a stone column with his sword. When the abovementioned Silver Horde was confronted by him, they wisely chose to give up. This is because Genre Savvy works both ways: yes, the small Silver Horde will defeat the big army any time. But guess what happens when a sole hero faces the Horde?
• Tarzan's abilities are mostly this; growing up under very harsh conditions and among apes much stronger than any normal human, he grew to be able to keep up. How strong is Tarzan, you ask? In one story, four burly sailors are struggling with Lord Greystoke's shipping trunk, so he casually picks it up and carries it himself! If the sailors can haul their own weight, a reasonable strength at the time, and weigh about 175 lbs., then he's casually shifting some 700 lbs. or more.
• The protagonist of Kristin Cashore's novel Graceling has this as a magical talent. In a setting where certain people are "Graced" with a magically-enhanced natural talent that can range from mind control to swimming to cooking, the heroine Katsa is Graced with superhuman survival skills that let her function perfectly without sleep or food for days, withstand blizzards, instinctively know how to live in the wilderness, see in the dark, navigate without a compass, defeat anyone in any kind of combat, and kill anything that she sees as a threat with her bare hands.
• Claw from the Andrew Vachss Burke book Terminal trained himself to be able to crush steel, gaining his moniker through his vice-like grip.
  • Also Ghost from Shella, who can actually see instant-kill points on the human body and has such tight control over his muscles that he can apply precise pressure to a postal scale to within hundredths of an ounce.
• In The Destroyer series of novels, knowing the Supernatural Martial Art of Sinanju allows you to: dodge (and catch) bullets, expunge poison from your body, greatly expand one's lifespan (Chiun's master lived to see his 250's before being murdered), walk on water, outrun a police car, pick up a police car with one hand, decapitate a grown man with your pinky-nail (But Wait, There's More!), count the number of people in a room by measuring the temperature, make a man's intestines fall out with a touch, hack security systems by touching a panel, fall from any height without harm, dry your clothes by raising body temperature, blur your face by vibrating (fools security cameras!), speed seduce women, ensure that you're the "10th caller" in a radio show, and not sweat.
• Yeoman from the Wild Cards series. His skills at concealment and archery verge on the superhuman, due to his being a highly-experienced Vietnam veteran who spent years using bows for silent efficiency on a great many jungle missions.
• Hari/Caine in The Acts of Caine. In Heroes Die he tries to vent his anger against a gel punching bag that hardens against force up to the strength of human bone before resetting. Well before he's gotten the rage out of his system, he's easily, repeatedly working it over.
• Rook in Astral Cafe is considered the most dangerous bartender in the universe. He spent years training to be the ultimate warrior under the greatest masters alive and then five years honing his abilities in constant battle against alien monsters.
• Rangers in Ranger's Apprentice gain their Improbable Aiming Skills through a LOT of practice. "An archer practices until he gets it right. A ranger practices until he never gets it wrong."
• One early Nick Carter Dime Novel neatly summarizes Nick's training and abilities: "Giants were like children in his grasp. He could fell an ox with one blow of his small, compact fist. Old Sim Carter had made the physical development of his son one of the studies of his life. Only one of the studies, however. Young Nick's mind was stored with knowledge of a peculiar sort. His gray eyes had, like an Indian's, been trained to take in minutest details fresh for use. His rich, full voice could run the gamut of sounds, from an old woman's broken, querulous squack to the deep, hoarse notes of a burly ruffian. And his handsome face could, in an instant, be distorted into any one of a hundred types of unrecognizable ugliness. He was a master of disguise, and could so transform himself that even old Sim could not recognise him. And his intellect, naturally keen as a razor blade, had been incredibly sharpened by the judicious cultivation of the old man."
• In Poul Anderson's "The Sensitive Man", the main character's abilities, which lead many to speculate that he's an alien, a mutant, or genetically engineered, prove to be this in the end. He explains how many are found in humans mostly psychotics and he's learned to draw on them. And since there are good reasons why normal humans can't normally do then, he's about to have a nervous breakdown because of the prolonged usage.

     Live-Action TV  

• The Vampire Diaries's experienced hunters can resist compulsion, especially if they've had training.
• 24's Jack Bauer has displayed an ability to shrug off injuries that would put an ordinary human being out of commission for weeks, from a broken rib to being rendered clinically dead for seven minutes, due to his sheer badassery. This is not to mention the fact that he never seems to need the toilet. It's enough for him to be used in tedious memes that once focused on Chuck Norris.
• Xena: Warrior Princess. Just see the Wikipedia entry. Sometimes she does temporarily develop actual supernatural powers when the plot demands it, but most of her impossible abilities originate from the fact that she's Just That Good. It is strongly hinted, if never explicitly stated, that Ares is Xena's father.
• In The New Avengers, the Big Bad of the episode "The Gladiators" was a martial arts expert who could punch through steel plate and swat aside automatic gunfire. His plan was to train an army of heavyweights to do the same.
• Subverted in Lost. Locke tries to claim that the reason he survived a gunshot is that it hit meat that used to have an important but expendable organ; it wasn't there anymore. Other characters recognize that for the b.s. it is; a shot in the chest is nasty business no matter what.
• In Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Iolaus was able to stay underwater for a long time. He explains that he picked up meditation techniques that slow down your breathing and heartrate.
• Somewhat unclear in Psych: Shawn Spencer's Hyper Awareness and Photographic Memory is described in a way that makes it seem like this trope the fact that he was schooled to notice and recall details from a very young age by his father is given as the sole explanation for his abilities (and the source of much tension between him and his father), but his talents seem to be far more advanced than anything that can be simply taught. On the other hand, since some people do naturally possess such abilities due to unusual brain structure, etc, a simple logical explanation is that Shawn possesses a double-whammy of natural abilities and extensive training, but this scenario is never discussed.
• The best-trained agents in Agents Of SHIELD are effectively one-(wo)man armies. May, Ward and Mockingbird can survive multiple bullet wounds, take beatings that would kill a normal person, wipe out rooms full of people without breaking a sweat and go toe-to-toe with superhumans and super-strong aliens on a pretty regular basis. Implicitly explained as the result of years of the highest level of training, but still far beyond what's realistic - Ward and May are described in-universe as being the equals (or near-equals) of Black Widow and Hawkeye, who fight alongside the superpowered Avengers.

