Flexing his oiled, bulging biceps and pecs, one-time bodybuilding champion Sein Maung, 91, admired himself in the mirror before starting to pump iron at his gym in Myanmar.
The barrel-chested nonagenarian’s career has spanned about 70 years, both pre-dating and outlasting the country’s half-century of junta rule.
However, he described the late 1950s as his heyday, when he bagged a medal at the 1958 Burmese “Mr Olympic” contest before being crowned “Mr Burma” a year later.
Photo: AFP
“All of my brothers died in their 70s, but I’m still here,” he said, attributing his hearty longevity to a disciplined lifestyle based around religion, diet and exercise.
Buddhist prayers begin each workout before he greases up and starts grueling sets of chest presses, deadlifts and bicep curls.
Myanmar has a robust bodybuilding culture and competitions held at malls often draw enthusiastic crowds to cheer on sculpted men in speedos — an incongruous sight in the socially conservative country.
Before he even knew it was a bona fide sport, Sein Maung said that as a teenager he would hulk heavy blocks of wood around his small village in the rural Ayeyarwaddy region.
A bodybuilding show that he saw as a young soldier in 1950 proved to be an epiphany and there has been no looking back.
With his career skyrocketing in the 1960s, he even starred in two movies and became a bodybuilding coach for contestants in the Miss Burma beauty pageant.
In 1962 — the same year that the military took over in a coup — he set up a gym, which still runs today, in the commercial hub Yangon.
Once there used to be about 200 members, but only a handful remain, mostly women in their later years, he said.
Sein Maung said that his fiery temperament might be to blame for his fitness center’s dwindling popularity.
“I get so angry and tell people to get out if they don’t take bodybuilding seriously,” he said. “I can’t control my temper.”
Like most in the city, the gym is shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet Sein Maung said that he is continuing with prayers, a protein-based diet and his strict fitness regime at home to keep his immune system as strong as possible.
He shrugs off concerns about the virus.
“I know it’s mostly elderly people who are dying, but I’m not worried just because I’m in my 90s,” he said. “I’m not afraid to die.”
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