Decades strong: Chinese bodybuilders pump iron at old Beijing gym

Xu Wei, a 63-year-old former factory worker and the current gym manager, show his muscles at the gym which has been turned from a bicycle shed inside a residential compound in the southwest of Beijing, China April 8, 2021. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang

BEIJING (Reuters) - Each afternoon without fail, a handful of men mostly in their 60s gather at an old bicycle shed in southwest Beijing, clad in sweatshirts and track pants and ready to pump iron.

Up to eight men could be doing bench presses, dumbbell curls or wide-grip pulldowns in the windowless shed, their rust-stained equipment built decades ago with scrap metal from a nearby railway wagon factory where they used to work - a far cry from modern gyms elsewhere in the Chinese capital.