Niklas Süle's Weight Struggles Under Jupp Heynckes

Niklas Süle sat down to announce his retirement and, almost casually, dropped a story that said more about modern football than any press release ever could.

On the “Spielmacher” podcast, the former Bayern Munich defender lifted the lid on what life was really like under Jupp Heynckes – and what it cost him just to stand on the scales.

The weekly weight cut

“Jupp Heynckes was a tremendous mentor to me. I played under him, but he also addressed the issue of weight. We had weigh-ins at Bayern on Thursdays. I didn’t eat anything all Wednesday, I fasted the whole day. And every evening at home, I went to the sauna – wearing a raincoat,” Süle said, as captured by @iMiaSanMia.

This wasn’t a one-off. It became routine.

He would starve himself on Wednesdays, then disappear into the basement sauna at night, wrapped in a raincoat like a fighter trying to make a lower division. The numbers were brutal: “The next day, I weighed two and a half kilos less. That’s extreme.”

The description of what came next paints the picture. After hours without food and sweating out every drop of water, Süle had to climb three flights of stairs to reach the bedroom.

“I opened the window, leaned out, and breathed for ten minutes because I thought I was going to faint.”

The pressure finally told on the scale, but not in the way the club might have imagined.

He would make weight. He would play at the weekend. Bayern would win. And Heynckes, pleased with what he saw, delivered the kind of line players remember for years: “See? you played much better now.”

Then came Süle’s punchline.

“But the reality is that my weight was exactly the same as before.”

By matchday, the lost kilos had returned. The “improvement” was an illusion, built on a number that existed for a few hours on a Thursday morning.

A defender built to dominate

What Süle described was essentially a boxer’s or MMA fighter’s weight cut – only this was happening in a football environment, every week. It was wild. It was risky. And it underlined how much of his career lived under the microscope of fitness and body shape.

Strip that away, and the player himself was a formidable package.

At his best, Süle was a force of nature on the backline. A towering frame, surprising acceleration, and a clean touch made him a rare profile: a defender who looked like a classic Bundesliga stopper but moved like a modern athlete.

Coaches even used him at right-back, an experiment that should have been absurd on paper. Instead, his size and speed turned him into one of the most physically imposing full-backs the game has seen, bullying wingers and closing space that should not have been his to reach.

In his natural role at center-back, he became a clearing machine. He could wrestle with the biggest strikers in Europe, then turn and chase down forwards with elite pace. On his good days, he didn’t just defend space; he erased it.

The shadow that never left

Yet the same theme kept circling back: fitness, weight, conditioning. The specter never really left his shoulder.

Some players carry extra kilos and still dominate, their talent and reading of the game outweighing the scales. Maybe Süle belonged in that category. Maybe he was one of those rare defenders who could perform regardless of what the numbers said on a Thursday.

Or maybe, with a different approach to health and less obsession over the weekly weigh-in, his career might have climbed even higher.

That question will follow him into retirement, long after the sauna in the basement and the raincoat have faded into memory.