For the next three weeks, the gym settles into a quiet kind of grind.
The building phase isn't glamorous. Ryoma still does everything he normally does; roadwork at dawn, bag drills, mitts, sparring, footwork, pendulum step drills, shadowboxing.
But now each day ends with an extra session, targeted, precise, and merciless.
There are more pulls, more scapular activation, more rotational chains that make his latissimus muscles burn like they're being peeled from bone.
Hiroshi calls it "punch engine work," and Ryoma takes to it without a word. He never complains, never asks for breaks. He simply checks the clock, checks the next line on the whiteboard, and gets started.
At 0.4 kilograms a week, he should reach 65 by the end of the third week. And he does, almost on the dot, exactly as planned.
They weigh him on June 28th.
