While the recent crop of Bollywood actors and cricketers have made fitness fashionable, there’s a significant chunk of Indian men who really believe that fitness begins and ends with broad shoulders and puffy chests. Strong, fit legs are reserved for the serious runners and cyclists. Sameer Sheikh sheds light on why most Indian guys (genetics notwithstanding) don’t work out their legs.

Illustration by Shaizia Jifri

“This used to be true and probably still is – because old-school Indian training involved a lot of ‘Pehelwan’ type approaches. For that, the chest cavity and thorax region were expanded, for various reasons – intimidation, breathing, harder to grab, etc. List goes on. The actual fight involved a lot of pushing and pulling which is mainly an upper body function. So, there you go – mystery solved.

But, fortunately, the mentality is changing, people are realizing that to get results, you have to train the whole body and concentrate on a strong base which has the largest muscles in the body. But, for the most part, most men still look like someone squeezed them from the bottom half into their upper half.”

“Case in point – a friend of mine was wearing shorts and we walked into Monkey Bar and some girls looked at him and said ‘dekh – tangdi kabab aa gaya!’ Time to work those calves, lads.”

*This post is (mostly) for comedic purposes.