    Radio 

• Kalimán, the Mexican superhero who first appeared in a 1960s radio show before going on to appear in comic books and film, is a superb example of the trope. He demonstrates numerous superpowers including levitation, telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis, astral projection, control of the involuntary functions of the body, hypnosis, and self-healing. Yet Kalimán makes it clear that anyone could learn to do the same things through study and hard work.
• The Shadow achieved his invisibility and mind-reading powers through intense training in India. (Where he also learned at least one handy wrestling hold.)

     Tabletop Games  

• Warhammer 40,000 gives us many examples in the Imperial Guard:
  • Ciaphas Cain can hold his own in a swordfight against a genetically engineered super soldier. Subverted somewhat in that Cain admits he wouldn't have the endurance for a long fight against a traitor marine; his fights are won by cunning and practice rather than an ability to punch through mountains.
  • Cadian Kasrkin have in fluff been comparable to Space Marines.
  • Eisenhorn has dueled and killed everything from a Chaos Space Marine to a Daemonhost. By the final book he's so injured he's practically falling apart, but it only slows him down slightly.
  • The Catachan guardsman Sly Marbo is a version of this and an in-story Memetic Badass; his reputation states that he has, among other things, killed an ork warboss, taken out a Tyranid lictor, destroyed an entire enemy armored column by booby trapping a ravine, and captured an enemy command post singlehandedly to kill its commander and entire bodyguard. It's gotten to the point that the colonel who debriefs him can recite the commendation for the Star of Terra in a single breath, and has a box full of the awards that Marbo never keeps.
  • A Heavy Bolter is an advanced weapon that fires .75 calibre explosive rockets. Normal humans can't use regular Bolters without breaking their arms, forcing the Imperial Guard to use Heavy Bolters as fixed emplacements, and the superhuman Space Marines may carry it around like a squad support weapon, but still struggle to handle the thing with sustained fire. This facet of 40k lore needs to be explained to Gunnery Sergeant Harker of the Catachan Jungle Fighters. He uses this beast of the weapon in the same way a lot of Guardsmen use their Lasguns, and he can move through terrain like a scout with it. It barely encumbers him at all. Not to mention his personal Crowning Moment of Awesome; he was on an assignment when a Tyranid Ravener burst out of the ground beneath him and knocked his bolter away out of his hands, only for Harker to catch the thing in a headlock and crush it's neck with his biceps. Seriously Badass.
  • The Catachans are this in general: their home planet, the original Death World in 40K, is a possibly sentient Hungry Jungle with more horrible lifeforms than Australia. Surviving to be older than 10 is a feat in and of itself, which is why every Catachan soldier is, without exception, seven feet tall with bodybuilder muscles, specializing in fighting in the jungle (and red headbands are a popular accessory). Their planet's gravity is said to be slightly higher than Terra's as a bit of an explanation.
• Given the speed at which a Dungeons & Dragons character gains experience, one can go from level 1 to level 20 in a bare six months and that's if you use the optional training rules which make it longer and costlier. Given how Hit Points work in D&D, a normal person would have extreme difficulty killing a high-level character in his sleep by stabbing him in the throat with a two-handed sword.
  • The special abilities many classes gain bear some mentioning. Rogues can hone their reflexes to the point where they can dodge a fireballwhile standing at the epicenter of its explosion (though a more technical read of the rules might indicate that they need at least a little cover or wiggle room to evade an explosion capable of leveling mountains unscathed), and Barbarians become so resistant to damage that an ordinary human with an ordinary knife could never hope to hurt them. Monks take this trope to a whole other level, training so hard that they literally no longer count as mortals and become Outsiders, stop aging, become immune to poisons, have fists that count as harder-than-steel magical weapons, and can heal wounds by meditating on them. And dodge fireballs like a rogue.
  • Martial adepts are explicitly based on wuxia films and anime, and consequently, they're all over this trope. Crusaders can regenerate anything short of instant death, cut through the armor plating of an iron golem with a normal sword, and issue commands so forceful they break the action economy. Warblades can strike an opponent fourteen times in six seconds, ignore poison and disease by gritting their teeth, and wield a two-handed sword while grappled. Swordsages are the most infamous: they can produce flames with their bare hands, throw basically anything, and bend shadows to turn invisible, teleport, and fly. Unlike the monk, whose more outlandish powers are generally Supernatural and therefore magical to an extent, these abilities are all classified as Extraordinary - they work perfectly even when there's an antimagic field up.
  • 4E averts this trope in regards to hit points, which no longer represent pure vitality and are more like "plot points" instead - minion monsters only have 1hp regardless of level, a character isn't really considered "hurt" until they've lost half their hp, and large quantities can be easily regained by inspiration as easily as by magic. This is actually returning to a concept originally invoked in the first edition's Dungeon Master's Guide, which justifies hit points by saying that they do not represent mere physical toughness, but all the things that can make a character hard to kill (toughness, divine favor, sheer dumb luck, etc). Conversely, this trope is alive and well in regards to character abilities, and is the official explanation for the martial power source. How can a rogue turn himself invisible, or a warlord rally an unconscious ally back to fighting form? Training and practice.
• This is explicitly the case in The World Of Aarn. In the setting, magic is a simple fact of life, often taking the role that electricity does in our world, and it's also present in every living thing. As a result, Mundanes, those who don't use straight out magic, end up having their intrinsic magic express itself physically, so they can hit much harder, take harder blows, jump 12 feet in the air, and resist magical attacks to a greater degree than mages can.
• Subverted in Mage: The Ascension, where the monks of the Akashic Brotherhood gain tremendous powers through intense training, meditation and the practice of martial arts, but even the Brothers admit that they are breaking the laws of physics as the sleepers know them.
• In Exalted you can perform incredible feats with charms, but even without enhancing your performance with them, an elder Exalt (with more than five dots in the attribute) can jump impossible distances and punch holes in steel.
• This is an option in Mutants & Masterminds, which features the "Innate" power feat which can theoretically be added to any power. It means the power is essentially something the character can innately do, so it can't be nullified via Anti-Magic or the like. This allows for characters capable of doing things like shattering a tank with one blow, because they're just that damn good at kung-fu.

