Abs and the flab

To me, the entire concept of the gym exercise called crunches or abs as they call it is a big farce, a big scandal. My gym instructor makes me do these crunches in various poses and ways promising me that someday I will see the effect of these crunches and that my abs will someday be like Brad Pitts’. One year of crunches later, not a single cut is seen on my abdomen. There is still that obvious flab. In the gym I see everyone doing these crunches. And not a single person in the gym I have talked to has actually said that the crunches have had some effect. I have decided to stop this abs nonsense and spend 10 mins lesser in the gym doing something useful like grabbing an extra glass of orange juice. The only effect you get after doing these abs is a severe pain in your abdomen, which makes you think that you have the whole abdominal flab under control.

The only way Brad Pitt could have got those abs was through liposuction or through some trick photography. I am tending more towards the liposuction theory. There are more such meaningless exercises in the gym like the rowing machine for example. I still haven’t got a clue as to which part of the body it really exercises. Then there’s that thing called the twister. You just stand on a rotating stand and twist your hips violently until the lower part of the body separates from the upper part. I havent actually tried this machine but I still have my reservations about the exact usefulness of this machine. The only thing that these machines do is eat away all the space in the gym. I hardly had any space to do some push-ups (or dips as they call them in certain parts of the world) last week thanks to the endless sea of useless exercising machines.

And of course, there is that mandatory weighing machine which shows a different weight every time (it only shows higher values). Stand on it three times and you see three different readings on the machine. The only way to console yourselves is to attribute the increasing readings as being due to your heavy shoes. In all this chaos, the gym music doesn’t help either. I cannot jog while listening to jagjit singh. Period. The guy who put this on deserves a serious whack. That apart I have nothing more to whine about in the gym since I am not really the complaining type. :-)