CHICAGO — PUSHback frontman Chris Sheppard is now completely unrecognizable to his close friends and peers after not having gone to the gym throughout the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic, judgemental sources confirmed.
“It seems like forever since we all last saw each other, so we didn’t know how small he’d gotten. It looks like his hair is too big for his head or something,” said Sheppard’s bandmate and guitarist Jesse Hopkins. “When he showed up to that first practice, I thought we’d gotten a new merch guy to push around… which would have been useful since we accidentally left the last one at a roadside bathroom during the last tour and just never went back for him.”
“He’s definitely a lot more nimble, and I’ve never seen him jump so high,” Hopkins added, “but we’re still considering whether he should stay as frontman because no one wants to be told to ‘fuck shit up’ by a dude who looks like a light breeze would knock him over.”
Sheppard’s fans were equally shocked.
“He looked so small, I thought the store had gotten bigger since the last time I was here,” recalled scene member and long-time PUSHback supporter Joel Rivera, who ran into the shrunken frontman at a local grocery store. “He reminded me of a kid trying on his dad’s suit… if the suit was a sleeveless XL Bane T-shirt, and the kid was 6’4 and 32-years-old and covered in shitty tattoos and working in a gas station.”
For his part, Sheppard is accepting and embracing the changes.
“My local gym has been open the entire time, but I couldn’t go since I’m back home living with my mom, who’s at high risk,” explained Sheppard. “I did everything I could think of to try to keep my muscle mass, but my basketball shorts just kept getting looser and looser. Dropping all that mass I’d worked to gain over the years was definitely hard at first, but I can rotate my shoulders again, and I’m saving a ton of money by not eating 6,500 calories a day. Honestly, if it wasn’t for my girl Yoga With Adrienne, I don’t know where I’d be.”
At press time, Sheppard was seen drying his tank tops on high heat for two hours in an effort to shrink them to an appropriate size.