     Video Games  

• Alex Kidd Sega's former mascot has trained in the "Shellcore" technique enabling him to alter the size and toughness of his fists through sheer willpower and enables him to shatter rocks with his bare fists.
• Chris Redfield of Resident Evil 5 fame is nothing more than a highly competent (supposedly unpowered) cop... who can punch a fucking boulder out of his way.
• In Doom, all that is required to literally fight your way to Hell and back is to have trained at boot camp. The story goes that Doom Guy was apparently a fairly/very competent trooper, who got reassigned to Mars as a grunt after punching out a superior officer when given a direct order to fire on innocent civilians. Of course, shortly after he arrived, shit hit the fan. Figures, huh? In the first novel he gets the hell beat out of him a lot and has a lot of trouble going on. Thank goodness for the in-canon magical healing balls of creepy. And if you believe the comic, Doom Guy was quite unhinged and seemed likely to be the kind of guy who you'd expect to be able to survive a trip to hell and back just because of his sheer lack of a grip on reality. Whether or not this came before or as a result of the Hell invasion is open to interpretation, however.
• Final Fantasy has plenty of heroes with explicitly magical nature and cool powers, some nonhumans, a few cyborgs... and then it's got the non-powered heroes who easily keep up with them:
  • Starting from the very first Final Fantasy I, we have the Bare-Fisted Monk Black Belt class, fully capable of punching out an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Thanks to some slightly buggy code in Final Fantasy VI, Sabin the martial artist achieved Memetic Mutation by being able to suplex a Soul Train. In the actual game, he also held up a giant collapsing mansion for several minutes by simply standing under the doorframe and posing heroically; in the ending cinematic, he also saves Edgar from an I-beam that, if Sabin were not in the party, takes three people to lift.
  • Tifa of Final Fantasy VII accomplishes similar feats despite being a slim (but buxom) girl.
  • Ironically averted in the case of Zell in Final Fantasy VIII, whose extreme physical power comes from junctioning Guardian Forces to boost his physical abilities. Well, except for that one limit break where he runs a lap around the entire goddamn planet and uses the inertia to damage the enemy.
• The Fighting-Type in Pokémon would fit this trope for the most part. Most of them have some absurd combat abilities judging by the Pokédex data, such as Machamp's absurdly fast punches at a rate of 1,000 punches doled out per every two seconds. Fighting-Type moves, usually consisting of punches and kicks, can bring down Rock and Steel Pokemon in a single hit. They're weak to Flying , Psychic and Fairy types though, and Fighting moves deal zero damage to Ghost Types. Bruno, Chuck, Brawly, Maylene, Marshall and Korrina all specialize in Fighting-type Pokémon. And they themselves tend to be pretty buff too, but within human standards.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Nero, discounting the demonic right forearm called the Devil Bringer, is supposedly human, yet he can jump several times his own height, reload superhumanly fast, fight in air-to-air, parry the thrust of a massive demon one-handed, and do much of what half-devil series lead Dante can. Subverted when it's revealed via Word Of God that he's the son of Vergil, so he innately has ''some'' superhuman ability.
  • Lady is quite mortal (albeit descended from an unnamed mortal priestess whose blood was used to seal Temen-Ni-Gru), yet is capable of incredible feats of agility, hauling around a squad's worth of firearms on her person, and takes a knife through the thigh and continues to stagger on out of sheer heroic determination. It's remarked upon in-game that she has no real exceptional strength of body it seems these kind of abilities are standard-issue in the Devil May Cry 'verse if you just believe hard enough.
• Nasuverse:
  • The Church has human members capable of predicting the intended firing paths of guns by watching muscle movements, crushing internal organs with blows and gripping thin swords between their fingers for effective combat. The manual also says that the only reason most vampires have superhuman abilities is because they've had hundreds of years to train their human abilities to superhuman levels.
  • Fake Assassin in Fate/stay night created a technique that bends time and space to allow his blade to strike from three different directions in a single attack. And it was developed solely through training his swordsmanship: he has no supernatural powers whatsoever. He literally just practiced super-hard at it until the laws of physics gave up.
  • Kirei Kotomine from Fate/stay night is a former Church Executioner, and his hand-to-hand combat abilities are terrifyingly good. In addition to standard Church abilities mentioned above, in Fate/Zero, he shows the ability to block bullets from an automatic weapon, and matches a guy explicitly using magic to move at twice, and then three times normal speed without apparent effort ("So you're moving twice as fast? Then I just need to adjust my timing."). In the Visual Novel itself he doesn't get much chance to show off, but when he does... he defeats a Servant. Granted, an Assassin-class Servant, who are among the weakest in combat, but still, he defeated a Servant! He also manages to hold his own against Shirou, who's using Archer's powers and fighting with the skill of a servant.
• The Crusader games both use and subvert this trope. In the first game, the opening cinematic shows a single mech killing two Silencers. The third (the eventual player character), not embroiled in their argument, managed to get out of its field of view and toss a grenade. The character then goes on to mow his way through hundreds of enemies in the game, shrugging off grenade blasts, and destroying a few dozen of the mechs that killed his compatriots. Then, in the second game, after sitting in a cramped lifepod for almost two days, he proceeds to kill two guards at range firing a burst from his assault rifle one-handed. Finally, the second game seems to take roughly a week, with no noticeable breaks for rest, or even eating or drinking.
• In Lost Odyssey, main character Kaim Argonar is shown in the opening scene working as a mercenary for Uhra, in the midst of a heavy battle. While Kaim's allies are getting stomped (roughly 20 of them seem to die for every one enemy soldier they manage to kill), Kaim is busy tearing the enemy to shreds by the dozens, and even killing an enormous war engine equipped with flamethrowers with a single blow. The next CD has an 8 year old white mage with no combat experience or training who still by the numbers hits harder and can take more damage then Kalm could at the beginning of the game, even ignoring her primary healing magic. The entire Uhra military can be beaten up by a little girl.
• Street Fighter:
  • The series is full of examples on or near the line between this and Ki Manipulation, but one that stands out as the latter is Blanka's power to discharge electricity, which he learned from electric eels.
  • In the Manga backstory, during their final battle, Gouken and Akuma leveled a mountain range with a barrage of aerial Hadoken shots, even though firing a single one is already supposed to be extremely impressive.
  • Parodied with Sakura's backstory. After seeing her erstwhile teacher, Dan, perform a pathetic little Hadoken once, she's able to toss a full-powered Hadoken with very little effort. What makes her scary is that she's a normal schoolgirl who had never trained before in her life, indicating she could potentially become the most powerful warrior in the franchise before her 16th birthday if she had half of Ryu's dedication to training. (And she does.)
  • On the more physical level of this trope is Cody Travers. Born into an impoverished family in the slums of Metro City, Cody trained himself in literal street fighting in order to survive, and he uses that training to be frighteningly effective. How effective? Word Of God has him as one of the most powerful characters in the franchise, above Akuma and on par with Gouken, Oro, and even Oni. Bear in mind that Oni could, without exaggeration, be called a minor god.
• Metal Gear:
  • Solid Snake is a clone of a legendary soldier, and picks up some impressive gear of the course of his adventures, but is otherwise entirely normal. That doesn't stop him killing Mind Screwing floating psychics and giant nuclear-armed walking tanks, and in Metal Gear Solid 4, he cuts through three war zones and two enemy bases while having the body of a seventy-year-old. In Metal Gear Solid, he destroys a tank using only grenades because he didn't have any anti-tank weapons. This is referenced to by Otacon in Guns of the Patriots, in which Otacon calls him "the most hardcore badass on the planet" for managing it.
