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Former factory worker and current gym manager Xu Wei, 63, exercises with a self-made barbell. Photo: Reuters

Ageing Chinese bodybuilders keep old Beijing gym alive after decades

  • The former railway factory workers built their equipment themselves out of scrap metal 40 years ago
  • Founder opened the gym a year after China’s ban on ‘bourgeois and narcissistic’ bodybuilding was lifted

An old bicycle shed filled with rust-stained equipment, built decades ago from scrap metal, is home to one of Beijing’s longest surviving gyms. Up to eight men, mostly in their 60s, gather there each afternoon without fail, ready to pump iron.

Many of the club members were young men in their 20s and 30s when it was founded in 1984 by Zhang Wei, winner of Beijing’s first long-distance race in 1956 and a fellow worker at the state-owned Erqi railway carriage factory, according to current gym manager Xu Wei, 63.

Men work out at in the former bicycle shed inside a residential compound in southwest Beijing. Picture taken April 8, 2021. Photo: Reuters

Zhang had visited a hotel where some foreign athletes were staying and was impressed by their strength and musculature as they worked out. He made sketches of the equipment they were using, reproducing it later using scrap metal from the factory, Xu said.

“In the factory, there were many different specialised workers. For example, I was the fitter,” Xu said. “We had the electrician and the bricklayer to help us build the gym. We did it all by ourselves.”

Zhang opened his gym just one year after the government had lifted a ban on bodybuilding in place since 1953. The sport, which first emerged in China in the 1930s, was outlawed by the Communist Party because it was “bourgeois” and “narcissistic”. In 2018, four years after Zhang’s death, Xu moved the gym to its present home in southwest Beijing, with the help of his former colleagues.

One of the younger members Liu Hongtao, 53, works out in the gym, which has never closed since it opened in 1984. Photo: Reuters

The gym has never closed in its near 40-year history. Not even the Covid-19 pandemic could keep its 29 members – the oldest is 82 – away over the past year.

The walls of the windowless shed are plastered with photographs – cut by Xu from the pages of a local magazine – of bodybuilding greats from the 1980s and 1990s, including Lee Labrada and Kevin Levrone. It is a far cry from the thousands of modern private gyms and training studios which sprang up to cater to a younger generation.

Xu said he would try to keep it running for as long as possible. Membership fee is just 300 yuan (US$46) a year, he said, but the gym is free for students, people aged 80 and above, and the unemployed.

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