Great-grandad still pumping iron at 94

By Douglas Whitbread via SWNS

This great-grandad still pumps iron at the age of 94 and he's got no plans to stop.

Mario Sanna dubbed 'Super Mario" even celebrated his birthday with a two-hour workout at the gym he calls his "second home."

The former railway engineer said his job laying train tracks kept him in good shape, but he fell in love with the gym when he took it up after retiring from work to stay fit.

Thirty years on, he still visits the I-Motion Gym in Rotherham, UK, twice a week for a rigorous workout routine that includes exercise bikes, rowing machines, leg presses and biceps curls.

He said: “When I retired from work, I had nothing to do, so I decided to join the gym. It was my intention to be as fit as I possibly could be.

“I use everything the gym supplies – any type of machinery, spinning classes, lifting weights and going on the walking machine.

“In my opinion, the body needs to be moving. I probably keep moving even when I’m asleep. It’s a machine itself. If you leave it idle, it begins to deteriorate."

Mario, who has two children nad four grandchildren, began working for British Rail in 1954 after arriving in the UK from Sardinia two years earlier.

During those early days, the physical exertion he needed to shift hefty tracks around had been enough to keep him in top shape.

When Mario finally downed his tools in the early 1990s, he recognized he needed a new way of staying fit and got his first gym membership in his 60s.

Only an eye condition prevents him from driving to the gym as frequently as he’d like, he is hoping to return more regularly after an operation.

He said: "I’ll do ten minutes of leg press ups, pull-down weights; I'll go on the rowing machine, walking machine and go on the cycling machine.

“I always think I need to stretch my legs as they’re carrying the rest of my body, and that’s one thing I’ll treat as the number one.

"Then I’ll do the other parts of the body – from legs to the arms."

“I also do Pilates and anything that helps me to be physically more fit than I am now. I’ll also lift a 25kg bar, and I go on the cables.

“I’ll normally spend between one and two hours at the gym. But if the coffee machine is working, I might stay two and a half hours.”

Mario said he regards the friends he’s made at the gym as a “family” and recently celebrated his 94th birthday with a group of them.

He said: “They all wish to see you all the time. It’s like a family.

“If you continue coming to the gym, then you bump into other people, and you make friends and have a chat.

“For my birthday they had a party – and this is the place. They celebrated it here.”

Mario said he is the oldest person that uses his gym, but he recommended other seniors give it a try if they want to keep in shape.

He said: “I think I’m the oldest one. I can recommend it to anybody to do it, especially if they’re on their own, to come out of their house and do something."