  • His clone brother Liquid Snake is similarly impressive, shooting down F-16s with a Hind helicopter, which he's able to pilot in the middle of a blizzard. Surviving the crash of said Hind, the destruction of Metal Gear REX with him aboard, falling 3 stores off REX's remains after a fistfight with Solid Snake, and being repeatedly shot with a machine gun. It takes FOXDIE forcing his heart to stop beating to actually kill him.
  • Their clone father Big Boss is no different. Just read his medical history at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
  • There's also Gray Fox who, even before he gained his cyborg exoskeleton, was capable of blocking machinegun fire with his sword. Gene from Portable Ops was also disturbingly fast. To the point of dodging rail gun fire at point blank range.
  • One of The Reveals in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is that Jetstream Sam's only augmentation is an arm. Apart from an exoskeleton which is inferior to cyborg tech, he's otherwise human. His ability to defeat Raiden the first time and still give him trouble after the Mid-Season Upgrade is otherwise due to pure, inhuman skill. It's even mentioned that feats he manages in the prologue, such as taking on a squad of rifle-armed soldiers with only his sword and killing them all without a scratch, are things he's been pulling off before he got that augmentation.
• Due to the game's mechanics, City of Heroes and the spin-off City of Villains includes 'natural' characters who shield themselves with protective balls of fire, regenerate instantly from near-fatal wounds, phase out of normal existence, or fly. Canonically, Malta's paramilitary forces have been quite capable of facing down evil interdimensional invaders assuming even numbers (who seldom took casualties when facing the American military), and can put up a hefty challenge to individual Heroes and Villains. Manticore's archery ability is similar to Green Arrows, in addition to being nearly impossible to kill. Of particular note is the Ninjitsu power set; most of its powers are fairly reasonable (increased agility, better perception, etc.), but the final power in the set (Kuji-In Retsu) allows you to alter the way time and space affect you, turning you into a nigh-untouchable blur of attacks.
• The titular hunters of Monster Hunter, while able to heft weapons nearly twice their size and weight, fall three to ten storeys without breaking a bone, receive attacks from ferocious behemoths that would otherwise shred a lesser person to ribbons and subsequently take down said behemoths with enough persistence, are otherwise regular, athletic human beings.
• Partly averted in The King of Fighters series, where several of the characters introduced in that series have powers due to "Orochi blood", and the China team's powers come from being psychics (and Athena's partly because she's the reincarnation of a goddess). The rest of them, though, can throw fireballs just because they practiced.
• Every single crack X-COM trooper/operative ever probably counts. They can go from complete losers who can't hit the side of the barn at point blank (and these guys are meant to be the cream of the crop from the world's Spec Ops, Military and Police forces!) to absolutely amazing marksmen who can run for several kilometers in powered armour that doesn't assist them whilst lugging giant guns that are bigger than grenade launchers. Let's not forget the ammunition and other supplies either. They go through Field Training From Hell to get to that stage, though, and the mortality rate can be quite high... even if they get a good suit of armour.
• Pretty much the entire point of Crackdown. The agent you control is already enhanced by surgery and cybernetics, but you can drastically increase his already impressive strength and agility through sheer practice. The agent starts the game able to jog at 20 mph, leap 20 feet into air, and lift roughly 2 tons. Simply by jumping across rooftops a lot and punching lots of criminals to death, you can increase these abilities to jogging 40mph, leaping 50 feet and carrying 10 tons. Training with explosives makes the same grenades you pick up off gang corpses explode bigger and harder. Even more ridiculously, you can also make your bullets hit harder and force cars to physically transform into better versions of themselves by training your firearms and driving skills, giving some cars powers like guns and jumping abilities.
• Xenogears. Granted, this is a setting where Asian mysticism and chi focus is in full force, but when humans can take Humongous Mecha apart with their bare hands, the game's strongest fighter is a Technical Pacifist Badass Bookworm.
  • Xenosaga does the same thing, if not to the same extent; most of the characters are cyborgs, synthezoid, or some Biblical figure, but Jin Uzuki slices through a mecha with a katana. He's one of the few non-special-powered-people in the game, and while it could be argued that sharing the same mom with Shion might make him special, nothing is said to that end.
• Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden proudly states that his "strength comes from training, not from some curse in my blood". It must really have been Training from Hell, as he performs undeniably superhuman feats. In the XBox version, he can launch armoured men with a single slash and keep them airborne while attacking, leap from wall to wall to continue a wallrun, block bullets with a wooden sword, run and leap unhindered by a 100-pound BFS on his back, and zoom with an unaugmented bow. As in, naked eye. That doesn't even cover the full extent of his abilities. Subverted when Doku's ability to awaken the Fiend blood in him suggests that his power comes from Fiend abilities, but then double subverted when this does absolutely nothing to affect Ryu's combat prowess, suggesting otherwise.
• Lune Zoldark of Super Robot Wars. This Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter is sent away by daddy dearest to a space colony around Jupiter, where she trains endlessly. In the Super Robot Wars Original Generation sub-series, Master Rishu Togo states this particular tomboy can dodge bullets...while eating breakfast. All that training around Jupiter's orbit must've really helped, because whenever she pilots her Ridiculously Human Robot Valsione, it can perform the machine skill "bunshin" (Mirror Image), which allows the machine to successfully dodge 50% of all enemy attacks. But here's the real kicker: the technology to perform Mirror Image isn't actually built into the Valsione, because Lune has just got that CRAZY REFLEXES to activate Mirror Image ON HER OWN. Talk about Charles Atlas Superpower...
• A strange example is found in Touhou. Marisa Kirisame is the series' "ordinary magician" (and damn proud of it), a muggle who gained expressly magical powers through sheer training alone. While her co-main character is a miko who never has to train because her natural magical power is just that good, Marisa spends all her time practicing, copying spells from other characters, and looting spellbooks from the local librarian. Even after all that, she can only use her powers in the first place because she carries around a mini-Hakkero, essentially a magical battery (or before that, magic mushrooms). Despite this, Marisa can hold her own against youkai, demons, even deities, while keeping up with the growth of the few other humans in the series, all of whom have magical powers. Marisa's signature attack even seems to show this sort of clumsy mentality - Master Spark can be described as analogous to taking the magical equivalent of C4, placing it in a metal bowl to make an ad-hoc shaped charge, pointing it at the enemy, and detonating it without the bone-snapping recoil that would entail.
• Even the weakest people in Team Fortress 2 can survive a direct hit at point blank range from a rocket, The Heavy hefts a minigun weighing more than some of his coworkers, and The Scout can propel himself through the air and trained himself to be so nimble to literally beat his brothers to the punch during their frequent fights. Charles Atlas has been parodied by the developers with a comic in the same vein as the original. Ironically, Saxton Hale, the one doing the parodying, doesn't quite count, as despite him training like hell and fighting yetis for fun, he also has Australium poisoning, like all Australians.
• Tekken: The only thing Heihachi Mishima seems incapable of doing is dying. While his father, son, and grandson all cheat death through demonic powerups, he has nothing like that to keep him alive when he's beaten to almost an inch of his life, tossed off a cliff, supernaturally drained by a god of war, slammed through a wall made of three-foot-deep brick, kneed about a foot into the ground, blasted with ethereal energy, beaten down again, then trapped in an explosion that levels the building he's in. Hilariously, everyone just assumed he was dead while he was under all that rubble, but of course he wasn't.
• Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer allows you to do things like become immune to falling damage via the Commando Pro perk by killing enough people with your knife. Or carry extra ammo by Scavenging ammo from corpses enough times. Etc. etc.
• Ayla of Chrono Trigger may not be able to learn magic like most of the other playable characters, but what she can do is beat the shit out of bosses with her bare hands. Her sheer physical damage output outranks Crono's by the endgame, and has been hitting the damage cap with her critical attacks well before that point.
• Scarface: The World is Yours. The extreme difficulty of killing Tony is remarked upon in game dialogue. One of your abilities is a Limit Break that grants invincibility, Bottomless Magazines and Life Drain, apparently through sheer Balls.
• Ys:
  • Adol Christin usually acquires at least some magical ability in his powers, but on at least one occasion, without any magic, he only failed to single-handedly kill a monster that normally takes an entire hunting party months to track down and kill due to it being physically impossible with the weapon he's wielding at the time, and does manage to fight it to a standstill and weaken it enough that it's easily dispatched by hunters carrying the proper armaments.
  • Adol's friend and traveling companion Dogi has immense, 100% magic-free strength. Trapped in a dungeon cell? Don't worry, Dogi will punch a hole through the wall for you to escape through. Cave-in leave you stranded? Neverfear, Dogi will clear the rubble with his fist! A wall of solid bedrock separating you two? Dogi PUUUNCH!!! He doesn't call himself "Dogi the Wall Crusher" for nothing.
• Mario. In his first appearence, he was a normal human being with an above-average jumping height. Starting in Super Mario Bros. 1, Mario displays the power to jump dozens of meters into the air, lift castles off the ground and kick them away, dodge cannonballs and even shoot fireballs from his hands. His bio in Mario and Sonic At The Olympic Games states: "This persistent little plumber developed his skills chasing down a big ape."
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Non-magical classes in Oblivion can achieve superhuman abilities simply by training enough. When their skills are high enough, they can outrun deer and kill them in one punch, jump the length of some buildings, turn invisible simply by crouching, kill bears with their bare hands, and jump off the surface of water, repeatedly.
  • The Voice in Skyrim. The Dragonborn can use it innately, but anyone can learn it with enough training. The Greybeard monks who devote their lives to such training cannot converse with normals; their Voice is so powerful that even a whisper is lethal.
• A staple in the later Fallout games as well, where, if trained for it, the playable character can cause raiders, mutants, and soldiers in power armour to explode into a pile of mutilated organs simply by punching them with their bare hands...and it is a viable, if not frustrating, method of going through the game.
• The player-character in the Record of Lodoss War Dreamcast game learns magic like a child learning algebra, so most of the time you must rely on physical attacks. At level 100 you can punch sandworms and 'lighter' golems to death, despite the fact he's supposedly just an average well-trained knight once you take off his magical armours and weaponry. (And one of those swords, the Hakuring, was the sword of an OGRE. Yes it is expectedly slow as molasses, but if he were so 'normal' it should be CRUSHING him! Cloud's cricket bat pales in comparison and isn't even double-sided like this is. The hilt alone is the size of your shortswords.)
• Alpha Protocol. Through experience, Michael can learn to do things such as curve shots from behind cover and nail up to six targets at once while using pistols, turn invisible to electronics if such a device is about to almost detect him as well as invisibility from humans either as an active ability or a "panic button" when almost detected, and shrug off an otherwise fatal attack.
• World of Warcraft:
  • While most classes have magic, pets, or various tricks, warriors only have up-front melee combat. And they still fight Eldritch Abominations, Physical Gods, The Legions of Hell, and undead armies as easily as anyone else. Not to mention, they're the only class that can dual-wield two-handed weapons.
  • Rogues are similar, having no supernatural abilities. Even their ability to disappear from sight in full view of surrounding enemies is solely due to their training.
  • Monks can do things such as jump their own height to unleash a damaging kick or spin kick, even without weapons. Their magic? Just Chi.
• Similarly, the Barbarian from Diablo II and III is described this way in a number of places. Most fitting is the natural resistance skill, which helps the barbarian resist several types of magic damage, and is said to come simply from surviving tough environments.
• In Battlestar Galactica Online, the skills your avatar picks up enable your starships to do longer FTL jumps, fly faster, make your guns more accurate and a variety of other things.
• In the first two (platformer) Prince of Persia games the Prince can climb up arbitrary number of levels vertically by jumping up, grabbing the ledge above him, then pulling himself up. He can also jump over a large gap, grab a ledge a level down, then pull himself up. The later games are designed with the very same concept. Starting with the Sands of Time series, the Prince's parkour allow him to run almost twenty feet along a wall before falling. The 2008 reboot takes this to an even greater extent, allowing the Prince to jump from one wall to another and keep running. There's even a ceiling run move.
• In the Fire Emblem series, pretty much everyone has the potential to become this if you're lucky with levels. Depending on their stats, combined with other features like supports, units can do things like mowing down legion after legion single-handedly, have 100% chance to use critical attacks or take things like artillery and devastating magic to the face and not even flinch. Of special mention is the My Unit/Avatar from New Mystery of the Emblem. He/she was put through rigorous training by their grandfather since they were kids in order to become knights, and it has become but a pastime by the time they're adults. Because of this training, he/she is one of the most strong and broken units in the entire series (the high strength growth can even get in the way if you're playing as a magic unit), and their support conversation with the knight Draug involves lifting three people with a pinky.
• Solaire of Astora from Dark Souls is simultaneously one of the tankiest and toughest things you can ever have on your side, and completely powered by hardcore training. He -intentionally- became Undead just so that he could set out on a quest to find his own inner salvation. Even the lightning spears he throws are a product of his insane willpower and training alone, not any natural gift.
• Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider, has the build of a cheerleader but is shown with the abilities of a super-athlete as well as being near-superhuman in strength and agility, often taking multiple hits from firearms and other weapons which can likewise be cured instantly with a simple first-aid kit; the only thing that can really harm her is fatal falls and death-traps.
• Garrett of Thief, thanks to Keeper training, can explicitly hide in plain sight, and effectively become invisible using any shadow.
• In Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, you can train at the gym to increase your strength and stamina. While there is a limit to the improvement you can make each day, it still only takes a maximum of about a week to go from a complete wimp to being one of the strongest, fittest people ever.
• Dog the Worthless Mutt in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura is an ordinary dog (possibly a wolf-dog)... who can gnaw through save door or tear an Ore Golem apart in mere seconds, at the cost of some minor damage to his teeth. Leading to a bit of Fridge Logic when one remembers Dog joins you after scaring off the (probably average) townsman who was nonetheless kicking him to death.
• Myrmidons and Eternal Soldiers in Nexus Clash have no power source but their own badassery, and still manage to match or beat the competition in a universe otherwise filled with angels, demons and magic users.
• Rock Adams from the Soul Series. In his ending in III, he returns home to the New World by swimming across the Atlantic.

