You never know when a necessity can turn into your passion and that passion will help you represent your country on a global platform and earn you gold medals. Bhavna Tokekar wife of an Indian Air Force officer started weight training just six years back, and now she won four gold medals at the Open Asian Powerlifting Championships of AWPC/WPC at Chelyabinsk Russia. A resident of Pune and mother of two teenagers had to undergo this training in order to reduce the side effects of the medicines she took to deal with skin inflammation. Bhavna says,
"There are many myths surrounding bodybuilding, weight lifting and other strength sports, especially related to women like it is meant only for young people and that it makes the body bulky. I started training initially when 1 was 41, but I wanted to be sure of it since I didn’t want to injure myself or do the wrong techniques since weight lifting is not popular here."
After getting into weight lifting she started reading books on the subject and surfed the internet to look through several weight lifting videos. Bhavna trained under the proper guidance of the IAF’s bodybuilding team, with a little help from YouTube and other websites.
There were 500 players in the competition among which 14 were from India. Bhavna took part in the Under 67.05 Kg Masters 2 Category as she per her weight which is 64.9 Kg. She proves that it's never too late to build your own identity, there is more to you than just being what the society has labeled you.
