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*If you've ever made an excuse to avoid putting in the work to get in shape, read on and bow your head in shame.
Great-grandmother Morjorie Newlin, now 86 years old, began pumping iron fourteen years ago, at 72, and has been dedicated to her regimen ever since reports Tasha Ho-Sang for the (Philadelphia) CityPaper.net.
Prompted by an incident while shopping at her neighborhood supermarket and having to struggle to carry 50-pound bags of kitty litter back home by herself, the retired nurse decided to do something about her deteriorating physical capabilities.
"I want to be as independent as I can be, for as long as I can. I just want to do things for myself," says Newlin, The daughter of very active Barbadian immigrants who says athleticism is in her genes.
Now, after 13 years of weight training, Newlin is more than taking care of herself. At her two-story home in Mt. Airy (in the Philadelphia area), she is as spry as a teen and has a room dedicated entirely to plaques, certificates and trophies (some almost as tall as her) from bodybuilding competitions that have taken her as far away as Italy, France and Germany. She's won more than 40 trophies since she began turning back the aging clock.
"There are so many, I don't know what to do with all of them," she says.
"I chuckled when I saw this little old lady walk inside the gym," says Richard Brown, a personal trainer at Rivers Gym in Mt. Airy, where Newlin began her training. "I was a little leery. I was just training young athletes at the time."
The little old lady quickly put all his doubts to rest.
"She kept coming in day after day, week after week, and month after month," Brown remembers. "She didn't want to do 'girly' workouts. She wanted to train with us fellows."
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86-year-old Marjorie Newlin (photo courtesy citypaper.net)
Newlin could bench-press 65 pounds when she was 73 years old and one year later she was tossing up 85.
"After a few months of training, I looked at her physique and knew she was ready for a [bodybuilding] show," he continues. "She definitely had something to show."
The bodybuilding competitions are broken into two divisions. Newlin's first competition was in the Amateur Athletic Union, which is open to the public.
She recalled being a little reluctant when she saw the string bikini she'd have to wear in front of the bodybuilding audience.
"I knew the contest meant a lot to my trainer so I went along with it," she says. To everyone's surprise, Newlin won. When they discovered that she was 74 years old, the crowd went wild.
Newlin began her competition career in that AAU's Master's Division, which splits contestants into two categories: under and over a certain age limit, usually 35 or 45 years old. Newlin obviously fell way over the dividing line, wherever it was set, but was competing and winning against women half her age.
"I was always the oldest in all my competitions," says Newlin.
Although she's taking a break from bodybuilding competitions for now, Newlin is still training at least three days a week, now at Bally Total Fitness in Cedarbrook. "I could bench-press 90 pounds with a spotter. I can dead lift 95 pounds. I can squat 135 pounds," she says.
She's made apearances on 'Oprah' and 'The View' and now does motivational speaking on the importance of exercise, weight training and dieting.