    Web Comics 

• From El Goonish Shive, the "Anime Style school of martial arts" originally seems to be this. Turns out it is actually a form of magic. More accurately, the martial arts school is using this trope to inadvertently cause their students to unlock their magic potential without a proper Awakening.
• Maytag and Bernadette of Flipside regularly perform combat feats that are physically impossible outside of Wuxia films.
• Ken from No Need for Bushido. Just look at this
• 8-Bit Theater:
  • Fighter has not only survived repeated stabs to the brain with only temporary ill effects (one of them actually made him smarter), but also direct clashes with, among other things, a dark elf prince, a fire demon and an obscenely powerful Lich, successfully dueling the former two. However, while Fighter is called Vargus' best student, he seemed to have spent most of Fighter Camp '86 watching TV.
  • Whereas Fighter is 'merely' able to wield four swords at once, Thief is able to regularly break enchantments and laws of physics by legal mumbo jumbo and just being that good and, amongst other things, he stole his class change from the future. To quote him, he's "stolen things that weren't even there."
  • According to Thief his law ninjas are so well trained they are capable of being deployed and following people even though they are dead.
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • Bun-Bun can outrun a car, toss a grown man over his shoulder, claw his way out of an alien's stomach, skin a grizzly bear alive, and survive grenade explosions at point-blank range. Made all the more impressive considering that Bun-Bun is a small bunny.
  • Oasis and Kusari might count as well. It's currently unknown how much of their physical prowess is due to their training and how much is due to being Dr. Steve's lab rats.
  • It's not yet determined how much of Oasis's ability is due to development or origin, but in her last storyline it was shown that she's at least learning how to become more impossible through training. And old man Feng, for all his history of martial arts training, didn't seem that surprised at what she could do. Maybe he's the Charles Atlas Supercoach?
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja:
• Girl Genius:
• O-Chul of The Order of the Stick, exemplified here. Hands bound, dumped into a pool of acid (while being dumped, knocks a goblin into the pool with his feet), lands on a pit of spikes, uses the spikes to cut through the bonds on his wrists, is attacked by an acid-breathing shark, punches it, breaking multiple teeth, gets to the surface. Finding himself unable to get out of the pool, owing to high walls, taunts the shark to attack him, uses the momentum from the shark jumping and biting him to get out of the pool, falls a fair distance to the floor, still covered in acid. Still conscious, he rushes the Big Bad Epic Level Lich Sorcerer, intending to take him down with his bare hands.
• Readers of Homestuck would know that Dave's Bro is a strong and versatile fighter, but would be quite surprised when he cleanly splits a giant meteor in half with his katana. Meanwhile, both Mom and Dad are able to defeat giant monsters bare-handed.
• Hannah Mets from Lightbringer was shown in one of her early appearances to be capable of lifting a table over her head without any sign of strain or effort despite her only mildly muscular frame. Word Of God states she has no superpowers.
• Grrl Power gives us Math, a martial artist so incredible that even the most powerful super in the world notes that distinguishing between his abilities and actual superpowers is a futile exercise.
• In Cloudscratcher, Ixia's super strength comes from her Training from Hell.
• A.P.M. from Wootlabs turned her gaming skills into actual enhanced reflexes and mental multitasking abilities.
• Sebastian from True Villains had to train like mad to keep a necromantic injury from draining his life force and killing him. When that injury was healed, all the extra energy that had been feeding the injury was added to his physical strength.
• Satin Steele has Satin, a professional female bodybuilder who does stuff like climbing up the spine of a giant dinosaur and fending off an alien monster with just her strength, gymnastics training and karate skills.

    Web Original 

• The Global Guardians PBEM Universe features several: Hazard, Cold Comfort, Hip-Hop, Awesome X, Quarterback, Elite, and Action Man are all notable examples.
• Lampshaded in the blog-novel Flyover City!, when the Hero / Load decides to pursue a career in crimefighting after his beloved 1975 Vespa is stolen.
• The narrator, Gervas Klarenfeld in Dead West is a fine example. He was a boxing champion at his university, and trained with guns to impress a countess before the story starts. He manages to defy aristocrats by Diamond, even if he himself is a commoner, and can take on the Porcelain Doctor or the Beast in a fight. When the latter is berserkering, he uses Gervas as a punching bag, and he survives. Having Heroic Build and being a Determinator helps. Just like the exercise regimen of a knight of the MacArkills.
• Journeyman of the Whateley Universe is a baseline but incredibly well trained in martial arts to the point that he can take on superpowered characters like Bladedancer, ki mistress Chaka, and Person of Mass Destruction Tennyo. He once sparred with all three at the same time. And won.
• Texts from Superheroes: Lampshaded by Deadpool who thought The Punisher had super-mutant healing powers.

