Six-pack someone

Crunchhhhhhh...

No you pig, its not the sound of someone crunching a wafer. Its actually pretty close to the sound which my palm made when I shook hands with Sabih - my gym trainer.
Believe me, it took me a lot of effort to block the nerve impulses which travel from my palm to my face.
Mind over matter, you see.
(Its just like me to attempt a bit of boasting even in situations most embarassing to my ego).

If you could get whatever you want just by visualising yourself getting your most passionate desires, I would've had a body like Hrithik Roshan. Sadly, the books which exhort 'the visualization technique' also talk about following it up with consistent action.

So, I made the 7th attempt at building up my body.

Umm... it might be more than 7....

Uh... its actually around 10...

Umm....

Oh forget it.

The bottomline is, I wanted a great body to avoid the pain of thinking of retorts to buddies making fun of skinny ole me, and... ahem.. a few other common reasons.

So I joined the Cyber-Pearl gym.

Well... I (re)discovered something almost immediately.
You dont have to have a great body to boast about it. Just working-out will add a lot of weight to your head. Yeah.. thats where you build muscles first - in your head.
I found myself looking for opportunities to tell people that I work-out. This had a lot of amusing results.
Read on.

Built to a T

My first IMS Communication Skills Building class.

I dont know how the topic got to exercising.
Oh..yeah.. I know. The instructor was about to give us an exercise in communication and damn his stupid parallel thinking brain, he asked how many of us physically exercise.

Needless to say, I raised my hand.
After he had asked everyone else, he asked me what I do in the name of exercise.
A bit indignant that I was asked after everyone else, I said that I go to the gym.

A pause.

'Where are the muscles man ??'

A longer pause.

'They're all inside my T-shirt' (and a stupid, sheepish, silly grin).

Oh.. Thank you.. thank you so much God for somehow making me wear a full-sleeved T-shirt that day !

Knowledge is potential power

I found this modified adage in a book called 'The monk who sold his ferrari'. It makes sense. What it basically says is that knowledge when applied is powerful.
I am gonna go home and look if the book has the author's email address somewhere in it. I want to append a paragraph to that one.

Knowledge applied at the wrong place, at the wrong time, by the wrong person renders the ego powerless.

Sreeji, Anuj and I were in the middle of our sets. And we were talking about the relative sizes of the muscle groups. As it is, the workout schedule is always designed in such a fashion that every session a big and a small muscle group is exercised.

I have a lot of knowledge about muscles, exercises and stuff. I really do. Its just that I didnt get to apply all that knowledge on myself.

Oka: Triceps and Biceps are both smaller muscle sets as compared to the chest, the shoulder, the back and legs.

Oka: Triceps are bigger than biceps.

Sreeji: Really ? I dont think the biceps are smaller than the triceps.
(Let me enlighten you with my knowledge here. Popularly, a man's fitness is associated with the size of his bicep. The tricep is relatively less popular, which would lead people to think that the bicep is more important and hence bigger.)

Oka: No. The triceps are bigger.

Sreeji: Maybe you are looking at yourself and saying that the biceps are smaller than triceps.

Anuj, the asshole that he is, bursts out laughing.

My wit betrayed me then and I didnt have an answer :(
Ideally my reply would have been...

Oka: In that case the stomach would have been the largest muscle group if people take a look at you two !!

Pity, that I couldnt think of this right then.

Mark of the Oko...

Anuj is the greatest show-off among the people I've known after coming to Hyderabad. Well.. let me qualify it.. he's the greatest show-off among the people I like. He doesnt spare a chance to ridicule my phsique and self-glorify his.

It was yet another day at the gym, where he was having a lot of fun out of comparing my skinny arm with his fat one.
I couldnt bear it. It was a do or die situation. I had to boast about something.

'My knuckles are fucking hard, you know.
I used to practise hitting the wall when I was undergoing martial arts training'.

'Oh.. is it ?'

'Yeah. I can hit the wall pretty hard, and not feel a damn. Watch this'

and I let out a punch at the innocent, white wall next to us.

'See... I feel nothing'.

'Oh wow.'

I was just about relishing my success at having the last word in this boasting contest, when a huge guy tapped my shoulder. It was Siddharth - the other gym trainer. He pointed at something on the wall.

'That wouldnt go off the wall'.

It was the mark of my dirty fist.
That was when I realised that there were quite a few people who had been watching this, for there was the voracious sound of laughter around us.

As hard as a bone... or a bone ?

Nothing would complete this post of kelas, better than this piece of conversation between me and Jess (remember the post 'Dating Rules ??')

Oka: I underwent 3 years of martial arts training.

Jess: Oh !

Oka: You should see my abdomen. I have a deadly six-pack there.

Jess: Whats a six-pack ?

Oka: I have six groups of rock-hard ridges showing on my abdomen.

(A pause)

Jess: They must be your ribs !