BEIJING, (Reuters) – Every afternoon, a handful of men in their 60s usually congregate in an old bike shed in southwest Beijing, covered in sweatshirts and track pants and ready to pump iron.
Up to eight men could be doing bench presses, dumbbell curls or pulling down a wide grip in the windowless shed, their rust-colored equipment built decades ago with scrap metal from a nearby railway wagon factory where they used to work – a long cry of modern gyms elsewhere in the Chinese capital.
Many members of the club were young men in their 20s and 30s when it was founded in 1984 by Zhang Wei, the winner of Beijing’s first long distance race in 1956 and a fellow at the state-owned Erqi factory , said current gym manager Xu Wei, 63.
Zhang had visited a hotel where some foreign athletes were staying and was impressed by their strength and muscle as they worked out. He made sketches of the equipment used by the foreign athletes, later reproducing it using scrap metal from the factory, Xu said.
Zhang opened his gym only a year after the government lifted a ban on bodybuilding since 1953. The sport, which first emerged in China in the 1930s, was banned by the Communist Party because both “bourgeois” and “narcissistic”.
Xu moved the gym into the 130-square-meter shed – about the size of a four-bedroom apartment – in 2018 with the help of his former colleagues after Zhang died four years earlier.
“At the factory, there were many different specialist workers. For example, I was the fitter, ”says Xu.
“We had the electrician and the bricklayer to help us build the gym. We did it all on our own. ”
Xu has posted several photos on the gym walls he has cut from a local magazine of bodybuilding giants from the 1980s and 1990s, including Lee Labrada and Kevin Levrone.
The gym has never closed in its nearly 40-year history. Even the COVID-19 pandemic could not keep its 29 members – the oldest of them at 82 – away over the past year.
With the rise of thousands of private gyms and training studios to cater to a younger generation obsessed with fitness and looks, Xu’s club will face stiff competition.
Xu said he will try to keep it running for as long as possible. The membership fee is only 300 yuan ($ 46) a year, he said, but the gym is free for students, people 80 and older, and the unemployed.