How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?

Review Time! Hibiki Sakura is a pretty high schooler with a major problem: her voracious appetite has started to impact her figure (not Kae from Kiss Him, Not Me levels, but it’s getting there!), and she is desperate to slim down to get herself a man! When she decides to attend Silverman Gym, she finds out a fellow classmate has joined too: Akemi Soryuin, beautiful, rich and has a SERIOUS muscle fetish. While Akemi is drooling over the muscle heads, Hibiki is having second thoughts, until the slim and trim trainer Naruzo Machio convinces her otherwise. She is about to fall head over heels for this handsome fellow, until he flexes and reveals that pretty boy face is stuck on a massive bulked out body! But in for a penny and all that, so she decides to stick it out anyways! Soon the two are joined by Hibiki’s best friend Ayaka Uehara (film buff, whose family owns a boxing gym, where she coaches part-time); Satomi Tachibana, the girls’ world history teacher (and secretly a cosplayer, whose motive for joining was to slim down to better fit in her costumes); and Gina Boyd, Russian arm wrestling champ who sees Hibiki as her rival, as the latter has surprising arm strength! As the girls train and learn more about fitness, they also have to deal with an Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike, Hibiki’s insatiable hunger and Machio’s uncontrollable urge to burst his clothes off at EVERY opportunity! Who knew getting in shape would be this much of a headache!? How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift is a hilarious and often educational romp in the world of fitness, one that I can relate to, as I did fitness for a number of years. I can very much identify with Hibiki at times, where I was dying, while my own Machio (now one of my best friends) kept pushing me, all with a smile on his face! I personally recommend watching the Dub version, if for nothing else than for Ian Sinclair’s terrific delivery of the Narrator. Seriously, it is side-splitting the stuff he comes up with, it almost sounds like what you would expect the Abridged version to sound like! I would also make a similar suggestion about Kaguya-sama: Love is War, as he does a very similar job as the Narrator, to equally hilarious results! There is fan service, which is to be expected, given it is 5 beautiful woman all trying to get better bodies, but the most frequent fan service is actually Machio himself, as he frequently is in nothing but a black speedo, with all those rippling muscles! So, if you want to learn more about fitness, or maybe just have a good laugh, give it a watch! And who knows: maybe after learning a thing or two from the anime, people will start asking you, “How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift”?