Bradley Cooper : Redux

Given the enthusiastic response (which I hope is mostly adulation from the fairer-sexed-readers) that I got to my joining the gym (aka The Bradley Cooper Project), I feel obliged to share with my readers, a quarterly report of progress on that front. Not so much a quarterly report as a 'I just bench pressed 20 kilos' report.

A friend and a co-blogger/gymmer recently said to me,

"The gym I go to has three types of frequent visitors, the first category is yours, the one trying to gain weight with frequently lifting up their shirts or examining their thin arms to see any trace of a muscle sprouting, the second is mine, trying to lose weight and trying to find traces of the muscle between all the fat, and the third is full of bradley coopers and mike tysons. I pray that we reach the third category's former part soon."

The gym I go to also has the same three types of frequent visitors. In fact, I feel that there's a certain universal causality to this frequent gym visiting. I am probably still in category one, hence way past my testosterone-ego induced promise of 45 days. But I'd like to think I'm making steady progress to category three and this is why :

1. I bench pressed 20 kilos today.
2. I'm seen wildly flailing my legs, hanging from the cross bar very rarely these days. This is usually after I have suffered from laziness or allied illnesses for over a week. Other days, my arms have enough strength to haul me over. Several times.
3. I'm somewhere in between the seniors and juniors at the gym. There are a lot of people who've joined after me, hence in the position that I was in when I shared my first report, i.e. hanging from the cross-bar, flailing wildly. We shall term this the "Conservation of Momentum" phase.
4. Those in the CoM phase can also lift much smaller weights than I can. I don't pass up an opportunity to look down upon and scoff at these hapless CoM-ers. All in my head, of course; I can still get fairly badly beaten up if I express this sentiment (owing largely not to my physique, but to my non-violent stance in life).
5. Every now and then (like today), you would find a CoM-er (usually belonging to category one) stand in front of the mirror, make faces that he considers macho and aggressive (and others consider constipated, for the lack of a better word) and flex whatever trace of muscle he has built up after lifting his latest two kilos. The CoM-er I saw today did this after every set of exercises he struggled through. I'm quite glad I never made too much of myself in the CoM phase.
6. Owing to oscillations of health, my weight has stayed pretty much the same. The banana shakes I'm made to drink make very little difference. They taste nice on most days, except those when my mother, for the sake of longevity, brings in slightly raw bananas. Raw bananas with milk stay that way- no mixing occurs. Needless to say how that tastes.
7. I bench pressed 20 kilos today. Have I already said that? Yes? Well, you've missed the point of the post.

There are, however, certain worrying developments as well. For one, a lot of mirrors ensure that you can see the top of your head from certain angles. Let's just say we might have to rechristen this whole frequently-visiting-gym business as the "Vin Diesel Project". Enough said. There's only so much one can do at the hands of genetics.

That, then is the quarterly-20 kilo-bench-press report. I declare myself a work in progress. No one is allowed to criticize a work in progress.

Ladies, stay tuned.

Men, continue W.A.T.C.H O.U.T-ing.