     Western Animation  

• Brock Samson from The Venture Bros. is a prime ultimate example of lampshaded Charles Atlas; through a combination of training and testosterone, he is capable of surviving in a vacuum for some time with no permanent harm, killing armies, mummies, crocodiles, wereodiles, and other foes, surviving hits by bullets, taking multiple hits from tranquilizer-darts with no effect, and otherwise being virtually impervious to pain. He also carries the trademark cartoon-characteristics of having an impossibly huge, gorilla-like upper body, but incredibly small and skinny stick-like legs. And can also tell if someone's in his car from an entire continent away.
• Teen Titans:
  • Robin routinely smacked around 20-foot-tall concrete giants with brute strength alone and shrugged off what should be near fatal injuries. After all, he was trained by Batman.
  • Slade and Red X both also fall into this. While Red X does generally use the environment and his suit's abilities to great effect to take down the Titans, he also essentially shrugs off being slammed into a concrete wall by Starfire's eyebeams and then dropping at least seven feet onto a concrete floor. All three of them are capable of performing jumps that completely defy belief.
  • Parodied in the Teen Titans Go! episode "Mouth Hole", where Robin trains at whistling to the point where he can use it as a Green Lantern Ring.
• Robin in Young Justice isn't that far behind either. In "Downtime", while working out at the gym, he punches a crater in a concrete wall.
• Kim Possible is the female epitome of the trope. We're seriously supposed to believe that cheerleading did all that?
• In one episode of Samurai Jack, Jack trains wearing heavy boulders; when they are finally removed, he is able to "jump good." So good, in fact, that it's mistaken for flight. The guy who trained him is essentially a normal human being who after running away to live with primates, has trained long enough to leap to the moon and back. In another episode, "Jack in Space", Jack fights a giant robo-gun in space and reflects their energy blast with his sword, getting a good backwash of electricity himself. The explosion sends Jack plunging through the atmosphere to hit the ground like a meteorite. It takes him about half a second to shrug it off and get back up.
• Hong Kong Phooey subverts this one, with the main character's constant referral to his 'Hong Kong Book of Kong Foo', yet he is incompetent at it.
• Valerie of Danny Phantom turned from spoiled rich girl into Action Girl. Despite being only fourteen, she has stated to be a ninth degree martial artist. Her older alternate future self even survived a fall with minor injuries from hundreds of feet high!
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Suki was a borderline case until "Boiling Rock, Part II" when she ran up a thirty foot wall.
  • Ty Lee has always fit this trope even more what with all the multi-story leaping.
  • Ty Lee's teammate Mai is a slightly milder case; similar to Marvel Comics villain Bullseye (mentioned above), her skill with throwing blades is basically superhuman.
  • Master Piandao has these in Warrior Poet form, in that he can fight on par with incredibly powerful benders with just a sword and defeat ludicrous numbers of foes and so on, and Training Montages some of 'em into Sokka.
  • Zuko has actual superpowers in the form of martial arts pyrokinesis, but given he's insecure about his bending and all he seems to have paid special attention to developing some of these. He's not much better than Suki, but he's pulling this stuff all the damn time. He's broken shackles with an ax kick, punched a person across a room, and has sufficient strength and stamina to have prolonged martial arts fights while wearing plate armour.
  • Most of Aang's speed and agility are shown to be from the use of his airbending, but he's also displayed feats of this trope that can't be attributed to it. While not as impressive as Zuko, he has done things like briefly Bridal Carry Katara while jumping down a couple stories, and also once carry Zuko, despite both of them clearly being heavier than him and his thin build wouldn't hint he possessed that sort of strength. He's also fallen a few stories out of a tree, and got back up seconds later with no lasting injuries.
  • Iroh has displayed the strength to toss boulders, while out of shape.
• The Legend of Korra:
  • Korra herself, to a degree unusual even within her franchise. In addition to being able to wield the four elements and having a Super Mode that can expertly crack continental plates without mussing anyone's hair, her sheer brute strength allows her to effortlessly pick up and fling around grown men taller than her. In the Book Three finale, she becomes so enraged that she breaks apart unbendable platinum chains by nothing but raw strength.
  • Similarly, the athletic-but-not-overly-buff Mako has casually tossed his bulky brother over his shoulder, thrown mooks away with a single hand, and doing neck lifts with no major exertion.
• In an episode of Justice League Unlimited, Wildcat becomes so frustrated with his lack of superpowers that he punches through a brick wall.
• The Ripping Friends are superhumanly strong and tough. Their leader Crag once dragged the entire landmass of Quebec back to Canada with his bare hands and a rope. They got this way by training their asses off with their brutal mother. To them, having superpowers is cheating.
• Finn from Adventure Time is probably the only human in the show, but he has demonstrated high acrobatic ability, more than enough strength to cut monsters in half, and has taken more damage than most adults could withstand, let alone a not-particularly-athletic 13 year old.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Although mostly Played for Laughs, Big Macintosh is strong enough to throw an entire dog pile of ponies off of him, smash through walls, and drag an entire house behind him. While hopping like Pepe Le Pew. His sister Applejack is no slouch either; the two of them are strong enough to dislodge apples from trees by kicking them. The IDW comics take it a step further when Big Macintosh matches Princess Celestia, the Long Lived God Empress of their entire nation with enough power to raise the sun every morning, at hoof-wrestling. The next panel she appears in, she has a bandage on her leg meaning he was strong enough to hurt her.
  • Earth ponies like the Apples are at least naturally stronger and more resilient than other ponies. Rainbow Dash however is the resident Lightning Bruiser despite being a pegasus, flying at speeds that are literally legendary and crashing into buildings and mountains with barely a scratch. When she finally took enough damage to break one of her wings, she was able to fly again (albeit not very well) in two days.
  • Pinkie Pie's sister Maud half-heartedly throws a boulder, sending it over the horizon, creating a massive shockwave in the process. Later, she smashes a giant rock to bits.

