Harry Potter and the Heir of Slytherin

A Bludger for your Thoughts

Harry Potter was frowning as he continued doing his push ups. There were many reasons for him to frown, not the least of which was how the school had discovered Mrs. Norris, petrified and hanging from the rafters last night. It was likely going to be the talk of the whole school once everyone woke up. It wasn't every day something like this happened.

And then there was the large writing on the wall about the Chamber of Secrets being opened. That was an issue that Harry did not even want to think about at the moment.

While both of those were definitely reasons to frown, they were not why he was frowning right now.

It was his work out.

It was beginning to get too easy.

He had noticed that recently, his strength had been growing exponentially from what it had been last year. Even though he had always been in excellent shape, the physical condition he was in now was above and beyond better than back then. He could run further and keep up a full blown sprint for much longer before running out of breath and all of his exercises were getting much easier.

The push ups he was currently doing were an excellent example. Already he had done 150 push ups. Last year, that many push ups would have left his triceps and chest burning something fierce. Now he only felt a mild burn that was barely worth mentioning.

Harry had already deduced that this was because his body was going through puberty. He was producing more testosterone than he had last year. Testosterone was a muscle building chemical. It was the principle anabolic and sex hormone in humans that was responsible for muscular hypertrophy, or the increase in size of skeletal muscle (a form of striated muscle that is under the control of the somatic nervous system and is one of three major muscle types) through an increase in the size of it's component cells.

Essentially, because his body was producing what Harry guessed was maybe five to ten times more testosterone than before (and he had already been producing a good deal of it), his muscles and consequently his physical prowess (strength, speed, endurance and constitution) had gone through the roof. He was now far stronger than he had been just this past summer.

Why was he frowning then? Wouldn't most people think this was a good thing?

It was, and Harry was very pleased that his body was getting stronger, but it still left him with a problem.

Namely, he needed to increase the intensity of his work outs, except, he didn't know how. Harry was already exercising far harder than most boys his age, and even a good many more above his age, did. Not even Oliver Wood, Quidditch maniac extraordinaire, exercised more than him.

There were only two ways to increase the difficult in an already difficult work out. Add more reps or increase the amount of resistance, aka weight, that he was working with.

He didn't want to add more reps. Harry was already doing well over one hundred reps for each exercise. If he added anymore, he wouldn't have enough time to actually finish his exercising.

Which meant he needed more weight. Unfortunately, transfiguring or creating a weight via alchemy was out of the question, for now at least. The problem with transfiguration and alchemy was that when you changed one thing into another, the thing you were changing it into had to have the same mass and weight as the object you were changing in the first place.

A good example of this would be if Harry were to transfigure a rock into a slipper that weighed .05 Newtons and had a mass of 6 grams, he would need to find a rock that weighed .05 Newtons and had a mass 6 grams. It made the transfiguration easier.

That was why all the Transformations they had done so far were small transfiguration such as changing a match stick into a needle, or a beetle into a button. Even though the match stick and the needle didn't weigh the exact same, they were close enough that a persons magic and the amount of concentration they put in could make up the difference.