For Gino Spada, it’s one last hurrah.
The 54-year-old bodybuilder is heading to the Henderson Thorne provincial championships this weekend in Hamilton. This comes after he took first place in the grand masters 50+ category at the regional invitational in Ancaster on July 12.
If he wins, Spada will head to Winnipeg to compete in the nationals.
But that’s as far as he’d like to go.
As Danny Glover’s character in the Lethal Weapon movie series might say: he’s getting too old for this stuff.
“This is it,” he said. “This is my last hurrah. It’s getting difficult.”
It’s not that the training’s getting to him. Every day, he’s works out at G&M Fitness and Health Club in Port Colborne, which he founded in the ’90s and handed over to his son, Mark, eight years ago.
Spada said the hardest part about getting ready for competitions is the diet – the careful counting of calories to ensure he’s always working off more than he takes in on any given day.
Right now, he weighs about 174 pounds, which is great for showing off his muscles but is about 20 pounds less than what his ideal weight should be.
“Maintaining that weight is difficult,” he said. “You have to be hungry.”
Spada got into bodybuilding relatively late in life – age 38 – and only because he felt he needed to prove a point. Though he took courses and was certified with the American Council on Exercise, Spada said his clients at the gym wouldn’t take him seriously. He said the mentality at the time was that if he didn’t have muscles, then he didn’t know what he was talking about.
“That’s really what the perception was, unfortunately,” he said. “So that’s what I did.”
Over a period of four to five years, placed in the top three in all six competitions he took part in. He also wrote a book, The S.O.S. Book: Eat Smart, Eat Often, Eat Small.
He said during the off-season, he would work on building muscle mass, and would work up to a more reasonable weight. But three months before a competition, he’d be back to counting every single calorie.
“The objective is to show off your muscles, so the least amount of body fat, the better,” he said. “That’s very difficult to maintain.”
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