     Real Life  

• Some unscrupulous martial arts "masters" claim to have achieved supernatural abilities through training. Websites like bullshido.net and badmartialarts.com are dedicated to debunking them. In spite of this, several martial artists and fighters have developed reputations for seemingly superhuman physical abilities.
  • Bruce Lee was able to perform a number of spectacular physical feats that he put to good use in his acting career. His films made it seem that he could translate his physical abilities into nearly superhuman fighting ability, but his true skills were never thoroughly tested.
  • Mas Oyama, the founder of Kyokushin style karate, was said to kill bulls by punching them in the face, before or after hacking their horns off with his bare hands. He was also said to crush rocks with his hands and fight one hundred people in a row with minimal breaks. The degree of truth to these stories is debatable. YouTube features a video of his bull exploits, though it only shows Oyama wrestling a harnessed bull to the ground and features a clearly faked portrayal of him hacking off a horn.
  • A popular legend states that former boxing Lightweight champ Roberto Duran once knocked out a horse with one punch.
  • After Fedor Emelianenko was suplexed directly onto his head in a Mixed Martial Arts match, he got up and went on to win the fight in less than a minute. When asked how he managed to recover so quickly from such a harsh throw, Fedor explained, "It didn't affect me. I train to fall great distances." In reality, with some training, flexibility, and luck, professional MMA fighters can avoid significant damage from attacks that appear to be quite serious.
• Many physical stunts appear to display superhuman abilities, but are not quite as impossible as they seem:
  • Legendary illusionist Harry Houdini could famously absorb extremely heavy blows to his abdomen with little to no effect if he prepared properly. In reality, the abdomen is naturally resilient to damage while the abdominals are being flexed. Ironically, a sucker punch might have caused or hastened Houdini's death from peritonitis, though it also might have simply delayed him seeking treatment.
  • Some martial arts and Le Parkour stunts that seem impossible, such as punching through bricks and falling from great heights, really just take some training and some fearlessness. Others take advantage of artful performance and stagecraft to appear more difficult or impressive.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, many of the CGI-assisted acrobatic stunts of Legolas were criticized as unrealistic, but some of his feats, such as mounting a horse at a gallop, are preexisting stunts that could be performed live by the right kinds of gymnasts, circus performers, or classic vaudeville stuntmen.
  • Even as fighting dogs and attack dogs are terrifying for most people, enough to blame it on some genetic memory of being chased by wolves in the distant past, trained dog breeders can neutralize the attack of the beast by simply sticking a closed fist between its jaws to keep them open and unable to bite. It's too counter-intuitive to be performed at home if untrained.
• History is filled with people who thought they could perform supernatural feats with enough training and other preparations, but were proven quite mistaken:
  • In the Maji Maji rebellion in German East Africa during the colonial days, tribes thought something similar. Through training and washing in magical water blessed by local shamans, they thought they would become immune to machine gun fire.
  • The Society of Right and Harmonious Fists (more commonly known as the Boxers of the famous Boxer Rebellion) believed that through training, diet, martial arts, and prayer, they could perform extraordinary feats and become immune to swords and bullets.
• Contrary to the Instant Death Bullet trope, sometimes people don't even realize they've been shot or otherwise don't realize how badly they're injured until the adrenaline wears off, resulting in people running around or moving with potentially fatal gunshot wounds, or not realizing what being shot feels like. Additionally, combat reflexes can be dependent on your culture to some extent; a culture which hasn't been exposed to firearms very much doesn't know that hitting the dirt in response to gunfire reduces your likelihood of getting hit, and thus may be more likely to remain standing while being shot at. This may look like incredible, inhuman bravery to people who are more familiar with firearms.
• This is also why grand mal seizures are so dangerous; such involuntary convulsive movements use all available muscle power, and a person experiencing one is not only at risk of biting through their tongue or breaking their own spine, but unnervingly difficult to restrain. Which would be why you're not supposed to restrain people having seizures, but make sure to move breakable and hard objects out of the way and leave them alone.
• Similarly, a drowning person in a state of panic may exhibit much greater strength than normal for that individual, due to the rush of adrenaline. This is why lifeguards and others responsible for water safety are strictly cautioned to swim out to still-conscious drowning people only as an absolute last resort, when other methods of rescue such as poles, ring buoys and boats aren't available or feasible, due to the risk of becoming victims themselves.
• It has been found that one can increase bone strength through their density but this requires heavy physical training and does not aid much more then allowing for fewer broken bones later on. The easy way is to train in martial arts or other physical combats that create micro-fractures in the pores of the bone and allow them to heal and fill.
• Well-disciplined Buddhist monks can reduce their metabolism by 64% and raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by 17%, just by meditating.
• Tori Allen, a champion rock wall climber, got that way by climbing trees constantly from the age of four. By chasing after her pet monkey when her own limbs were maturing, she acquired phenomenal grip strength and a disproportionately-powerful bone structure. Now, she could give Spider-Man a vertical run for his money.
• Some blind people are able to learn to navigate through echolocation, just like bats do. All humans have the ability to a certain extent, but with training, it can be greatly improved.
• Although films like James Bond and The Bourne Series get panned for showing the titular protagonists doing unbelievable stunts, in reality most of the actions shown are actually possible. Various studies and TV specials, including two from Discovery and the Science Channel, show that there are people who can pull off those insane driving scenes, marksman who can hit a dozen targets at various ranges with a pistol, and fighters that can take on five men at once and curb stomp them. The biggest problem in the portrayal is that nobody can do all of this; it requires an enormous amount of training not just to learn these skills but to maintain them as well.
• There are plenty of stories of people who survived things that should kill them. For example, this 7-year-old girl who took six bullets and not only survived, but is able to walk and talk like normal even after doctors predicted she'd be paralyzed and mute for life.
• Many elite-level athletes have physiological "quirks" that allow them to excel at their particular sport, such as swimmer Michael Phelps^note his arms are longer than average for his height; a 6'7" wingspan for a 6'4" man and ultra-marathon runner Dean Karnazes^note his body's production of lactic acid actually decreases the longer he exercises. They still need to train extensively to compete at the highest levels.
• Some attribute their extraordinary speed and endurance of Kenyan marathoners to simply training religiously in the high altitude of Western Kenya.
• Paramedics and Emergency Physicians are capable of saving people whose hearts aren't beating or who have taken bullets to the brain only through insane amounts of training and experience. However, the strain of this can lead to depression and anxiety especially without treatment.
• Throwing a needle through glass is impossible, you say? Just watch.

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